O’Reilly: Inside RIA

I was a bit nervous about telling my coworkers about the fact I'm doing this blog. After all, I'm under NDA and my inspiration for these posts usually comes from things that happen on the job. I try to keep...

Actually it was over two days. Two days last week when the unthinkable happened: our Internet went down. Let me tell you, it was a maddening experience, because both my husband and I work from home. First, everything slowed waaaay...

I have to confess, I joined my local Adobe user group with the most altruistic of motives. My husband, an Adobe Community Expert, saw the need in our area for an Adobe User Group, and I wanted to support him in...

In my last blog post, I discussed a CSS trick I recently discovered. That post spawned a lot of comments, and at one point in the discussion I stated that I felt that just because a technique is popular and has been put forward by one or more resources as best practice, that it doesn't necessarily make that technique better practice than a new practice I (or any developer really) might come up with. The question was asked, "where do best practices come from?"

...I think any developer, consumer, or citizen has the right to put in the research time to study what current practices are and the reasons for them and put forward alternatives that can be considered for adoption as best practices.

I've always has a Platonic relationship with CSS. You know, the kind where you see the shadows on the wall and you try to infer what is casting it. Lately, I've been forced to use CSS more and more,...

Up until the past year or two, the people doing RIA development and the people doing eLearning development have, for the most part, been two different groups of people. In recent years, the increasing requirement for eLearning to be accessible over the web has pushed eLearning developers toward the same tools used to make RIA's. I think as they spend more time exchanging ideas with RIA developers, eLearning will pick up more of the functionality that characterizes the best RIA applications.

I had my first encounter with web services about two years ago. I was contracting at the time, and Adobe had just announced the end of development of the software where I had most of my reputation, Authorware. I needed to retool my skills to Adobe Flex, and I needed to convey to potential clients what kind of skills they could expect as I was retooling. I decided I wanted my company website to reflect the bleeding edge of what I was doing. But I was also devoting a lot of time to blogging and participating in online newsgroups to try to spread the word, and I just didn't have time to manually update my site as often as I felt I needed to.