“Aurora is a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series. Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.” This is really interesting, maybe nearly future, something better than milions microbliging sites on other hand still the same or similar.

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

We’re talking here about Adobe Flex/Air rather than about Silverlight, it is generally because we’re working with Adobe products now. But it’s nececary to find out also different ways of creating RIA applications and this way can be a Silverlight, so read some interesting article about it. I found Serge Jespers (Adobe platform evangelist) review of his Silverlight training course and this is maybe you should read.

Read His article.

This is the one of the most exciting topic in web development in my opinion. Why ? It’s because Adobe Flex gives us amazing flexible tool for creating RIA interfaces. I mean we can be very productive in creating very very usable and beautiful interfaces for our applications, and what is more it is can’t be even compared to Ajax capabilities. Ok, this is frontend but what about backend ? Here we have another cool and productive stuff in this category - Ruby on Rails. Of course you can now say “ohh now he said that NXD is easier way, that Seaside is great and the only way, and now he’s talking about Rails again” - yes, but everything depends on what problems we have to solve. If it’s unnecessary to implement extremely difficult business logic I prefer NXD (native xml databse) and Flex. But Rails destination is exactly to solve these difficult problems. On other hand sometimes also there is no need to use something so powerfull like Flex - in this case, my favorit is now Seaside and some Ajax stuff like YUI or Prototype and Script.aculo.us So generally how many solutions we know, so many problems we can solve properly.

Back to Flex and Rails, last time I found sth called Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 this is one of the series Dzone Refcardz. But to be honest it’s not outstanting help, there is about 8 pages of pdf lecture. Best start of using Flex and Rails is to read Peter Armstrong’s book Flexible Rails (Flex 3 on Rails 2). I’ve read this book and it’s really good, unfortunately based on Cairngorm framework (rubbish). If the author had mentioned about PureMVC there, it could be simple outstanding. There is a couple examples of different ways of communication between Flex and Rails. First he’s talking about REST in Rails so XML way. Later there is an example of AMF format but with RubyAMF (open source flash remoting gateway for rails) which is much faster than WebORB and easier to use. But there are other solutions e.g. Flex Dynamic Scaffolding for Ruby on Rails, here is also screencast and project site. Interesting is also Ruboss framework but I haven’t tried it yet. From their page ” The goal of the Ruboss Framework is to automate much of the plumbing necessary to use Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR with Ruby on Rails. The Ruboss Framework brings the design principles and productivity of Rails to Flex development, and makes integration with RESTful Rails controllers as simple as possible.” See also announcing enterprise flexible rails book.

Generally Flex and Rails gives a lot of fun and profit in web developing, so try it and have fun

Another really interesting video from Adobe TV demonstrating some of features related to designer/developer workflow that will be coming in Flex 4 and Thermo. There we can see how easy will be creating custom components and generally design of our apps. Like I said some time ago there is no need to use Degrafa (Declarative Graphics Framework for Flex). “If you imagine Thermo writing all the MXML code he types, you can imagine just how powerful Designers are going to be in the next generation of Flex development.” - sounds nifty huh ? Now developing RIA apps in Adobe FLex 4 will be even more exciting than now, so we can only waiting for new Flex verion. Here is a small version of Adobe TV oryginal video, which you can find at this link.

Great news ! We can find in this article that Adobe is announcing a collaboration with Google and Yahoo to enhance the searchability of SWF content The project runs SWF files within web spiders and allows all contents within a SWF file to be read by both major search engines. We can find there that it also covers dynamic data loaded in from requests to a server which was ignored in AJAX and SWF applications. So big milestone for RIA world because now it’s to complicated to tell these two major search engines about our SWF content.

If you haven’t tried yet Adobe TV you should do it now, there are many interesting videos from RIA and Adobe world Here is an example list of some interesting videos from there:

• Building Adobe AIR Applications with Flash CS3 (Lee Brimelow)

• Building a Video Application with Flex Builder (Duane Nickull)

• Third-Party HTML Services with Flex and AIR (Ryan Stewart)

• Get Up to Speed on Flex Messaging Service (James Ward)

• Create a Pulse Effect in Flex (Chet Haase)

• Chet Haase presents Top Drawer (Part 1)

Like I said AsWing is a really good option in RIA applications development, but there is another solution if you don’t like AsWing, called SPAS (Swing Package for ActionScript).

The Swing Package for ActionScript 3.0 (SPAS 3.0) provides a set of “lightweight” classes for making graphic user interfaces (GUI) on the Flash Plateform.

The SPAS 3.0 is fully compatible with both Flash 9 and Flex 2 applications.
It will be the starting point to extend Rich Internet Application to all applications wich are developed using Adobe’s Flash authoring products.

The SPAS 3.0 supply Flex 2 developers a real and efficient “java-like” set of GUI classes to wrap RIAs much better if they had to work with the native Flash Platform components.

Here is a sample application and some examples of using SPAS 3.0 . You can even find there a quick comparison of these plaftorms: AsWing A3 vs SPAS 3.0. Looks really nice

Acrobat.com is really great example of Rich Internet Applications power. This is platform which integrate multiple online services, for example: Buzzword (Adobe’s online word processor), Share (Adobe’s file sharing system), Brio (the new version of Adobe Connect - meetings and presentations service) and online PDF generation. Of course now we have year of the RIA, so it should be possible to use it on the desktop, and it is ! There is an Air Application that provide similar functionality (with additional features but i haven’t tested yet). Everythings great but.. what about availability and scalability (especially after last amazon AWS crash), you should read this article Learning From THE S3 Outage. What is more Adobe made special Site: health.acrobat.com where we can see acrobat.com services condition.
Generally speaking this is another step forward in something called SaaS(Software as a service) and another example of exciting job called - RIA developer.

Sun Microsystems ciągle rozwija swój produkt, mogący pozwolić wejść im w świat aplikacji RIA. Tym produktem jest właśnie JavaFx. Aplikacje w JavaFX tworzyć można wykorzystując środowisko NetBeans z wtyczką JavaFX Script, Media Converter. Aplikację będzie można uruchamiać na wszystkich wspieranych platformach (po zainstalowaniu pluginu), podobnie jak Adobe AIR czy Silverlight. Na niedawnej konferencji JavaONE zaprezentowano przykłady aplikacji dla Facebooka, połączonego z Flickrem i Twitterem. Pokazano możliwość przeciągnięcia aplikacji z okna przeglądarki na pulpit. Co więcej tę samą aplikacje uruchomiono następnie na telefonie komórkowym na platformie Android.

Całość wygląda efektownie i obiecująco, jednak na razie jest zbyt wcześnie by JavaFX mogła konkurować z Adobe Flex czy Adobe AIR. Wynika to faktu, że całość nie jest jeszcze tak dopracowana, a co za tym idzie rozpowszechniona (pluginy vs FlashPlayer = produkty Adobe). Tak więc jeśli chodzi o platformę dla Aplikacji RIA, Adobe wciąż wiedzie prym.

AsWing to Open Source’owy GUI framework stworzony w języku ActionScript3 (przedtem ActionScript2). Framework ten wzoruje się na Java Swing (obecnie najpopularniejszej bibliotece GUI w javie). Jest tu bardzo dużo komponentów, dzięki czemu można zbudować w pełni funkcjonalny interfejs dla aplikacji Flash/RIA.

Podstawowy problem pojawiający się w aplikacjach używających Adobe Flex to .. ociężałość. Gotowy plik SWF może zajmować do kilku megabajtów, a sam czysty framework już zajmuje koło 1 Mb. Dodatkowo wszystkie te efekty i przejścia zażynają procesor.

AsWing jest jakby odpowiedzią na to. Jest lekki (plik z samym Hello World zajmuje kilkanaście KB) i wydajny.

Przykładem może być to co zrobił mój znajomy Evgenios Skitsanos grafeio.eu na razie wersja Beta, wszystko działa szybko i zajmuje 124 KB !! (podobna Aplikacja w Adobe Flex zajmowałaby około 1.5 MB).

Dobry tutorial mozna znaleźć tutaj Step By Step AsWing with FlexBuilder, oraz forum dyskusyjne AsWing Forum.

Anthony Franco powiedział “2008 to rok aplikacji typu RIA”. Jak sie jednak ma RIA do tego co niosą możliwości action script’owych bibliotek 3D ? Te ostatnie rozwijają się teraz znakomicie czego przykładem może być PaperVision3D, świetnie wyglądający Away3d czy też rzecz, którą ostatnio dopiero zobaczyłem Alternativa Platform. Generalnie brakuje słów patrząc na prace, którą wykonali ich twórcy. Jak jednak świat 3D wpasowuje się w aplikacje RIA ? Mimo, że jest to temat stosunkowo świeży i nie ma zbyt wielu komercyjnych przykładów, wydaje mi się, że znacznie lepiej sprawdza się on w grach, marketingu, rozrywce, ecommerce…. ale mniej w aplikacjach typowo biznesowych. Powodów jest wiele jak chociażby wydajność. Wydaje się jednak, że skoro wszystkie webowe aplikacje czy też zwykłe strony mają coraz to bogatsze interfejsy, kolejnym właściwym krokiem powinien być właśnie świat 3D Dobry przykład reklamy nowego Audi RS6 Audi RS6 3D Site.