I’m currently working on my next book, Effortless Flex 4 Development. This is an entirely new title for me and my first full-length book on Flex. It’ll be published by New Riders, which is a sister publisher to Peachpit Press, that I normally work with. Most of the books I’ve written have been in the Visual QuickStart/QuickPro Guide series, which has a scripted format. This book will not be, so you won’t see the step-by-step instructions everywhere (there will be some) or the two-column format. I just submitted the third chapter, so I’ve now written about 90 pages or so, approximately one-quarter of the book. Here’s the rough table of contents, for those that are interested. Continue Reading…
Archives For Flex
I’ve just started writing my forthcoming Flex 4 book, tentatively titled Effortless Flex 4 Development. I’m happy to say that the first chapter is in the can, which is always a big hurdle to overcome. The book will be around 400 pages, released by New Riders, with an expected publication date later this Spring. I may post a more detailed table of contents in time, but the rough outline consists of three parts:
- The Fundamentals
- Data and Communications
- Application Development
Each part will be roughly a third of the book. As no previous Flex knowledge is assumed, the first part covers the basics of Flex development. This includes the tools you’ll use, the user interface elements, an introduction to ActionScript, and a discussion of event handling. The second part of the book is especially important, I believe, as working with data and client-server communications are what give Rich Internet Applications their true power. Unlike the other Flex books that I’ve seen, I’ll be exclusively using PHP for my server-side code. This is in part because I’m a PHP guy at heart, in part because increased PHP support is a key addition to Flex 4, and in part because I want to present Flex development in a way that doesn’t require a huge amount of cash or server requirements. The last section of the book adds more advanced concepts, ties together what had been discussed to that point, and has more complete examples.
I’ll post more details in time. If you have any questions or comments, on my book or on Flex, please share them. Thanks!
An article I wrote titled Integrating Flex and PHP—An Introductory Tutorial was just published online at DZone (specifically RIA Zone). As the title suggests, in this article I discuss how to use PHP and Flex (and a bit of XML) to create a Web-based application for managing employees by department. Basic understanding of both PHP and Flex are assumed.
A valuable Flex resource, in case you’re not familiar with it, is Adobe’s Tour de Flex. If you’re doing any kind of Flex development, this really is a “must have”. Besides showing off what you can do using Flex (and Adobe AIR), the Tour de Flex provides a single, simple interface for referencing:
- Flex components (UI, containers, effects, validators, etc.)
- Services (data and network interactions)
- Cloud APIs (Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Google, Twitter, etc.)
- Mapping (Google, Mapquest, Yahoo!)
- Third-party tools
Most categories also have a “techniques” section, giving specifics for how to accomplish common tasks. There’s tons of sample code that are also visible in action, so you can easily understand how the code works in practice. And, of course, the related language reference is included.
Tour de Flex is available in both an online and desktop version (thanks to Adobe AIR for the latter).
I’m a big fan of Adobe’s AIR, and not just because I’ve written a book on it! I’ve been developing AIR applications, for in-house and client use, for a couple of years now, in both JavaScript/HTML and Flex. I’ve recently, and not so recently, come across these two good articles on Adobe AIR:
From the titles, the articles are self-explanatory, but the emphasis is on performance. The interesting thing about the first article is that it discusses the theory of performance, which people don’t think about enough (e.g., what does it mean to perform well?). The article uses a specific example for which one could easily come up with three different senses of “performance” (the article uses Flex for the code).
The second article has lots of specific, excellent tips, many of which being applicable to any application you develop (although the example also uses Flex for the code, it’s mostly ActionScript).
Even if you’re not using Adobe AIR, I would think these articles would be worth reading, as the subject of application performance is one we could all always continue to learn more about.
