RIA Ideas?

[CDHBookingEdge]

I know the projects section has been closed but I thought I'd throw something(s) out. Flex and Flash and such are more being used to, or positioned to be used to, create RIA's (Rich Internet Applications). I was wondering if anyone had any ideas to throw out there. Maybe some of you have already done some and would like to share the look or ideas of them.

Here's an idea or two of mine, just to start things off.
1) An Intranet in Flex/Flash
2) An employee start up screen.

Essentially in my mind what I'm seeing is that Adobe/MM is trying to set things up so they can grab more commercial business (for good or bad) and we've got our tool/toy to use to go that way. There are new paradigms that can be used based on the new tools available but also we must not forget the old paradigms and the ways that commercial users are used to dealing with programs.

Who knows some of these ideas might turn into group projects or personal projects or something that people would like to institute in their own organizations.

I'll shut up now:o Just throwing out some ideas to generate some other ideas.

Christopher

[outlando]

More than half of my development time over the last 12 months has been working on a RIA for my work.

We run the maintenance contract for a major UK retailer, and I have developed the app to reference information on the shops (about 1200 nationwide) and their respective maintenance contacts.

The data is stored in XML, and is fully updateable using a built-in PHP module.

The app is now in version 5. Up until version 3 I was using the components supplied with Flash, but eventually found that using bespoke code to run the search function was leaner and quicker. Plus I don't like the way the components look, and skinning them was too much of a PIA!

The app has been a success with the user group, they all use it regularly, and have commented that it's refreshing to use an application which doesn't look exactly the same as all the others you see.

[CDHBookingEdge]

"refreshing to use an application which doesn't look exactly the same as all the others you see" Just wondering. Did they mean that it didn't look like a "website" or didn't look like the programs they were running from their computers? Sounds like a pretty cool program overall.

Christopher

[outlando]

I guess they meant doesn't look like a client-based program like Word/etc. Here's a screenshot.

[CDHBookingEdge]

I thought so. In my mind there needs to be a kind of balancing act between "making it look new and enticing" and "making it built on tasks they are familiar with doing." Dealing with something that looks nice and different always kinds of juices up the user a bit. But there needs to be some basic principles that their used to seeing in programs so they don't have such a large scale of "unlearn and relearn" to accomplish. Looks like you did that there.

Christopher

[tg]

build a simple time / project tracking system. if you can do it so it has built in reporting tools also, you will have a full time job.

[outlando]

I remember that the Macromedia site had a timesheet application tutorial, that might be something worth running through if you're looking for practise?

[CDHBookingEdge]

What I was thinking of was a nice startup screen that would allow the user (based on "who they were" in other words their title or job description or such and also based on allowing some personal configurabilty) to have a starting point, a launching point. It would hold things that they use quite often. In my mind I was thinking of a look somewhat akin to the OpenLaszlo dashboard demo, (not pushing Lazlo, LOL just saw the demo and liked the look of it.) but many different UI options of course are available. In fact it could provide some means of personal configurability as far as UI. By that I mean this: Some people prefer tabs, some would prefer the "bars" like are used in the demo or the ones in outlooks navigation thread. That's really just a small sampling of UI configurability.

But anyway, this could/would have links to the project tracking system (maybe a small calendrical todo list or such, with a button to launch the bigger project tracking system.) and something as far as a timesheet quite possibly as well. Also, let's say the person is in the Accounting department. There could be a Zone (to use the ASP.NET 2.0 terminology) on the startup screen and could have bars that represented AR, AP, Payroll, etc. based on their position.

I think you get the idea. Sorry for droning on, just something my mind was (pardon the puns) flashing on for a moment.

Oh thought I'd say it here then I'll let others know as it doesn't seem to be in here. It looks like Adobe has started their own kind of SourceForge. It's called RIAForge and here's the URL http://www.riaforge.org/

Regards,
Christopher

[CDHBookingEdge]

I was sitting here in the morning futzing around with some stuff and had this thought. Ok we're talking about RIAs, so what about FlexBuilder as an RIA?

Now let's not talk about the underlying "engine" at the moment. Lets look at it from a user interface perspective. You'd have to have a menu and toolbar area (The applicationControlBar should take care of the toolbar right?) This toolbar area would have to allow for multiple toolbars to be put in and arranged. The views would have to be movable and dockable thru drag and drop. And they would have to have certain predefined usercontrols based on the type of view and such.

I'm not in any way saying that Flex couldn't handle it I'm just saying that these types of items would be used in lots of other applications as well. So these types of reuseable components would be good to have in any RIA developers toolbelt.

Christopher

[jsebrech]

If you're looking for a free set of components, and the layout tools for those components, take a look at aswing. It's a port of java swing to AS.

[CDHBookingEdge]

First off thanks Joeri, for your lead. I found the link to AsWing (http://www.aswing.org/display/AsWing/Home) and am checking that out. I also saw the post you made in Components that had a link to the UI Component Framework Comparison Table (http://osflash.org/components) and am taking a look at that too.

So here's something to throw out to you "guys". What do you feel are the things needed as far as frameworks/toolkits/components/etc to effectively build RIAs? I know that's a quite open ended question and in a large way I meant to make it open ended. Though I will say that I'm thinking at this point on a more UI perspective.

This is not a question I'm not asking myself LOL so don't feel I'm being lazy. Just seeing what input is out there. I come from a long time in a Windows and heavily Microsoft house, so I do have my biases. But I'm as willing to give them up as to admit to them.

That's all for now,
Christopher

[CDHBookingEdge]

I've been taking a look at this (amidst doing many many other things LOL) and I've been focusing on the Flex 2 aspect of it.

The first thing noted as "lacking" in Flex 2 is "Dialog" now wouldn't TitleWindow and the PopupManager make that an incorrect statement?

Next is "layout can be changed". Now I guess my first (maybe stupid) reaction to that is: What do they mean by that? Is this what I've been thinking about in my head, where the user is able to move views around and dock them and float them and such?

That seems to be all out of the list that's "missing" and if I'm missing anything let me know.

I'm going to try and get some stuff going on my weblog (http://cdhbookingedge.wordpress.com/)on RIA development and all this is helping. And I hope it's helping and/or will help others.

Christopher

[CDHBookingEdge]

I thought I'd let you know that they've just put up a Flex Scheduling Framework (http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_Scheduling_Framework) on Adobe Labs.

Christopher

[CDHBookingEdge]

Lemme give two examples of it in the "C# World" first off there's the way the VS 2005 can take a database and generate stongly typed data classes for it. Also Marc Clifton has a nice article (http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/declarativeclassgenerator.asp)and sample code where given an XML file classes are generated for it.

Is there something out there already?
Am I missing something important here and there's no real need for it?

Maybe it's just me but the data access stuff seems a bit disjointed. Maybe I'm just missing my "old buddy" ADO.

If I'm being stupid here and missing the whole boat. Feel free to tell me LOL.

Christopher

[jsebrech]

If you miss ADO so bad you can use ADOdb in server-side PHP to feed data to flash ;)

To effectively build RIA's you need an easily used and easily extended toolkit that allows to merge pre-toolkit code with it (meaning it should be able to provide movieclips for you to render stuff in). It should be themeable by non-programmers, it should be light-weight, and it should allow loading the parts of it as you need them on different frames. It's a bit of a tall order :)