360|Flex and Accessibility of ILOG Elixir charts

During this month we’ll be in San Jose for the 360|Flex, during the presentation we’ll talk about the accessibility of the Flex Framework and we’ll eplore how to create an accessible custom component.

The presentation will be on Flex and Accessibility with a practical demo of how to make ILOG Elixir component accessible for impaired users; the component we would like to work on is the OrgChart component on which we’ll implement a short description and a long one that is readable from the screen readers.

After the presentation we’ll publish for sure a lot of slides and practical samples.

Flash player engineers

Watch the interview here:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1564561905/bclid1564555900/bctid1564557060

topics covered include:

-garbage collecting loaded .swf files

-ecmascript4: is it too much?
-future of the web client ecosystem
-life as a player engineer

-history of flash player’s internals

-macromedia and adobe culture

-flash player engineering process

-politics of the web
-future player features

-jon gay’s vector renderer

RIA Teaching Resources

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) combine the flexibility of desktop applications with the broad reach of the web. RIAs are interactive and engaging, combining an online and off-line experience. To prepare students with the right skills for this new realm of application development that impacts interactivity and visual design and connects designers and developers more closely, institutions must plan courses and course content. Working with faculty from higher education institutions, we’ve put together resources for teaching RIA design and development across a variety of courses, such as Human Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, and Introduction to Computer Programming.

http://www.adobe.com/education/instruction/teach/ria.html

ARIA

Here you can find a lot of info about ARIA and it seems easy and quick to develop.

http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/misc/ARIA/atmedia2008/

MyFlex.org

MyFlex.org is a new intersting set of tools for Flex.
All  blue-chip software producers have at least one thing in common – a vibrant community of independent developers, some of which become vendors of  components or tools that greatly enrich the main product. MyFlex.org is built  for independent software vendors who are creating free or commercial components for Adobe Flex 2. MyFlex.org has been created by an independent software vendor  Farata Systems, which is also a contributor of the first commercial plugins for Flex Builder.

For more info www.myflex.org.

Mango Blog 1.0 released

Mango Blog is an extensible blog engine released under the Apache license, built with ColdFusion. It provides the core engine to administer and publish entries and the necessary architecture to extend its basic functionality by adding plugins. Mango Blog can be easily customized by the use of exchangeable and completely customizable skins.

For info and download the new release chech this link.

AIR/Flex competition launched on SitePoint

SitePoint is giving away two copies of Adobe CS3 Web Premium (kindly donated by Adobe) to the authors of the best articles about Adobe Flex and AIR submitted over the next four weeks.

For more information check this link http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/04/08/write-for-sitepoint-and-win-the-adobe-cs3-web-premium-suite/

101 fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site

Surfing the web I found this itneresting article http://www.insidecrm.com/features/101-web-site-fixes-031808/.
The article outilines 101 easy to implment techniques you need to use in order to improve the performance of your web site.

MXunit

MXUnit.org (http://mxunit.org/) is proud to announce the first release candidate of Unit Test
Framework *and* Eclipse Plugin for ColdFusion Developers.

Features include a simple-to-use extensible framework that allows
developers to spend more time writing tests and code than getting
distracted by frameworks details. The MXUnit Eclipse Plugin further
facilitates test creation by integrating running and debugging of tests
within the Eclipse IDE.

Common desing patterns

There are tons of design patterns, the common patterns used in a Flex application are:

- Singleton
- Command
- Mediator
- MVC
- Observer
- Value Object

The following links are useful resource and framework in order to start to implment in the right way the design patterns listed above:
http://osflash.org/projects/arp
http://www.serverbox.com/foundry
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/blueprint_print.html
http://www.model-glue.com/flex.cfm
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Cairngorm
http://www.puremvc.org/