Adobe Flex is the leading techonology for the development and deployment of cross platform Rich Internet applications. This session is an introduction to building RIA with Adobe Flex and AIR.
We can’t really talk about Web 2.0 without Web talking about 1.0 for many reasons. Anyways, the Web was a very boring place back then. We had a page-based architecture using the client-server paradigm We started out with dull Static pages and ended up with pages with dynamic content and database on the backend etc... A lot of things were done and many technologies has been developed; some of are still being used until this day Here is a list of some of theses technologies and how they fit into a traditional web app The thing that I want you to take away from this slide is that we never broke away from that page-based architecture and the core skeleton of the traditional web app remained the same
People lost faith on Web Applications No Real Standards The quitter: Many abandoned the web and simply said that this will never work
This was not all bad, but turned out to be a good thing after all It gave the time to the community to develop standards and revaluate its position
Web 2.0 didn’t really bring any new technologies It is about looking at the features that we already have in the browser and the preexisting technologies and try to use them in a different way In other word, to use them for something more powerful that they were not intended for The first feature that happen to be looked up first was the communication feature of the browser Its ability to send HTTP request and process responses How can we use it differently?
How? Usually, only one node of the DOM tree needs to be updated Using JavaScript, an HTTP request is sent to the server in the background The server responds with an “application/xml” (XML) MIME type, “application/json” (JSON) MIME type, or other JavaScript is used to change the inner html of the node to be updated The rest of the nodes in the DOM tree are not updated and are available the whole time for the user to interact with
Flexible and productive development is more important Optimized JavaScript guaranteed by the compiler Look at a mature software development The Language Choice: Java (OO, the most popular, statically-typed, runtime-error checking, etc…) Unit Testing: Junit IDE: Eclipse
Non-Absolute layout is fluid and results in slower applications Nesting many VBox and HBox affect performance
int and uint data types: for faster integer-based math E4X provides an alternative way to DOM interfaces and uses a simpler syntax for accessing XML documents New event model: Listener-based event model with support for event propagation