O’Reilly: Inside RIA

I've been holed up in meetings or in my hotel room working more than I've been over at the show, so my ability to speak as johnny-reporter-on-the-spot is rather limited. That said, here are a few impressions: --General Web 2.0...

The concept of unit testing has been around for a long time as part of the traditional Waterfall model of software development. However, it has gained in popular recently as one of the main tenets of Extreme Programming. In Extreme Programming you write unit tests first and then your code. You also refactor code often as you add features. Unit tests help find errors quickly as code is refactored and can be used as part of regression testing to make sure new code has not affected existing functionality.

Brad Umbaugh and I were interviewed on The Flex Show last week discussing our use of 3D in Discovery Earth Live. You can check out the full interview here if you're interested. In the interview we discuss the nature of 3D interfaces, some things to think about when attempting 3D, and just barely scratch the surface on the differences between Papervision3D and Away3D. Kinda timely given Andrew's post on 3D just a few days ago. Finding the "right" way to use rich innovative features like 3D is a topic I'm really passionate about. We didn't get into the usability aspects of it as much as I'd liked in the interview, but I'm hoping to do a panel at MAX or Web 2.0 NYC later this year and get more into it. Is that something you'd be interested in? Leave us a comment if you don't mind.

I've discussed graphics filters previously, and here's a trick to use them to extend the capabilities of basic Flex controls. In this example, graphics filters will be used to alter the appearance of a basic tree control. I've run into this scenario numerous times... How can you change the appearance of tree folder icons to imply meaning to the branches of the tree?

Ted Patrick has a nice overview of the Elixir data visualzation and charting components that iLog has been working on. They seem to be a good example of a commercial embracing Flex to create RIA components. There is some interesting chatter about paying for commercial components in the comments on Ted's blog worth checking out.

Conditional compilation allows developers to tell the compiler not to include certain parts of their code unless a set of conditions are met. Apparently Adobe added this feature to Flex 3, though I hadn't heard anything about this until this morning when Jim Cheng mentioned it to me. In this entry we'll examine the ways conditional compilation can improve development and help attract members of the opposite sex.

Last time we looked at Cairngorm and its role in our application. This installment of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA, we're going to look at Cairngorm’s business delegates and how to set up a service oriented architecture in Flex. Join us every Monday for the next installment in our series: Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA.

In the previous tutorial, I demonstrated how to return all of the rows of a database table and access the results within AIR. Many times you will not want to retrieve all of the rows in a table, so today I will examine some techniques for querying your tables. I will focus on two main areas: Strongly Typing Results and Parameterized Queries.

 

At the London stop of the OnAIR Tour Europe we got to see a presentation about Alert Thingy which has now launched. AlertThingy is a client for the new social feed aggregation service FriendFeed and it's build in AIR.

I am thoroughly impressed with some of the things that I have seen recently coming out of the 3D flash world. PaperVision3D has come a long, Away3d is looking great, and today was the first time that I have ever seen the Alternativa Platform. I'm speechless by some of the work that I have seen.