UPDATE: I gave a talk on the Lifecycle of a Component in Flex 4 first at Bangalore Flex User Group and then at FlexMania conference, check out the video recording, slides and code.

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Someone recently asked me how to go about understanding the Flex Component Lifecycle .. my usual answer to this is to go read the documentation, then the source of UIComponent and a few basic components like Label, Button etc. .. I also sometimes point people to the Building A Flex Component [PDF] presentation from Ely Greenfield which I’ve found useful in the past … this time though, I was also reminded of some recent presentations I had seen on the subject and found interesting .. so I thought I’ll share them here as well .. read more

I’ll be at Adobe Flash Ahead tomorrow. If you’re in Bangalore and not planning to attend this event you should .. the event will showcase the finalist’s of Adobe RIAthon and the cool applications they built…
  

   
The event will also have interesting presentations on some of the latest advancements in the Flash platform .. some of the highlights include … read more

Dick Hirsch introduced me to Stax in relation to an open source project that I’m involved with, Apache ESME (more on that later)
 

  

What is Stax ?

According to the Stax website … Stax is “The fastest way for developers to build, manage and scale Java applications on EC2″ .. here are the notable features …. read more

After a lot of convincing, Abesh got me to start writing at SAP Network Blogs … as part of my introductory post I ended up describing what I thought the term RIA meant and I later realized I had never documented my interpretation of Rich Internet Applications so here’s what I said in the SDN post ..

What are Rich Internet Applications? .. while there are many definitions on the web, I like to decide if something is an RIA or not based on the following criteria …

1. It has to be an Application … something that deals with dynamic data, takes an input and processes it to produce valuable output.
2. Its primary function should be to deal with data that lives on the Internet (or intranets).
3. It should offer a user experience that is Richer than what we’ve been used to in the past in a particular environment.

If a piece of software satisfies the above criteria, in my opinion, its an RIA. If you think about these points for a little bit, you’ll quickly realize that, even though a fairly new buzzword, is not a new concept …. Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail etc are all RIAs that came out several years ago. After some more thought, you’ll realize that in today’s context majority of applications that we build have something to do with data that lives elsewhere on the network, therefore the dominant factor that defines an RIA is the richness of the experience users have while using it. So if we oversimplify, RIAs are applications built with special attention to user interface and user experience.

Many modern interface development technologies have been labeled as Rich Internet Application Technologies .. these include AJAX, various Javascript libraries and frameworks, modern browsers, Gears, Flex, Flash Player, AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX etc .. while these technologies facilitate building an RIA it does not automatically imply that everything built with them is an RIA … in fact, it is very easy to build a Not So Rich Internet Application with these so called RIA technologies. At the same time, it is important to note that the use of these technologies is not a prerequisite to building an RIA either.

This is how I understand Rich Internet Applications .. what is your interpretation of the term RIA?

Maybe I’m missing something here, but why does FlexBuilder generate css styles as “styleName” but suggests auto completions as “style-name” ?

Generated Style

 

Auto-Complete

 

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UPDATE: If you find this behaviour annoying, please vote on this Flash Builder bug
 

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