O’Reilly and Adobe have teamed up to create an invaluable online community for RIA developers. This new project will provide up-to-date information on the ever-changing state of design and development in the Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) space.

Rich Tretola will be championing the effort for InsideRIA as the Community Manager.

Show your support so we can make InsideRIA the number one place on the Internet for Rich Internet Application resources and information.

I added a simple JSON decoding class to the ActionScript 3 source code page of my blog today. This is a useful base class which you can extend to use a JSON object as a data source.

The JSONDecoder class defines a simple set of methods for loading a JSON encoded object from a specific URI, decoding the result into an ArrayCollection of ActionScript Objects, and displaying any errors that may occur.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) objects are a lightweight data-interchange format which are very useful due to the fact that they are language independent. JSON objects are simple objects comprised of name / value pairs which are easy to use with any language such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, ActionScript etc.

Adobe released the updated FAQ for Apollo last week. If you are not familiar with Apollo, it is a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe. Apollo aplications can be developed using either the Flex framework, Flex Builder, Flash 9, or html and Javascript. It is a standalone runtime that dows not require a browser.

To learn more about this revolutionary runtime from Adobe read the FAQ: http://labs.adobe.com/

In order to build and debug an RIA or web application which utilizes external data sources such as web services, xml etc, a good, quality network monitor is needed. Flex 1.5 had a built in Network Monitor that could easily be accessed in the Flex 1.5 IDE. However I have yet to find the same functionality available in Flex 2.0

At my day job I am building applications in Flex 2.0 / ActionScript 3.0 and although there are some good debugging tools available I have found that there seems to be a lack of an easy to use Network Monitor.

I have been using Charles, a great Network Debugger which is capable of displaying soap messages. xml, AMF, and various other HTTP protocols in an easy to view fashion. This type of HTTP monitoring is crucial to anyone who is building RIA’s with Flex 2.0

Check it out at http://xk72.com/charles/