Using encapsulated components instead of reinventing wheels in code have been around from some time, for both GUI elements and nonvisible functional blocks such as communications protocol handlers. Here is a brief sampler of some for Adobe’s Flex 3 development tool.

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Software development may well be the closest activity to perpetual motion that can be achieved in the real world. Approaches and techniques once thought new are more often than not a bad solution to an old problem. Cascading Style Sheets is one of those ancient wheels badly reinvented.

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Rich Internet Applications are often the basis for Web 2.0 sites, where increased functionality comes at the price of more extensive development and coding efforts. Here’s an excellent overview from a JavaScript perspective that will help anyone and everyone who wants to master this, from beginners to seasoned professionals.

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Online searches driven by keywords get their results from spidering text in pages’ html scripts. Completely graphics driven web pages, like pure Flash or Rich Internet Applications with Adobe’s Flex or Microsoft’s Silverlight, are invisible to search engine scans. Here’s a way to quickly and easily add searchable content.

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If digital image manipulation is like painting, then this book by Todd Yard is like listening to a painter describe a desired artistic effect, using Actionscript as a set of brushes, the classes as a palette, and Flash as the canvas.
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Rich Internet Applications, aka RIAs, are encountering some interesting problems that seem new to a lot of developers. Like many other things, these are really old problems that were solved a long time ago.

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Written by Paul Tondeur and Jeff Winder, from Packt Publishing, also available from
Amazon; ISBN 9781847195722. Probably should have been titled The Missing Manual if that hadn’t already been taken. Interesting that it took two Dutchmen to come up with a book in English, published in England, indicative Papervision3D’s international activity.
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Adobe’s Flex has a lot going for it for Rich Internet Applications. Some of the benefits are indirect but no less welcomed.

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