Waiting days are almost over as Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 release is just around the corner. Heres a chance for each one of us to get a sneak peek into the Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 release scheduled sometime in march. Bangalore Flex user group gives us an opportunity of being a part of this special FUG meet on 25th February where we focus on the much awaited release of Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 and talk our heart about it. What more Adobe is sponsoring this meeting with cool giveaways and a raffle copy of adobe flex 3 builder professional.
Flex Builder 3 is a great upgrade and comes armed with loads of offerings like improved designer-developer work flow,advanced components,advanced charting and data visualization capabilities,memory profiler and a native support for building application on AIR platform. To know more about Flex 3 goodness head to Ted’s post, Mat’s article, Ryan’s Post, 360Flex Keynote, Flex 3.0 Features@Adobe Labs.
Along with Flex 3 release is soon to be released Adobe Integrated run time environment(AIR). AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop. AIR applications can talk to the local file system,accepts drag n drop from the desktop,runs outside the browser and runs completely offline.
Looking forward to the meet.
(Venue Details will be out soon)
We have faced this situation many times when we kept wondering while developing a flex application if instead of going back to design/coding mode,we can change the visual appearance right there at the run time and see the results right away.Many a times we are not sure of the visual appearance of the component at the design time and we have to run the whole application in order to see the final result. If you are bogged down just like me with this annoyance then FlexSpy can come to your rescue. FlexSpy is tool using which one can change the look and feel of the component at the run time dynamically and inspect the appearance of the component.This way the tool can help us save the development time and imagine using the tool while demoing your application to your users,just as they raise questions on the look n feel,may be a different color- invoke FlexSpy right away and change the properties right there.The installation is easy and above all its free and open source. Check out more about the tool here and check out the demo here too.
We had a wide range of talks ranging from Ajax to flash/flex, and we had a chance to witness some of the most amazing applications built on flex/flash platform during the event.
Around 130+ people were expected to attend (based on the registration) but around 65 people turned up.
The list of the topics presented on the day:-
A) Data Visualizations in Flex – Raghunath Rao, Adobe
As pointed out rightly by raghu, every motion on the screen has a meaning-he clearly illustrated the power of flex framework in data visualizations and bowled all us over the new features that flex 3 is coming with in data visualizations arena. Key take away in this session was some of the amazing visualization capabilities in flex 3 such as advanced data grid-which offers the charting capabilities, tree data structure data in Datagird itself. Drawing out another chart with the data region selected on one chart was one of most impressive feature offered in flex 3.Advaced Datagrid is one of its kind and comes geared with capabilities which can leave a huge impact on data analysis and visualizations arena.
B) RIAjaxified – Rakshith, Adobe
Rakhshith is from coldfusion team at adobe and have worked a lot on the Ajax framework
He put light on asynchronous and synchronous techniques used in AJAX. His focus was to showcase the RIA capabilities of AJAX and how client side programming in JavaScript with server side processing that can deliver XML fragments back to your web page to allow the page to be updated with new information from the server without having to reload the entire web page.
Key learning from his sessions was the understanding of how AJAX delivers Rich Web applications which precisely has the following methodology:-
- XHTML and CSS standards based presentation
- Interaction with the page through the DOM
- Data interchange with XML and XSLT
- Asynchronous data retrieval with XMLHttpRequest
- JavaScript to tie it all together
C) Designing RIAs with RC Pattern – Yash Mody, TeknoPoint Multimedia
Yash shared his experiences and challenges that he faced while working on RIA projects and RIA application development processes. While working on these applications he came out with an approach called RC (Rapid Correct) approach.
His approach addressed the following concerns
-Change in the look and feel of the application takes longer time.
-Adding a new call will take a long time.
-Flexibility of the code
-Understanding of the working of the application
From the development point of view his approach centered on use of web services in Flex based applications. Singleton classes were the main ingredient of his approach. His approach came in as the collection of the best practices used while developing a flex based RIA and that was the key learning of the whole talk.
D) Flash for flex developers – Bhavin Padhiyar, SAP
Bhavin is both flex and flash certified developer; his sayings came in handy where in he showcased the use of flash scripts/classes being used in flex. He demonstrated the use of flash timelined objects being created in flash and then being used in flex. The most important point and the key learning of the whole session was that with the use of flash we can add custom animation in flex.
Flex have set of animations which can not be customized as far as the different pattern of the animations and the timeline is concerned, this can be done in flash and then can used in flex.
The creation of flash animations leads to creation of flash classes which can then be imported in flex and can be attached to any object in flex. This made us realize that all the flash capabilities can be used in flex and add more colors to the existing palette of flex. Some of the web applications which are already using these capabilities are http://www.harley-davidson.com, www.Sherwin-williams.com.
E) Building Live Documents – An online Office suite leveraging RIA technologies
Sumanth Raghavendra and Adarsh Kini, InstaColl
This was one session that went over the edge and took us all with a surprise.
Sumanth and Adarsh are the CTOs of the installColl a startup company which has Sabeer Bhatia as their chairman of the board. The company has come up with a concept called Live Documents which is a unique solution that layers on persistent security, access control and management capabilities onto desktop productivity tools. With Live Documents, our normal Word documents and Excel spreadsheets are transformed into auto-updating entities that have Wiki-like capabilities. Sumanth mentioned that they would be able to roll out their product by March next year. There experiences with the flex technology blew our mind and the captivating demo kept us stuck on our seats.
F) Optimizing Flex and AS3 – Mrinal Wadhwa, SAP
Mrinal’s session was one of the most interesting sessions which explored the benefits of adopting best practices and suggested some of the techniques to optimize AS3 code. His session was the major take away of the event. Strict data typing and using absolute positioning in the layout of the flex application is one best practice which puts less load on to the AS Virtual Machine and is less expensive. He stated that Flex Virtual Machine is very fast as compared to AS2 Virtual Machine and in some tests carried out it performed equally well as Java Virtual Machine.
He put light on actionscript server side and client side optimization as well.
G) Developing Flex RIAs with Cairngorm Micro architecture Debabrata Acharjee, CapGemini
Debabrata put light on the importance of Cairngorm Micro architecture. The Cairngorm Microarchitecture is a lightweight yet prescriptive framework for rich Internet application (RIA) development. This architecture is nothing but a Design pattern based framework for RIA Development. The architecture comes really handy in enterprise wide applications and not usually in case of small scale applications. He pointed out that the implementation of the design patterns (the patterns that have been selected for the micro architecture) and the future roadmap for Cairngorm development are firmly aligned with the feature set – advertised and anticipated – of the Adobe Flex platform, and the emerging ecosystem of tools (such as Apollo) around the Flex platform.
The benefits of the Cairngorm architecture are realized when developing complex RIA applications with multiple use-cases and views, with a team of developers, and with a multi-disciplinary development team that includes designers as well as creative and technical developers. The whole session was very interactive and had an active participation from the audience where in people asked if the existing applications can be turned into a cairngorm micro architecture type application and the answer of the question is yes.
Birds of feather
This was a random session on RIA and their future, we had random discussions on RIA and technologies like Silverlight and we saw a bubble animation test of silverlight (JavaScript and CLR) vs. DHTML vs. flash (Flex) vs. WPF vs. APOLLO vs. Java (Swing).We later had a demo of a tool for Test Management System called Zephyr (http://www.getzephyr.com ) built using Flex.
Read more on initRIA experiences and post event thoughts here, here, here, here, here and here
Check out some pics of the event here and here
All in all initRIA Rocked and we all had a great time!!
initRIA has been a great success and it went on to become a first of a kind event in india on Rich Internet Applications.The other day mrinal brought the idea of utilizing the license that is raffled out by adobe every six months to the user groups that are registered with adobe. As Bangalore flex user group was registered with adobe, we thought of utilizing this opportunity and have a open forum event where in people can come in and speak on different RIA technologies. We guys at the group started having idea thrown in for the event and there we were,we had a huge support from the group and hence initRIA was born. Though later the adobe software raffle suggestion couldn’t work out but we guys were determined to make it happen and went ahead for initRIA and guess what at very short span of time we had a sponsor,tecknopoint on our hands as well. The event turned out to be a huge success and we all had at great time.
Hi all and welcome to my blog on RIAs and BI.
RIA and BI are the two words that excites me the most, in other words they are the sole reason of me writing about them on this blog.
I am a constant believer of the fact that Business intelligence and Rich Internet Applications can create a blend of rich,intuitive,simpler BI Applications which can work wonders in BI space.
I will be blogging more on topics related to RIAs and RIA Market Trends and Technologies such as Microsoft’s WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), AJAX, Adobe’s Flex / Flash/APOLLO and topics like BI/DW and RIAs.
Though my focus is primarly on how the internet applications are evolving, i choose to write about RIAs becasue RIAs are the front runners in evolving internet applications and giving new dimensions to it.
The raw powerfullness of RIAs is that it provides client rich applications with high performance, enabling desktop experience on the web browser. We can leverage our existing skills to develop RIAs to provide data rich applications with compelling user experience.This helps clients to leverage the advantages of web based architecture and performance comparable to desktop applications.
You will see me speaking more on User Experiene(Ux),Usability of applications as well.
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About
I am Saurabh Narula, Engineer at Honywell Technology Solutions,Bangalore. I work as Rich Internet Applications Developer with Business Intelligence Team in ITSS Honeywell. This Blog is about my experiences and learnings with RIA, RIA Technologies & Business Intelligence practices,applications and technologies.You can drop me an email at reachsaurabhnarula@gmail.com
Disclaimer: My thoughts and content posted here are entirely my own and are not reflective of the opinions of Honeywell Inc.
