AdvancedED Flex Application Development offers a well written extended case study on the details of developing the Rich Media Exchange (RMX). The RMX was built using Adobe Flex and numerous OpenSource tools (i.e. Drupal, OpenAds). Now straight off any book that talks about Drupal and Flex is going to get my attention.

There is a lot of informed and intelligent debate around Cairngorm and it's dependance on "Singletons". We have been using Cairngorm for the last six months and while we are aware of it's faults we also feel that it offers many benefits. It's not my intention here to get involved in an argument about it's strengths and weaknesses, I've made a few posts touching on this already.

Borland has released Silk 2008.  The first update to it's automated testing tool in over 2 years.  For this release they have rebuilt the products architecture to make it more flexible and to allow it to support applications it hasn't traditionally supported.  A significant element of this release is the ability to test Flex and AJAX applications and the use of Flex for application development.

Adobe have released the Actionscript Reference for RIA Development.  This free pdf provides an alphabetical reference for all native Actionscipt API's for Flash, AIR and Flex.  The reference is very clearly laid out making it very easy to identify the relevant platform for each API as well as available properties, methods, interfaces and superclass.

In my last post I mentioned that the must have feature for me in Flex 3 is the module optimization. So one of the first things I did this morning after installing Flex Builder 3 was to re-publish an existing project using this feature. This project uses 25 modules to manage the various elements of the system.

This is the obligatory post for everyone who breathes, blogs and uses Flex : Flex 3 has been released. You This is an exciting new release of Adobe's RIA juggernaut. From my perspective it is a must have release just for the module optimization features. But there are no shortage of great features to make our lives easier. You can find a full list of features with some videos here.

Added 18/01/08 : Demand for this event has out stripped expectations and the number of registered attendees has exceeded the venues capacity. If you registered prior to this addition then you should receive an invitation confirming you've registration and providing venue details. Last week I posted regarding the possibility of Danny Dura coming to Melbourne for a Flex 3/AIR Pre-release event.

There is a good chance that Danny Dura , an Adobe Platform Evangelist from Adobe U.S.A, will be coming to Melbourne for a Flex/AIR presentation on the evening of Tuesday the 29th of January, 2008. This is an excellent opportunity for developers keen to find out more about Flex and AIR and for existing Flex developers to get some pre-release insights into Flex 3.

Ted Patrick has posted a very frank and thoughtful post discussing the reasons why Yahoo has moved from Flex to AJAX for the latest version of Yahoo Maps. To summarize he identifies 3 main reasons for the shift : Shortage of Flex developersProblems integrating Flash advertising into Flex applicationsComplexity of migrating from Flex 1.5 to Flex 2.

There has been no shortage of hype about Microsoft's Silverlight during 2007. But I was playing around with Google Trends the other day and started wondering how well the hype translated into user interest. The graph shows the relative number of Google searches on the terms Flex and Silverlight.