India, RIA

Adobe India has been running a very interesting contest these past few months called RIAthon

The idea is simple, you build some cool RIAs using Adobe technologies and if Adobe likes your work they give you some very cool prizes and a platform to showcase your work and your skills.
  

  

I was quite excited about the contest at first .. I had even thought of an idea for an app I would build, but after very little exploration I decided not to participate. Now that the contest is well underway and this blog post cannot negatively affect Adobe’s efforts in anyway since the Grand Finale of the contest is tomorrow… I think its appropriate for me to express why I made my decision … read more

AIR, Flex, India, RIA

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

Flex, Java, RIA

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

AIR, Flex, JavaFX, RIA, SAP, SilverLight

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?

RIA

This was *brand new runtimes* week in RIA land, Silverlight 2 released on Tuesday, Flash Player 10 released on Wednesday. And, now that FP10 is out, I’m guessing a new version of AIR that embeds it should not be very far along.

One of my favorite new features in Flash Player 10 is the ability to use PixelBender to create filters that can be applied to objects inside of Flash Player. As I was watching Lee Brimelow’s very helpful PixelBender tutorials I thought it would be cool to use these filters as Flex Effects. So I wrote a custom Flex effect called BendPixels, this effect can be used with a PixelBender filter to animate properties of the filter and very quickly the whole thing turned into library of Flex effects. I’m releasing the BendPixels effect along with many specialized effects as an open source library on Google Code

• Example (Flash Player 10 required)
• Google Code page
• BendPixels.swc

The base BendPixels effect can be used as follows:

<effects :BendPixels 
	benderFileURL="[URL of .pbj file]"
	benderParams="[
			['property1',startValue1, endValue1],
			['property2',startValue2, endValue2],
			['property3',startValue3, endValue3],
 
		      ]"
	/>

• benderFileURL is the url of the PixelBender binary (.pbj)
• benderParams is a multi-dimentional array which contains arrays of type [propertyname, startval, endval]

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