According to Adobe's senior technical evangelist and AJAXWorld 2006 veteran Christophe Coenraets, we're seeing today the first steps of the industry's journey down a path towards 'high definition' user interfaces. 'Real time data, in-context collaboration, vector graphics-powered expressiveness, rich media integration, and offline capabilities will soon become standard attributes of any client application,' says Coenraets.

Integration New Media, Inc. and Really Strategies Inc. announced a new joint white paper, entitled NIMAS: An Opportunity for Educational Publishers. This free white paper provides educational publishers with an overview of the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS), an explanation of how NIMAS applies to them, and a summary of the new opportunities it creates.

Event-driven programming model offers an excellent architecture based on loosely-coupled components consuming and throwing events. In this tutorial I'll show how to design component that communicate with each other via events.

Pop quiz: what company both doubled its annual revenue in 2006 and closed a $26.25 million round of funding? Clue: it also tracked 290,000 downloads of its RIA platform and lined up IBM, Walmart.com, H&R Block, Monster, Barclays Global and Pandora as customers. Extra clue: it also announced project 'Orbit' which will allow developers using its platform to compile into Java Mobile and run it on devices.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) services today are going mainstream. Corporate executives and individuals at home are demanding access to many of the same GIS capabilities previously used only by engineers, geologists, and government officials.

This is a checklist of items you need for an all-encompassing personal branding strategy. Personal branding is the process of marketing and selling yourself as a brand in order to gain success in business. Personal branding is a continual process just as knowing yourself is a continual process. As you grow, so does your brand. The need for personal branding arises from the fact that globalization has increased competition in the workplace. As the wheat is separated from the chaff, if you are left standing, you are left standing with others of good caliber. The playing field is now that much more challenging since your competition is as good as, or better, than you.

Cynergy Systems delivers Web, RIA and Legacy Migration solutions to over 1,400 customers worldwide. Maintaining offices across three continents and leveraging over a decade of experience, Cynergy Systems focuses on the delivery of rich, powerful business applications to customers across dozens of verticals including Healthcare, Manufacturing, Banking, and Governmental Organizations. Partners include Adobe, Microsoft, Sybase, Percussion Software and Jive Software.For more information, visit www.cynergysystems.com.

'With Flex 2.0 and Flash Player 8.5, we can finally deliver the kinds of rich applications our clients demand without compromise. That's Web 2.0!' With these words, a VP at Cynergy Systems today gave his ringing endorsement of the Adobe Flex 2.0 product line and Adobe Flash Player 8.5.

As the biggest-ever i-Technology event devoted specifically to AJAX-compatible Rich Internet Application technologies, it is hardly surprising that AJAXWorld Conference 2007 had an entire track devoted to Flex.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) describe what the software development community aims to do; break out of primitive Web delivery to deliver robust functionality, exciting data visualization and 'thicker,' role-based and process-oriented user interfaces. These types of RIAs are now possible.

The Adobe Engagement Platform enables great experiences through the following key elements. Cross-platform, cross-browser, cross-device clients, a composite-driven programming model, and server frameworks and tools that accelerate the development of compelling applications. Adobe Flex, part of the Engagement Platform, is a complete application development solution for creating cross-platform rich Internet applications. And by combining the best of AJAX and Flex, developers can now build next generation expressive, interactive applications that include vector graphics, audio, video, and charting.

In XML, namespaces are used to avoid potential naming conflicts with other components having the same names. Flex also has namespaces. Familiarity with Soprano family is a pre-requisite for reading this article.

My goals here are to integrate www.adobe.com/ products/flash/ Flash with www.adobe.com/produc ts/flex/ Flex, i.e. not just treat it as a design asset tool, but as a contributor to the functionality of the client; using Flash for enhancing the design, and helping reduce transition code which tends to be verbose in Flex.

SYS-CON Events (www.sys-c on.com)announced today that AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 East(www.ajaxworld.com), which will take place on March 19-21, 2007, will attract over 1,000 developers, architects, IT managers, and software professionals of every stripe who will be converging in New York City toattend the most comprehensive meeting on the most significant technology subjects of recent times: AJAX, Rich Internet Apps & Web 2.0.

At the end of each year, when SYS-CON informally polls its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors, our question is always the same: where's the industry going next year?

Andrew Trice, co-author of Flex 2 articles on Adobe's Developer Center, maintains a blog at http: //www.cynergysystems.com/ blogs/page/andrewtrice in which he helps orient newbies and experts alike about Flex. Web Developer's & Designer's Journal is pleased here to bring a sampler of some of his more recent shared insights.

Many people are confused about the relationship between Flash, Flex and AJAX. It's a bit tricky, because in many cases the three technologies are similar to each other: all three allow web developers to add dynamic elements to static web pages very easily. Flex and Flash are both delivered via the Flash Player (normally used as a plugin to browsers), AJAX applications are delivered via the browser. AJAX is written with JavaScript, XML and HTML components, Flex applications are written with ActionScript, XML and MXML components.

I can't wait to get started.' The sentiment struck me pretty hard as I struggled to get some sleep on a packed red-eye flight leaving Las Vegas at 11 o'clock at night.

What I love about Adobe Flex is that it is a framework in addition to a pretty impressive library of off-the-shelf controls, which can fit the bill for many of the Rich Internet Applications. Flex enables you to create new and extend existing components with a simplicity and elegance hardly ever offered by other GUI development systems. In this article I'll show you how to start extending a standard ComboBox component, which is a combination of edit field, button and a dropdown list. We will be customizing the API and adding some new functionality, making our ComboBox a bit handier than a standard one.

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It's not a single technology, but rather a combination of different technologies that are used to create a Rich Internet Application feel. You've probably seen examples of this kind of application. Google uses AJAX a lot on such services as maps.google.com. After bringing up a location, you can click and drag the map, zoom in or out, or even bring up directions to and from the location. All this is done without any screen refreshes. You have to admit that the interface is pretty sweet. (Note: Yahoo has a similar mapping application, built entirely in Flex at http://maps.yahoo.com/bet a.)

On November 7 at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, we announced that Adobe is contributing source code for the latest ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2) to the Mozilla Foundation. AVM2, the new scripting language engine for ActionScript 3.0 introduced with Flash Player 9, was designed to deliver the performance and features to support the needs of rich Internet application developers. The new open source project, known as Tamarin, will be hosted at mozilla.org (www.mozil la.org/projects/tamarin/) and contributions will be managed by a governing body of developers from Adobe and Mozilla.

SWFAddress is a new open source project that provides deep linking and search engine indexing for Flash Websites and applications. In other words, it enables the Back, Forward, and Reload buttons of the browser and creates unique URLs that can be sent over e-mail or IM. Recently it reached version 1.0 and quickly gained the attention of top design agencies and interactive developers. SWFAddress started as a small experiment that aimed to enhance a typical Flash Website by presenting the portfolio of a fellow photographer. It adopted all the best practices available on the Internet and became one of the best solutions among the growing number of similar libraries.

Is XML overrated? This is a question not asked lightly. It is a heavy and bloated question, much like XML itself. XML has been around since 1997. It is document based and it is extremely verbose. It requires a higher payload across the network and cannot be natively used once it arrives. The XML payload must be consumed in some fashion. None of these activities attribute to the speed of an application.

You know the drill: a language is called object-oriented if it supports inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism. And what do we do with interfaces?

Taconite is a framework that simplifies the creation of AJAX-enabled Web applications. It's a very lightweight framework that automates the tedious tasks related to AJAX development, such as the creation and management of the XMLHttpRequest object and the creation of dynamic content. Taconite can be used with all modern Web browsers (Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera, and Konqueror, to name a few) and can be used with any server-side technology, including Java EE, .NET, PHP, ColdFusion or any language that lets you return XHTML.

Adobe Flex and Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX (previously code-named ?Atlas?) were rated tops in security when rated by users of these popular languages, according to Evans Data Corporation's newly released 2007 Scripting Languages - Developers Choice Report. The research is based on developers ranking scripting languages that they use across thirteen distinct attributes.

In this AJAXWorld Conference & Expo session (March 19-21, in New York City), attendees will learn how Apollo will allow you to take your existing AJAX applications into the desktop. Install AJAX apps and give them online/offline capabilities, offline storage, chrome-less windows, and best of all, they work cross-platform - on Windows and Macs.

Visible Measures, the Rich Internet Application Analytics Company, officially launched the release of Visible Measures 2.0, with full support for AJAX application usage analytics. Visible Measures products provide solutions that capture and manage detailed application feature usage and associated error information for traditional, Web, and Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

In the July 2006 issue of CFDJ, I wrote about the Directory Watcher event gateway, and how easy it was to set up and how powerful a tool it could be for managing files and external interfaces. While this is true, there are some potential hazards waiting for the unsuspecting developer who jumps into DW waters without a life preserver.

Even though I write for SYS-CON, I've never publicly complimented them. But this time they really deserve a credit. SYS-CON will present the AJAXWorld 2007 Conference & Expo 2007 East in March. Usually, attendees have very limited access to speakers during conferences, and SYS-CON Events came out with a simple but smart idea - yesterday they have created an Ask The Faculty Forum, where anyone can post questions to the conference speakers and faculty. And you do not even have to attend the conference to participate in this forum. It's a very nice idea, or rather 'Idea 2.0' Speakers should visit the forum and answer the questions to promote their sessions, and software developers will have a chance to correspond with well known people in the industry. Yours truly will run Adobe Flex Hands-on Workshop during this event, so feel free to post relevant questions - it does not matter if you are planning to be there or not. I'm sure, other event organizers will start copycatting SYS-CON, which is a win-win situation for everyone.

VeriSign and Adobe Systems yesterday announced their intent to collaborate on integrating Adobe Flash technologies with VeriSign's peer-assisted content distribution technology. The first phase of the expected collaboration consists of VeriSign incorporating Adobe Flash Media Server 2 into its new globally-deployed Intelligent Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Just as 2006 was the year of streaming video and the birth of 'Internet TV,' 2007 is going to be the move beyond infancy toward the long-awaited and complete convergence of television and the Internet. Now that broadband is available to more than100 million households worldwide, every corporate Website and every media company will now provide video content, not to mention live and interactive video Webinars and on-demand Webcasts, in order to remain competitive.

During Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' keynote address yesterday at the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), he announced a new solution that will bring together two of Microsoft's leading entertainment products: the Xbox 360 gaming console and the Microsoft TV IPTV Edition software platform.

Understanding the complexity of AJAX at the browser level is critical to refining and debugging rich AJAX applications that leverage Web technologies such as JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and XMLHttpRequests. Adding a third-party AJAX runtime heightens the complexity and sufficient browser tooling becomes critical when attempting to build a rich Internet application around existing libraries. The Eclipse AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) provides both a multi-faceted set of browser tooling features as well as support for integrating and building on existing AJAX runtimes.

This is a part two of the prior blog where I described how to get data from JSP to Flex. This time we'll send data from a Flex application played by Flash Player to a Java Server Page. In the next version of our Flex-JSP application I'll show you how to post data from a Flex form to JSP. We'll place a simple form under the data grid above to enter the data about the new employee as in Figure below. Pressing the button Add Employee will submit the entered data to the JSP, which will attach them to existing employees and return back so the data grid will be repopulated to include the newly inserted employee.

One of the many hotly contested items about ColdFusion in recent times that some developers have been clamoring for are the addition of interfaces to ColdFusion Components as part of the standard CFML language. At one time I was definitely in this camp myself - interfaces would indeed be a good way to make sure that components follow a given contract.

At the end of each year, when SYS-CON informally polls its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors, our question is always the same: where's the industry going next year?

As the Web develops, the need for easy and efficient Web site and portal management increases. Developing an easy-to-use future-proof content management system (CMS) from scratch isn't easy. The basic functionalities can be assembled in a reasonable timeframe, meaning that you will be able to edit the structure and the content of the Web site.

Adobe staged its MAX 2006 developer and customer conference under the theme 'Beyond Boundaries' to showcase the company's emerging technologies and provide a glimpse of future innovations. Adrian Bridgwater attended to drink it all in.

All applications, simple or complex, online or desktop, are composed of many elements: screens, forms, menus, etc. In a Rich Internet Application, those elements can also include video, audio, or images. From the programmer's standpoint, it would be great to be able to reuse those parts so that they can be incorporated into different places of the application, or in different applications, using the same component.