It sometimes feels like the Flash community isn't on top of the changes that are taking place in the greater web. It took months for Flashers to start adding themselves to Twitter, for example (and I wasn't a very early adopter myself!) It's almost as if we're a little too preoccupied with our own little (ok, growing) world to see what else is happening around us. This is, admittedly, an easy enough position to find yourself in given how fast the Flash platform is currently expanding. However, excuses aside, we have a lot to learn from non-Flash developers and it's a good idea to keep a finger on the pulse of the greater web.

'Don't talk to strangers' may sound like the advice your mother used to give you as a child, but as is so often the case, mother knows best. As we'll soon see, 'don't talk to strangers' or 'only talk to your friends' is advice that can apply to programming as well. In programming terms, this general concept is known as the Law of Demeter, and it's a great programming practice that facilitates a reduction in coupling between objects in object-oriented applications.

One of the many features available in Flex 2.0 is a ResourceBundle class, which allows for a standardized approach for internationalizing applications. Many recent projects of mine have required that applications be built that can easily be ported to other languages. Traditionally, I've used a series of XML files for this, one for each of the various languages that need to be supported. This strategy is still viable, and I still use it on some of my projects. However, I've recently discovered a different approach, which is available natively in Flex.

Adobe senior product manager Craig Barberick told SYS-CON's Web Developer's & Designer's Journal that 'this is really an extension of the Flash Video ecosystem. Up to this point, we did not have a tool that allows Flash Video players to play on their desktops or offline. (With the Adobe Media Player) flash video playback tool, users on a plane or train, for example, can still view Flash Video content locally on my machine.'

Several months ago I posted some articles on my blog about Flex 2 components and accessing/modifying their BitmapData. In one example, I sent the BitmapData to the server and saved it as a JPG file, and I've been asked numerous times since... 'How did you do that?' It's surprisingly easy to do once you understand the concepts involved. There are four ways to get binary data from the Flex application back to your server: AMF3 (RemoteObject), Web Services, HTTP Services, or through a Socket connection. In this article I'll cover the first three topics as they pertain to Flex 2; Socket connectivity could take an article all by itself.

Hot Banana Software, Inc. (www.hotbanana.com), a leader in Web content management for marketing, announces a new white paper from The Gilbane Group that explains how marketers benefit from utilizing a Web CMS-driven eMarketing platform to deliver tangible ROI on marketing investments.

JavaOne starts next week, and most of the Java developers will be watching closely what's new and exciting will be announced in the tried, true and aging Java. But my today's column is about books that will be sold at JavaOne. Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex & Java. We spent a year writing this advanced book, and I'm pretty pleased with the result this is not one of these shallow books that repeat API descriptions of vendors manuals. In this book we are sharing how to design and build rich Internet enterprise applications in an object-oriented way with such great and complimentary technologies as Flex and J2EE. You can get this book at the booth of SYS-CON Media.

Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP), an Internet solutions provider of choice for the world?s elite businesses, today announced ExpertVillage.com, an online resource offering more than 15,000 free, on-demand instructional videos, has adopted Internap?s VitalStream content delivery network (CDN) and proprietary ad-insertion technology. Enabling global scalability and rich-media content monetization, these technologies empower ExpertVillage.com to generate revenue through in-stream, contextual advertisements, while supporting its rich-media streaming and e-commerce needs.

CFDynamics, a ColdFusion Web hosting company, has announced their Spring Server Spectacular. The Spring Server Spectacular is an opportunity for the company to offer top-of-the-line dedicated servers at a discounted cost to encourage customers to expand their services. The Spring Server Spectacular officially begins on May 1 and will run through the end of May. Those who sign up for a dedicated server in that time period can expect to see significant savings and no long term contracts.

Adobe has announced that a large portion of the next version of Flex goes open source under Mozilla Public License (MPL). Here's the partial list of what becomes open: mxml, compc, and ActionScript compiler, command line debugger FDB, Flex framework and RPC libraries and testing infrastructure.

Most Flex developers have seen and used the [Bindable] tag but not many know what this tag does or even what it is. [Bindable] is what is known as a metadata tag. Metadata tags are special tags that are inserted in your source code that give the compiler information on how to compile the application. These tags aren't actually compiled into the generated SWF file but provide instructions on how the compiler should create the SWF. There are 12 documented metadata tags. This article will offer definitions of these metadata tags and give examples of their use. By the end of this article you will understand when and where to use metadata tags in your Flex 2 applications.

Development and Design are two sides of the same coin in the digital age, and it is very nice to consider in any case how well these two formerly separate worlds have come together over the past two decades. Adobe was at the forefront from the beginning, with its Postscript Fonts. Based on earlier work by Adobe co-founder John Warnock at Xerox PARC and Evans and Sutherland, Postscript was integral to the Apple LaserWriter, hooked to an Apple Macintosh, all announced in 1984.

Now there is simply no excuse for accidentally buying a DVD I already own. I will soon be entering my entire collection of DVDs into this new Flex 2 DVD library. From now on, I plan to check this library before heading out to the video store. For the final online version of this Web application, I've added search functionality so that as the library grows, it will still be easy to filter out and find the movies. I already have plans to port this Flex Web application to an Apollo desktop application in the coming weeks. If you would like to keep an eye on my progress, please visit my blog, www.flexination.info, when you have time. If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to ping me at the e-mail address listed with the article.

Small business owners and Web designers alike will benefit from eCart's complete integration into the Adobe platform through Dreamweaver and over-arching ease-of-use. Unlike hosted eCommerce solutions, eCart is easily incorporated into existing site designs for an unmatched personalized storefront. The redesigned user interface and new checkout wizard bring the advanced functionality of eCommerce sites to the everyday Web professional.

On2 Technologies, Inc., , the leading provider of video compression software and solutions, and Kulabyte, a leading provider of advanced audio and video processing technologies, announced today a licensing agreement for On2 VP6 compression schemes for Live and On Demand encoding, used by Adobe(R) Flash(R) Player 8 and 9, to Kulabyte for its Professional Encoding Suite. The new solution will be unveiled at the upcoming NAB convention held in Las Vegas from April 16-19, 2007.

Automatic Sync Technologies (AST) today announced its CaptionSync automated captioning system now delivers XML caption output for the Adobe Flash CS3 captioning component. This will allow organizations to bring their Flash video into accessibility compliance faster, more affordably, and easier than ever before. This caption output is available immediately at no additional cost to AST users.

Already, even in pre-release, Adobe's Spry seemed to catch the imagination of many Web professionals wrestling with how to integrate new AJAX frameworks into existing workflows. Created with designers in mind, Spry uses regular HTML tags, CSS, and JavaScript, and is easy to use - boiling down to a couple of JavaScript libraries that you include in your Web page in order to be in a position to add dynamic interactive content to your site.

Total Training(TM), Inc., a pioneer in engaging and innovative video-based training, today announced five new DVD-ROM based training series: Total Training for Adobe(R) Photoshop(R) CS3 Extended: Essentials, Total Training for Adobe Illustrator(R) CS3: Essentials, Total Training for Adobe Flash(R) CS3 Professional: Essentials, Total Training for Adobe InDesign(R) CS3: Essentials, and Total Training for Adobe Dreamweaver(R) CS3: Essentials.

Strata, the company adding the power of 3D to the designer's toolset, announced today three new plug-ins for Adobe(R) Systems' Photoshop(R) CS3 Extended software. Each of these 3D[in] plug-ins will be priced at less than $149 and will ship spring of this year.

A couple of weeks ago I stopped by at our publisher's offices (SYS-CON Media) and they showed me our Flex book with the correct cover, but all pages were blank. Yesterday, I've got an email from them with the words, 'Yakov your book is ready, stop by and pick it up'. The guys from production department are really nice, so they've attached this video just to show me that the book is really really finally super-duper ready. Check this out (the video file is large though).

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced that the first public alpha version of Apollo is now available for developers on Adobe Labs. Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system application runtime that allows web developers to leverage their existing skills in HTML, JavaScript and Ajax, as well as Adobe® Flash® and Adobe Flex? software to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the desktop. Apollo combines the reach of Internet technologies with the richness of desktop applications, working seamlessly across operating systems and outside the browser to deliver a more consistent and engaging user experience. The alpha version of the Apollo application runtime and the Apollo Software Developer?s Kit (SDK) can be downloaded for free from www.adobe.com/go/apollo .

e frontier, (http://www.e -frontier.com/), a leader in graphics and animation software, today announced that they will offer for download, a free exporter for Poser 7 that will allow Poser 3D content to be imported into the 3D layer of the new Photoshop CS3 Extended software.

Are your colors cool? Do you wish they were cooler? Adobe believes there is power in color. Their new web solution, Kuler, is a clear demonstration of this. In this article, you will find out how to use Kuler to create, share and rate color themes.

Paravue(R) Inc., today announced Turbo Mask(TM), an image masking tool designed for graphic and web designers, photographers, and motion graphic artists that work with Adobe Photoshop CS and Photoshop CS Extended. Most image masking tools rely on skill to get the desired results. Turbo Mask works like human eyes to pick out the important subject in an image. Leveraging the Paravue technology, Turbo Mask understands images like people do and can isolate subjects and remove them from backgrounds accurately -- often with just one click. With Turbo Mask, digital artists can focus more on creativity and less on time-consuming cutouts.

A noted Flex Evangelist from Adobe has published a list of top dozen of consulting firms that offer application development using Adobe Flex. Farata Systems is one of the firms that made this Flex honor roll. This company is run by experts who put lost of efforts into studying Flex Framework - they've spent time going deep under the Flex skin, learning its source code to make sure they can offer the most efficient solutions to their customers. The fact that Flex is a well designed extensible framework has allowed them to start building their own components and plugins that dramatically improved their team's productivity while working on the enterprise applications with Flex and Java, and this week they are going to offer Beta version of some of these components at myflex.org.

Amyuni Technologies launches v3.0 of its PDF Converter, PDF Creator and PDF Suite products. All products are now Microsoft Vista compatible, with full support for both PDF and XPS and offere extremely accurate conversion of any type of document into PDF and XPS, the company says.

Farata Systems has announced a strategic partnership with Midnight Coders to offer Web reporting and data-bound components and services that can be used in Flex, Flash and Ajax-based rich Internet applications. 'This partnership is an important step in improving productivity and time-to-market of rich Internet applications?, says Victor Rasputnis, Managing Director of Farata Systems. ?With FlexBI your end users do not depend on IT to tailor business reports the way they want them to be. With DAOFlex, IT folks do not have to write a single operator to create a complete CRUD application. Now we?ll give our customers a server deployment freedom they deserve ? to choose between Java, .Net, PHP and Ruby.'

Since our last issue, several events have transpired that have significant impact for ColdFusion developers. I have been keeping my eye on several trends and have been evaluating whether or not they deserve focus in ColdFusion Developer's Journal. I've begun blogging about these trends and about my observations and ideas regarding these trends and the future of CFDJ.

This article looks at an easy portal infrastructure that's based on a Flex-based portal container and portlets (individual Web applications) deployed as Flex modules. This portal framework provides full support for AJAX-type message processing with a very efficient deployment of portlets and manages the portlets so that they can logically connect to any Web application, freeing developers from routing to J2EE/.NET portal frameworks.

ColdFusion, BlueDragon, Coral Web Builder, IgniteFusion, and Railo. All are CFML engines, but none of them support the same implementation of CFML as each other. This, in the long run, is not a good thing. Up front, I am not opposed to other CFML engines. Yes, I use only ColdFusion in production environments, but I have played around a with BlueDragon and other CFML engines. That being said, I feel that we need a common CFML base from which to base all CFML engines; a CFML core, if you will.

Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced the Adobe Creative Suite 3 product line, an offering of tightly integrated design and development tools for every creative workflow. Adobe?s new Creative Suite 3 line-up unites the best of Adobe and Macromedia product innovation to provide designers and developers with a broad spectrum of creative options for all facets of print, Web, mobile, interactive, film, and video production.

Farata Systems, a leading provider of Flex and Java services and components has announced availability of the Alpha version of the first community site www.myflex.org that will become a repository for commercial Flex components and Eclipse plugins developed by independent vendors.

'It takes a village,' said Cynergy VP Dave Wolf this morning at AJAXWorld 2007 East, 'to build an engineering team capable of writing world-class Rich Internet Applications.' You cannot create the right atmosphere in a 'cubicle farm,' he contends. And Cynergy walks the talk, and walks the walk, with no individual offices, large spacious office environments, and a commitment to keeping its staffers energized and creative, more like an ad agency than a development shop.

Can a Flex programmatic skin draw text? The short answer is, yes! The longer answer is, it's a little tricky. Let me break it down. First of all, in Flash, the only way to draw text is with a TextField. Flex can't do anything about that, so any Flex class that wants to draw text has to do it using a TextField.

Bluestreak Technology, Inc., the developer of the award-winning MachBlue(TM) platform for mobile phones and digital television, announced today that MachBlue Mobile will be commercially available for J2ME-compatible mobile phones.

This article describes a basic method for indexing and searching images and digital photographs based on color using ColdFusion and CFImageHistogram (www .leavethatthingalone.com/ projects/cfhistogram/). This method indexes and searches color in images quickly using ColdFusion.

The key to successful build management in distributed environments is a foundational commitment to consistency, repeatability and portability. This is just as true for small, homogeneous development environments using in-house, scripted build systems, as it is for large, complex environments, where a new class of non-scripted, distributed build-management tools are now available.

Hot Banana Software, Inc. (www.hotbanana.com), a leader in Web content management for marketing, today announced that it has launched Version 5.5, which takes Web CMS to the next level by integrating Web site optimization and marketing automation features. The company also made significant changes to its SaaS and licensed pricing, squarely focusing on small-to-midsize marketers.

While recently channel surfing, one of the 'Geico caveman' commercials came on the tube to remind me that Geico.com is so easy to use, even a caveman can do it. Plenty of ColdFusion developers are not what some people might call 'real programmers.' This is not necessarily a reflection on the platform; I've met plenty of Java and .NET developers who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag either. The very idea that someone is 'not a real developer' is ridiculous. You're either a developer or you're not. If you get the job done and you do it fast and well, I don't care what you wrote it in - even if you are a caveman.

With the onslaught of excitement around AJAX and RIAs, incredible user interfaces that engage users in a passionate and sticky experience is paramount. Creating these experiences requires much more than just great developers or creative designers. It takes both sides working together in a very disciplined and choreographed workflow that empowers designers to create world class interfaces and enables developers to implement those interfaces to create rich and engaging experiences quickly and efficiently. The designer to developer workflow is the focus of the major players in RIA and will be the defining area that decides whether your RIA development succeeds or fails. Come hear from the industry?s experts in RIA design and development about approaches, experiences and lessons learned.