O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Hamcrest? No, it isn't a fancy sandwich topping. Hamcrest is a framework for creating matchers, allowing matching rules to be defined declaratively (from Wikipedia). Hamcrest has been used by many popular unit testing frameworks including JUnit and FlexUnit 4. Hamcrest-AS3...

Every day million people make use of Google products and these products are written mainly using one well known language: JavaScript! What makes this online software stable, fast and responsive is a good use of the language and an excellent system of data compression and asynchronous loading. Today this power is available to everyone, since Google has released its magic tool under Apache 2 license.

A couple months ago I wrote an article on how to use Dojo to create a rich UI for websites. One of the key points of the article was how to support all users -- those with JavaScript enabled and those without. The purpose of this was to enable basic browsers like search engine spiders to go through your site without JavaScript, while enabling the rich interface for your regular users.

Kevin Shuttle already beat me to the proverbial punch with his review, but I'd to share some of my thoughts on a recent Boston based conference called RIA Unleashed. This developer focused event was recently held at Bentley College, Waltham,...

Now that we have a client built that will send and receive packets we need a server for it to communicate with. Lets walk through a quick implementation of a basic Java UDP socket server. Some familiarity with Java is...

This is an excerpt from Designing Social Interfaces. From the creators of Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces provides you with more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, along with salient advice for many of the common challenges you'll face when starting a social website. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.

If you have had an opportunity to look at the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) you could see that there is a huge opportunity to do interesting multi-user applications without needing to write all of the server side code. However there is the challenge of how do you control who comes into your application and what they are allowed to do. In addition, keeping your application credentials safe in case your SWF file was decompiled. So as the title suggests you can use a service like Facebook to take care of the users authentication and Flash Remoting for the application authentication.

The goal of this article is to help you gain a better understanding of the Decorator design pattern. The Decorator pattern is used to attach additional responsibilities to an object at run time dynamically. Decorators provide a flexible alternative to subclassing to extend the functionality of classes in a hierarchical relationship. The Decorator design pattern utilizes an important OOP concept known as the open closed principal. This means that classes are open to extension but closed for modification. The Decorator pattern also uses the concept of composition, another very powerful OOP concept.

Adobe, a long time player in rich internet applications wants be an active participant on mobile platforms, including the iPhone. Adobe engineers put their minds together and delivered a solution to work around the problem of the iPhone browser's lack of support for Flash. If the iPhone Safari browser will not support the Flash player, let's use the Flash tools to compile a native iPhone application (ipa) which lives directly on the device. This initiative now gives the opportunity for ActionScript developers to develop applications for the wonderful iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

Adobe just released public information about AIR 2.0 and added new capabilities that better tie with the operation systems which gives your application more control while increasing performance. The new version will be deployed on Flash player 10 using Flex 4 SDK. The new features can be split into four main categories: new functionality, additional functionality to existing APIs, platform awareness related to APIs and finally, optimization.