This article is about creating a Flex tree control that uses a component hierarchy as the data provider. As with most of my Flex development, after struggling for days and then finally getting something to work, I later find out that there is a much easier way to do it that none of my searches ever turned up. I am a beginner Flex 2 developer, so any constructive feedback would be greatly appreciated.

The recent years of Web development have been marked by several important events. In the Flash world, we have seen a constant evolution of the technology. From a developer's point of view, Flash started to be really usable with the introduction of ActionScript 1.0 in Flash 5 and the improvements made in Flash 6. It turned out that Flash was no longer only an animation tool for designers but also a framework for developers. This led to many Flash projects that would not have been possible before, ranging from Web games to Rich Internet Applications.

'The innovation we are most excited about,' said Bruce Chizen, Adobe's CEO, 'is Apollo, which we believe will revolutionize the way the world will interact with the Web in the future.' He was speaking at MAX 2006, the biggest ever Adobe developer conference, in Las Vegas.

The opening keynote was superb, definitely one of our more exciting keynotes, and without a doubt the loudest. After several 'let's tease Ben' segments courtesy of Kevin and Shantanu, I got to present two segments. The first concentrated on ColdFusion. I talked about the CF/Flex integration in CFMX 7.0.2, showed the ColdFusion Flex Application Wizard, and then discussed 'Scorpio'.

Getting good quality text in a JPEG file has long been a concern for many designers. Fortunately for us, Fireworks MX and higher versions have a very useful feature to help with this called the Selective Quality. In Fireworks MX 2004 and higher, we also have the ability to adjust and customize the aliasing of text. In this short tutorial find out how to utilize these features to keep your text crisp and snappy when exporting a file as a JPEG image.

At its first MAX developer and customer event since joining forces with Macromedia, Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ: ADBE) today will demonstrate technologies and future product workflows that make it possible to create and deliver new kinds of high-impact, rich applications and engaging content and experiences. Adobe is previewing the company's next-generation technology, code-named Apollo, for developing rich Internet applications for the desktop, and debuting the public beta of Adobe Digital Editions, new software for interacting with eBooks and digital publications (see separate release).

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today introduced the public beta of Adobe® Digital Editions, a Rich Internet Application (RIA) built from the ground up for digital publishing. With native support for Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) as well as an XHTML-based reflow-centric publication format, Digital Editions delivers an engaging way to acquire, read, and manage content, including eBooks, digital magazines, digital newspapers and other digital publications. Initially available as a free public beta for Windows®, Digital Editions will support Macintosh systems as a universal binary application, Linux® platforms, as well as mobile phones and other embedded devices in future versions.

ColdFusion developers have known for years how powerful rapid development can be and how much of a difference that makes when building dynamic Web applications. Over the course of a little more than a year we've watched as the Web model was turned on its head in favor of something that feels much more intuitive and is much more user-friendly. Part of this change has come about because of what most people call 'Web 2.0.' Web 2.0 has brought about more buzzwords than a marketing convention. A lot of normal users have stopped trying to figure out what tagging is, what AJAX means, or what the blogosphere really is. They have to be wondering why most of the Web sites they're using suddenly have 'beta' on them.

'MAX 2006 is both a milestone in the integration of Adobe and Macromedia, and a reflection of what's possible when all these creative forces come together,' said Kevin Lynch, Adobe SVP & Chief Software Architect today here in Las Vegas, where Adobe is staging its first MAX developer and customer event since joining forces with Macromedia.

'By creating a specialized, consumer-friendly application like Digital Editions, Adobe is ensuring publishers can securely deliver high-impact content to the widest possible audience, across hardware platforms, operating systems and devices,' said Shantanu Narayen, president and COO at Adobe, as he today introduced at MAX 2006 the public beta of Adobe's new Rich Internet Application (RIA) built from the ground up for digital publishing.

This article is based on a presentation that I made at the Adobe Flex seminar in August 2006 (www.flexseminar.com/), after which the master of ceremonies Jeremy Geelan asked me to explain how to make great mapping mashups using Adobe Flex.

Christophe Coenraets, a senior Flex Evangelist from Adobe has published a blog showing a number of sample Flex applications that communicate with Java on the server side.

When I joined Macromedia/Adobe Consulting, my role as Practice Leader was to grow a practice in EMEA around Rich Internet Application technologies. , reflecting the recurrence in opportunity for us to fuse these client and server technologies together to solve a number of enterprise business problems. As I assume the responsibility to grow this combined practice in EMEA, I'll extend my blogging to share some of the excitement and thinking we have around how the technologies from our Enterprise Developer Business Unit - including Flex, Flex Data Services and the numerous LiveCycle technologies - converge as an enterprise business platform.

Oracle and Adobe today announced they are working together to enable developers to easily create Web 2.0 applications for the enterprise. For the first time, enterprise applications will be able to include animations, charts and graphs in Adobe(R) Flash(R) combined with other AJAX content surfaced in a rich Java- based portal such as Oracle Portal, which is part of the Oracle(R) Fusion Middleware product family.

Your footsteps echo down the unmarked path. Gravel shuffles everywhere as you slow and strafe around the corner of a generic concrete bunker. You reach for the double- barreled shotgun but it's too late. A loud bang rips through the air but it's the soft thud as you hit the ground that confirms your worst fear, you're dead...again. A quick click of the mouse and poof...like magic you're all the way back to your last reached checkpoint.

The winds of change in the Web world have reached hurricane force right now, and nowhere are they blowing more fiercely than around that epicenter of weather activity that's been labeled 'Web 2.0.' There, a perfect storm is brewing.

Ten years ago I've been doing PowerBuilder and my mentality was different: first, I was the best friend of business users, and second I did not really worry about what's under the hood. I could do stuff quickly, or using the modern jargon, I was an

SYS-CON Books (www.books.sys-con.com) announced the forthcoming publication of two uniquely comprehensiveand up-to-date books devoted to every aspect of AJAX technologies and RichInternet Applications in the greater context of the overall 'Web 2.0'spectrum:

There is this blog and a nice looking demo showing how AJAX can happily live together with Flex charting. This vendor's AJAX grid component is populated with the data first, and then using FABridge the data is being passed to the Flex Charting component. Typically blogs demos like this get a number of Wows, and I expect several 'Cool, man' comments to this blog within the next day or so.

The subject of this piece is how to pass parameters from HTML to a Flex 2 application using flashVars parameters.

Flash Player 9 enters pre-Alpha stage on Linux. Adobe marketing needs to work harder.

We are about to enter a new era, when plain looking Web applications will gradually be replaced with RIA delivered over the Web that can actually land on the PC and work in a disconnected mode as well. How this will affect the evolution of Business Intelligence (BI) applications?

The simplest way to explain Flex Data Services (FDS) is to compare them with Flex Remoting. Simply put, FDS addresses only a subset of operations facilitated via Flex Remoting - result set requests. However, whereas Flex Remoting enables one-way requests, FDS combines one-way requests with the publish/subscribe mechanism so that besides the original result set FDS sends the client live updates produced by other clients of the same destination. And there's one more dimension in which Data Services depart from Flex Remoting - support for hierarchical collections, but we won't be covering that subject in this book.

Specializing in 'Total Solutions Hosting' Apollo Hosting provides everything their customers need to build, sell and market their websites. Their web servers were processing over half a million unsolicited spam emails on a daily basis. Apollo's Vice President of Operations, Don McLeman was I.T. Manager at the time and oversaw the switch to CanIt-PRO. ?We were fairly happy with our anti-spam filter at the time, but they wanted to renegotiate the contract,? McLeman explains, ?this would have been expensive for us and bad for our clients.?

Flex 2 applications may have complex architectures and they are usually made up of multiple files: MXML, Actionscript and CSS.

You read the blogs, see a couple of articles, and hear all the buzz about Flex 2 and how it can really transform how your users can fluidly interact with information and the business in an exciting and efficient new way.

In Java, if you've created an object from a particular class, you can use only properties and methods that were defined in this class. This is not the case in ActionScript 3. This is one of the examples of unusual (from the OOP perspective) programming techniques.

Traditional application development processes make it challenging to meet the time and budget constraints facing businesses today. Going from the requirements gathering phase to writing up design documents to delivering applications can take many months-which is often too long for executives wanting to address new market opportunities or solve old business problems.

All objects in recent versions of ActionScript are defined by something called classes. Think of classes as blueprints that determine the unique combination of characteristics, actions, and reactions that comprises a particular object of a certain type. By 'object,' we are talking about the familiar things a Flash developer deals with every day: movie clips (the MovieClip class), text fields (the TextField class), buttons, sounds, math functions, components, you name it. They are all defined by classes.

With all the noise the Web 2.0 revolutionaries are making, it's easy to ignore another-this time velvet-revolution. E-commerce 2.0 is coming into maturity and getting ready to relieve its now 10+ year old predecessor. It's about time.

We've all seen Google finance, and the great job that it does at mixing HTML content with Flash content, as seen on company stock quotes. Google has done a great job at using Flash where it makes the most sense, in the graphs for company quotes, with HTML where it makes sense (linking to news items). Today, I'll show you how to build your own Google-finance type site, using a combination of Ajax, JSON, PHP and Flex / Flash. And, best of all, we'll do it all for free.

RSS - Really Simple Syndication - is about sharing content with new audiences. Lots of websites create RSS feeds so that their audiences can get updates using their favorite Aggregators (like NetNewsWire). Other websites collect that content and republish it in new venues, to new audiences, or just in a different medium. That's what syndication is all about -- sharing. And since my mamma always taught me sharing is good, I'm gonna share the secret to putting RSS content onto your web page.

There comes a day when we all need an application in multiple languages. Eso es la verdad. In Flex, the solution to this problem is resource bundles. In this article, I'll describe the basic use of resource bundles and create a small example in Flex Builder. I'll also suggest some resources for further exploration and ponder some potential future directions of this feature.

I gotta say, I had a lot of fun at the Real-World Flex Seminar SYS-CON put together. Things went, for me, really smoothly. Registration, getting Internet at the booth, and hooking up with my team. Free coffee was readily available, so I was set.

While currently used by four million people, Dreamweaver has no e-commerce functionality. Which is why WebAssist today is launching a new e-commerce solution that will add value to Dreamweaver for small businesses and web professionals.

On August 14, I attended the seminar RealWorld Flex in New York City. I was really impressed by the endless number of presentations showing the use of Adobe Flex 2 technology in the real world applications. Real-time processing, vector graphics, collaboration, messaging, multimedia, shopping carts, geo maps, customer support, and more. This was a really interesting event about the technology that will become a hit of 2007.

Each of our students comes with different understanding of how to program in Flex according to their 'legacy' background. So I'll tell you the story that might have happened in a real life, but first, let me remind you of an old Indian tale about seven blind men and an elephant. In short, one blind man touched the elephant's head, the other one touched the tail, someone was by the leg. And each of them visualized an elephant differently based on what he touched.

InterAKT Online announced the release of MX AJAX Toolbox. This Dreamweaver extension empowers web developers and designers to build AJAX sites. You can now integrate AJAX controls and widgets into your existing projects or build complete AJAX sites from scratch.

While a large Flex application is loaded, the user may experience unpleasant delays, which can be used productively to logon to this application. Besides, it'll give the user perception that your application loads faster.

We are finishing writing our book on RIA with Flex and Java , and the last chapter is called 'Integration with External Applications'. It's sixty five pages of some advanced read. After writing this chapter one of us suggested that it would be easier to re-write Excel from scratch. It's not straightforward coding, but the results are good. After covering some basics about ExternalInterface and how it enables bi-directional communications between JavaScript inside HTML page and embedded Flex application, this chapter leads you through jungles of Flash technologies such as External API and LocalConnection as well as through maze of Microsoft old timers like ADODB and OWC. We have been coding in VBA, JavaScript, XSLT, not to mention the ActionScript, of course.