I have been working on a new ThunderBay SaaS product for months now. And two of the myriad issues I have had to consider is that of user management and licensing and intellectual property protection (IPP). Now many people will argue that one should not protect source code as IP, but rather business processes as IP. When it comes to online Flex products, however, I could not disagree more![1] Do you know how ridiculously easy it is to reverse-engineer/decompile a Flex 3 application and its AVM byte code? Try it: simply use SWFDecompiler to open any SWF. Even if that .swf file has been optimized...

This approach to component development and architectures will change your perspective on Flex software development! Consider the myriad situations when you want to add sophisticated functionality like zoom, drag-n-drop, swapping, MDI window minimizing, etc. Instead of designing subclasses or building complex compositions of nested components, developers can create distinct behavior components. These behavior components are then dynamically attached to target components and inject functionality. I must admit that this software concept is not new. Consider the very popular JQuery UI Interactions....

While working at Ustrive2, Inc. I initiated some redesign efforts for the Sellit Administrator tools. Focused on creating a fantastic, rich user experience, The dev team [DanM, JesseF, MichaelF, and MikeC] used Fireworks CS4 to quickly iterate through several design prototypes and deliver designs that satisfied many complex feature requirements. One aspect of those designs was to create a sense of depth [and engage the user] by judiciously highlighting key components with lighting and reflections. Many of the resulting storyboard pages contained 2 or more components with reflections. Manually...

As Flex continues to grow as the choice RIA technology, many developers start investigating and apply Java design patterns to Flex implementations. Similar to Java Struts, Cairngorm is a MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework – endorsed by Adobe – that is widely popular within the community. One of issues that frequently confuses, blocks, or complicates Cairngorm implementations is the issue of “view notifications”. Every Cairngorm developer ask the following question at some point: How should the Cairngorm business layer best communicate with the Presentation layer?...

Recently, Eric Dolecki published a Flash 8 version of a very cool Elastic Cords flash application. I am sure he was – as I am – inspired by the works of Andre Michelle. This application, of course, does nothing commercially practical but does demonstrate great features of the FP8 API. I, of course, decided to continue that tradition. I wanted to create a Flex, object-oriented, component version… All too often I find great visual applications with great experiences… are more often created in Flash not Flex. And unfortunately, their code (if published) is usually procedural...