O'Reilly News & Commentary

Google Closure: A New Way of Developing in JavaScript - A Guide and Links to Google Closure's Mature and Complex JavaScript Framework

By Davide Zanotti
November 19, 2009

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.

Four short links: 17 November 2009 - Digital Natives, Supersexy C64 Debugger, a Google Tripwire, and a Patient Botnet

By Nat Torkington
November 17, 2009

ICU64 -- an open source Commodore 64 emulator (Frodo) hacked to visually and textually display memory. Watch the video embedded below, it's hypnotic and seductive. It immediately made me want one for my programs (without having to port my code back to 6502 assembler). (via waxy whose return from pneumonia is greatly welcomed)

Flex 101: Customize Scrollbars

By Andrew Trice
November 17, 2009

Customizing scrollbars in Flex is something that I see requested all the time, and it's actually really easy to do. I see requests for things like getting rid of the buttons, or making the scroll bar less intrusive to the UI. In this post, we'll walk through some simple css style changes to customize scrollbar appearance.

URI Manager Utility

By Jesse Freeman
November 16, 2009

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - URI Manager Utility. In the past I have talked about using RegEx to create a utility for replacing tokens in a string. My uri manager utility follows the same concept but helps you organize all of your URIs in a external file. Not only that but when you request them when, you can customize their values on the fly. Whether you are keeping track of 1 or 100+ URIs this simple utility will help make your life way easier.

5 Tips For Flash Unit Testing

By Jesse Freeman
November 9, 2009

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over 5 Tips for Unit Testing. Unit Testing and Test Driven Development are a hot topics in the Flash community lately, especially on Twitter. A few weeks ago, after realizing how complex my F*CSS library was getting, I decided to go back and write FlexUnit test for the library in a hope to use TDD moving forward.

Posterous: The Copy-and-Post Revolution in (Micro) Blogging

By Mark Sigal
November 5, 2009

A friend of mine, who has achieved repeated success in high-tech startup land, said that if you want to be successful, focus on segments where <10% of the crowd currently adopts the solution, and by virtue of dramatically simplifying the approach, you can toggle adoption rates to closer to 90%. Enter Posterous, a micro-blogging tool (it's free) that does a few things really well.

5 Tips For Documenting Code

By Jesse Freeman
November 3, 2009

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over - 5 Tips for Documenting Code. Documenting code is not high on many people's lists of things todo. Most of the time it is boring, repetitive, and time consuming. If you want to get better at documenting your own code then this is the post for you. I have 5 simple rules to follow while coding to make the process easier.

Create cleaner ActionScript with conditional compiling

By Tyler Larson
October 27, 2009

A large part of any ActionScript project is code dedicated to testing and debugging. These parts of your application may be needed while in development, but usually not needed within a production environment. You might think that making a release build will take care of everything. Really, this only takes out the internal debugger code but not any of the traces or code that you might of defined while creating your project. The only way to strip this code out of your code base is with conditional compiling.

RIA Radio MAX Interviews - Mark Anders, Ed Sullivan, Jesse Freeman, and Julie Campagna

By Garth Braithwaite
October 26, 2009

InsideRIA's Garth Braithwaite examines the future of rich internet application development with an eye on happenings with Adobe. In this edition of RIA Radio from Adobe MAX, Braithwaite interviews Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe Mark Anders, ADC Product Manager at Adobe Ed Sullivan, Flash expert Jesse Freeman, and the Managing Editor for the Adobe Edge Newsletter, Julie Campagna.

The importance of ubiquity

By Scott Barnes
October 23, 2009

I've spent a few years studying the behavioral pattern associated with ubiquity, and I'm surprised at what I've learned along the way. Here right now, I'm going to unload my findings, and it's up to you to keep an open mind about it all and take a deep breath about the subject. Ubiquity is only important to you, the one in the "doing" seat (developing/designing). Ubiquity isn't important as much as the reasons why people will use a given technology in the first place. Ubiquity is simply a scorecard to track whether or not people are choosing NOT to install a plug-in.

Four short links: 22 October 2009 - Cognitive Surplus, Scaling, Chinese Blogs, CS Education for Growth

By Nat Torkington
October 22, 2009

Isaac Mao, China, 40M Blogs and Counting -- "Today, there are 40 million bloggers in China and around 200 million blogs, according to Mao. Some blogs survive only a few days before being shut down by authorities. More than 80% of people in China don't know that the internet is censored in their country. When riots broke out in Xinjiang province this year, the authorities shut down internet access for the whole region. No one could get online." This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Why Posterous Is a Smart Tool For Informal Government Blogging

By Mark Drapeau
October 19, 2009

For a few weeks, I've been testing a tool called Posterous, and I've come to like it a lot. You can post blogs simply by emailing post@posterous.com or a similar address - you don't even need an "account" or a "login" or a "password." Even in the private sector, this is considered a cool feature. But for government employees, it could be a breath of life in an otherwise locked-down state of cybersecurity affairs.

The Aftermath of Adobe MAX 2009 - Flash Player 10.1, Flex 4, LCDS, Air 2.0, Flash Catalyst

By Yakov Fain
October 19, 2009

This was my second MAX and, let me tell you, I enjoyed it a lot more than the last year’s one. This was an intriguing event with lots of interesting news, and promises of new releases. Among the announcements, news about upcoming developments for Flash Player 10.1, Flex 4, LCDS, Air 2.0, and Flash Catalyst.

MAX 2009 Session Videos: Flex Frameworks, AR, & Best RIAs - A Video Roundup from MAX 2009

By Rich Tretola
October 16, 2009

InsideRIA had three sessions at Adobe MAX this year: The Battle of the Flex Frameworks Returns, with Greg Owen; Augmented Reality within the Flash Player, with Jesse Freeman; and InsideRIA's Secrets of the Best Rich Internet Apps of 2009 (So Far), with Garth Braithwaite.

Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change

By Tim O'Reilly
October 15, 2009

Today is Blog Action Day 2009. This is an annual event, held every October 15, with a goal of encouraging an outpouring of simultaneous comment on an important issue calling for global action. This year, the designated subject is climate change. Back in January, I wrote a blog post summarizing my position on climate change. Entitled Pascal's Wager and Climate Change, the post makes the argument that even if you're a skeptic about climate change or humanity's role in causing it, the risks of ignoring the issue are great, and the benefits from addressing it are significant even if scientists are completely wrong about the causes.

Could Adobe potentially harm the iPhone AppStore

By Scott Barnes
October 15, 2009

Adobe have spent a lot of cycles / years nudging Apple that Flash should be on the iPhone. Apple have firmly just said no, and despite the answer, Adobe keep expecting them to cave due to public demand. The problem with this logic is that Apple won't give in. Let's break this down into two parts: First, Don't poke the sleeping giant. Secondly, just because it's easy, doesn't mean its successful.

Multi-touch and the Flash Platform

By Andrew Trice
October 14, 2009

One of the big announcements at MAX this year was Flash on devices. As the capabilities of devices change, so do the capabilities of the platforms we use to build our applications. One of the latest trends is Multi-touch. In this post, I'll try to shed some light on the upcoming multitouch capabilities in AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1.

JXT - Javascript XHTML Tags

By Davide Zanotti
October 12, 2009

First of all, I would like to thanks Rich Tretola and O'Reilly, for the possibility to write on this blog and talking about my project (http://www.jxtproject.com), I'm very thankful for that! ...and I'm quite embarrassed, because this is my...

Stateful Skins in Flex 3

By Amy Blankenship
October 12, 2009

Even though stateful skins are simple to understand, they are not well documented and there are a few quirks both of stateful skins and of how some of the components work that meant that the concept is easier said than done. So maybe by joining me on my journey you can benefit from the simplicity and power without hitting all of the headaches. Instead of a full-blown tutorial, I thought I'd share a few concepts about how I approached the problem of creating a stateful skin and what I learned in the process.

jQuery and AIR - Moving from web page to application (2)

By Raymond Camden
October 1, 2009

Earlier this week I blogged about a new jQuery based AIR project, Hangman. In the first blog entry I talked about the game and the jQuery code behind it. One of the main problems with the code in that entry though is that it really isn't an AIR application. I mean sure it makes use of the AIR framework. Sure it's an AIR application technically. But none of the code actually did anything - well, AIR like! We can fix that don't you think? As a followup I discuss modifying my Hangman game to make use of a database of words.

Four short links: 28 September 2009 - Science Blogs, Concussion Games, Packet Sniffer, and an Astonishing Product Name

By Nat Torkington
September 28, 2009

Sci Blogs -- A collection of aggregated science related blogs from New Zealand. Topic areas range from Agriculture and Medicine to Technology. It's not just blog posts. Sci Blogs includes Twitter chatter and science related videos, too. This Planet-built aggregation site is worth a visit. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Custom SortableList Component using Flex 4

By Simon Barber
September 11, 2009

Recently, I decided to get my hands dirty with the latest build of Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4. The new IDE has a lot of really exciting new features that will save developers a lot of time. The features that excite me the most are the new Spark components and skinning capabilities in the new SDK. Towards the beginning of the year I had read through the first few drafts of the new Spark component architecture, the style changes and how easy it is to skin components. Lots of things have changed since then, so I decided to refresh my memory and build a simple component to test my knowledge. Behold the SortableList component.

Bringing Football Highlights To Your Desktop with AIR

By Andrew Trice
September 11, 2009

In the spirit of tonight's first NFL game of the season, I decided to put together an example that integrates feeds from NFL.com and brings it directly to your desktop. This is a basic example that demonstrates how to use Flash Builder's data wizards to consume data from a public rss feed as a HTTPService.

Do You Speak Flex? Part Two: Recruiting the Right Experience

By Ben Elmore
September 10, 2009

It's imperative to identify what your requirements are and the number of resources that you'll need to address them. You must determine what your team needs to accomplish before you begin to assemble it, otherwise you risk redundancy, inefficiency, and slowed or stalled projects. It sounds elementary, but this step can save you a lot of headaches later on.

Flash Developer Guerrilla Workflow - Starting from Scratch on a Deadline

By Jesse Freeman
September 9, 2009

Advance Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. Each AFT is designed to be quickly digested, usually only taking a few minutes to get up and running, and contains valuable information you can directly apply to your next Flash campaign. In this AFT I will go over - Setting Up The Flash Developer Guerrilla Workflow.

How To Get a Job - Become a Rich Internet Application Developer

By RJ Owen
September 8, 2009

You've been looking into the world of Rich Internet Applications for a while now but how do you make the jump? Whether you're a developer working in Java or C++ looking to get on the web or a designer working in an art department wanting to do more interactive, the RIA world is a fast-growing and exciting field many people are looking to transition to. Unless you're lucky enough to have some personal connections into an RIA firm, the decision to move requires hitting the pavement and convincing an RIA company that you're worth hiring. This article comes from my experiences as both a former interviewee and current interviewer at a mid-sized RIA company.

Branding 101 for Developers - Part 3 of 4

By Sidney de Koning
September 4, 2009

So you've written your AIR application, now what? What does it take to create a successful AIR application? What is an identity and what does it have to do with AIR? And what steps do you need to take before releasing it? In part 3 of this series I'll share my ideas about my personal quest and lessons learned the hard way.

10 Tips for Flex Application Performance

By Andrew Trice
September 2, 2009

We're going to keep this post lean and mean, and get down to business with 10 Tips that will keep your Flex applications fast, lean, and responsive. The tips are focused around three best practices rules. Rule # 1: Clean up after yourself -- In general, it is good practice to maintain clean code. Not only in the sense of having properly formatted and readable code, but also code that leaves nothing behind... no memory leaks, no cpu hogs, nothing but a clean object that can be reclaimed by the GC.

Are We Ready for Universal Augmented Reality 1.0?

By Amy Blankenship
August 31, 2009

I'll admit it. My husband, Steve, has a severe case of gadgetosis. Because of this affliction, we've invested some of our savings in a company called Microvision. At first, to me, this company was nothing more than a good investment -- after all, who in this industry hasn't wanted a projector so small and light you could stash it in your purse -- but now I find myself excited by the prospects of what the devices they make (wearable displays, vehicle displays, and pico-projectors) could mean for me as a developer.

Branding 101 for Developers - Part 2 of 4

By Sidney de Koning
August 28, 2009

When you just developed your AIR application you are presented with one major, but not unsolvable problem: how to get exposure? The world’s strongest brands have not just customers or fans, but evangelists. Are you an evangelist for your own brand? Brand evangelists preach positively about their favourite brands, not just by buying or using that brands products, but by enthusiastically recommending them to others and/or to potential customers. In this episode I'll talk about what brand evangelists are and what they do, and how to gain trust from your users.

How I learned to stop worrying and love Flex Frameworks

By Greg Owen
August 20, 2009

I use frameworks in my Flex code, and so should you. There is some debate today about whether there is any utility in using frameworks in Flex. The argument against frameworks is generally that they are unnecessary, constrain development style, and add lots of useless overheard to applications. I use frameworks in my Flex code because I want my code to be as valuable as possible, because I want to be as profitable as possible.

Let's Call It A Draw(ing Surface) - Diving Into HTML 5

By Mark Pilgrim
August 18, 2009

This excerpt is from "Dive Into HTML 5" which will be published in early 2010 by O'Reilly Media. The book will cover features from the upcoming HTML 5 specification and other emerging standards. HTML 5 is still a work-in-progress; browser support is listed at the beginning of each section.

Google Voice + RIA has Potential

By Jesse Freeman
August 17, 2009

These are exciting times to be developing RIAs. All the barriers of the old mediums like print, tv, and now phones have transitioned over to the internet and been improved along the way to the point where the old mediums are almost irrelevant. It's only natural that traditional landlines will be put on the extinction chopping block. I never thought I would see the day where Flash would have the potential to replace my home phone. Looks like Google is building quite a communication empire for us to all play with.

Flex's coopetition: HTML5

By Mike Slinn
August 14, 2009

It won't be ready for prime time this year, and probably not next year, but the HTML5 specification is firming up and current implementations suggest a that HTML5 will be a strong platform for RIAs. People familiar with other versions of HTML might assume that Flex would have a few advantages over HTML5: AIR (no browser required) and data services (distributed computing.) The neologism 'coopetition' might be an apt term for the relationship between HTML5 and Flex.

Do You Speak Flex? Part One: Building a Team

By Ben Elmore
August 13, 2009

With the release of Flex 4, misconceptions abound regarding Flex, and there has been a general reluctance to build Flex development teams internally. These are that Flex resources are scarce, and that teams need years of experience, must be large, expensive, and comprised of all-stars. However, I've found that with a few exceptions, the opposite is generally true and that nearly any organization can afford to build an effective team. This series of articles intends to debunk mistaken notions and help organizations realize the power and accessibility of this skill set.

Moving to Windows 7

By Amy Blankenship
August 3, 2009

A couple of months ago, I got a brand new Dell laptop. To future-proof it, I ordered it with enough RAM that it needed 64-bit Windows to fully use all that muscle. So, once my in-house IT department (AKA my wonderful husband) installed Windows 7 on it, I fired it up for the first time and went through the process of setting it up to connect to the servers at work. Oops! I immediately had a problem. The Citrix client that the company I work for provides for download and installation won't even install to 64-bit Windows, and according to Server Guy (yes, that's his official title), the 64-bit clients it does make require an upgrade to the servers.

Google Maps - Now With Perspective!

By Andrew Trice
July 31, 2009

No, this isn't my new perspective on using the Google Maps API. In fact, it's much more exciting. Google recently released a new addition to the Maps API for Flash, including 3D perspective, and a new control set that is reminiscent of the controls in Google Earth! Straight from Google: "With a perspective map, the map is projected on a viewport (the screen) using a virtual point of reference in front of the screen (the camera). These three components (the map, the viewport and the camera) form a perspective on the viewport which gives the illusion of depth perception to the map."

Yes, you can now use quite a bit of SVG in the Internet Explorer too. With Ample SDK.

By Sergey Ilinsky
July 31, 2009

The Scalable Vector Graphics technology, SVG in short, seems to be experiencing nowadays its second (or third?) birth on the web. The browser vendors are investing heavily into lifting up what they initially prototyped long time before. This is true of Opera, Firefox, Safari and Chrome, but there is no clear indication on the plans to supporting SVG from the major browser vendor - Microsoft. True, Microsoft has recently made a vague statement on its commitment to support the standards and the thrilling web-as-a-platform thing aka HTML5, but in what extent and when? And what shall we do until that time has come, or until the older IE browser park has updated?

Adobe launches Wave

By RJ Owen
July 23, 2009

Adobe Wave is an all-purpose aggregator designed to let you keep up to date on a variety of different media streams. The application is a simple AIR app that connects to a variety of different services and displays a small alert when new content is available. In this entry we'll walk through how Wave works, some of it's uses, how it differs from other similar services (Twitter), and what it needs to do to survive.

How to Tell When It's Time to Settle Down (with a Company) Part 2

By Tom Barker
July 20, 2009

Beyond the obvious questions of: am I paid fairly, is the company stable, do I like what I do and the people I work with, there are a number of questions that you need to further ask to easily identify a home. One such question is, "Are there working managers?" In some companies the manager of application development is not actually a developer and never has been a developer. Most of the times when this is the case the company has no career path for developers beyond senior. Or there may be titles created beyond senior but no path that leads to VP or a C-level position. In those companies that path is reserved exclusively for "managers".

The Learner's Journey in Practice

By Brian Sawyer
July 9, 2009

Earlier this year, while Michael Milton was in the early stages of developing Head First Data Analysis (publishing later this month), we brought him to Cambridge to meet with the Head First editorial team for a focused training session. Our primary goal was to help crank out storyboards for chapters of Michael's book, but in the process, we further refined our thinking about the purpose and process for the Learner's Journey [1] to help get us there.

Calendar Component in ActionScript 3 Part 2

By Tom Barker
June 19, 2009

In my previous entry I discussed including and implementing the Calendar component in a new project. In this next entry I'm going to explore the Calendar class. The basic idea for the Calendar class is to assemble a collection of...

Flash Builder, Linux and Winning the RIA War

By Mike Slinn
June 19, 2009

Summary: Adobe should address developers with a marketing program that is separate from their designer marketing program, and offer products aimed at hard-core developer interests. The goal would be to leverage the influential developer community to drive sales of products...

Five Reasons Architecture Matters

By Dan Thomas
June 19, 2009

This post is an attempt to help justify the sometimes seemingly unappreciated efforts of good application architecture. Sometimes project managers/clients can question time spent on architecture and it can be hard to bring out appropriate explanations on the spot. This...

Union Platform - Interview with Colin Moock

By Rich Tretola
June 9, 2009

Union is a development platform for creating multiuser applications. It includes the Union Server, a multiuser communications server, and Reactor, a framework for creating Adobe Flash client applications. I recently had the opportunity to discuss the new Union Platform project with Colin Moock who is one of the creators of this new platform. Here are the questions that I asked of him.

Calendar Component in ActionScript 3 Part 1

By Tom Barker
June 8, 2009

A few months ago I sat down to make a calendar component, purely as a technical exercise, but because of the way that I set up the architecture it ended up being a fairly useful and easily extended component....

Exploring the Data List Component in Flash Catalyst

By Chris Griffith
June 3, 2009

Now that the first public beta of Flash Catalyst (formerly known as Thermo) has been released, we can start to explore some of the features that have been added since the Preview release from last November. I will assume you have worked through some of the other introductions to the Flash Catalyst user interface. One of new features that has been implemented in the release is the Data List Component.

Having Fun With Google Maps Flash API

By Andrew Trice
May 27, 2009

Here's a trick combining graphics filters with Google maps for some interesting effects. They don't necessarily make it easier to read the maps, nor do they have a lot of value, but they look interesting, and are fun to play with. I can't claim this idea as my own. I just randomly stumbled across this post on axismaps.com, and figured I'd throw together a Flex example showing how to do it.

The Art and Science of Experience Design

By Christian Saylor
May 26, 2009

In a world that is overly saturated with technology and the ever so present visual clutter of messages trying to vie for our attention we, as Designers and Technologists must embrace the "Art and Science" of the experience. As we look back over the course of the last several years in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) market we begin to see some patterns emerge. Patterns and languages circling around the idea that true change has, and always will, come from the delicate balance between Art and Science.

Building Higher Performance RIAs for Smart Phones

By Robi Sen
May 15, 2009

With the growing popularity of smart phones like the iPhone and Google’s Android, as well as new players on the market like Palm’s Pre, the idea of having an always-connected general computational device is finally being realized. Today’s smart phones are not only used for making calls, taking pictures, and listening to music; now people are using their phones to do business, build presentations, make quick edits to important files, and even surf the web. Yet contrary to what the commercials would have you believe, few smart phones provide a web experience equivalent even to a netbook.

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