Techniques

Creating and Accessing Pop-up Menus in AIR Applications with Flash CS4

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:00:00 EDT

Reading my previous AIR tutorials, you’ve worked with menus that are associated with tangible elements of your applications, such as the following: Context menus that are activated on objects on the stage Context menus associated with icons in the system tray or dock bar Menus associated with windows and menus of the application itself AIR applications also allow you to create pop- up menus . These are native menus like all the other ones you’ve seen so far—the only difference is that pop- up menus aren’t natively associated with any element on the interface of the application. It’s up to the developer to define and implement the logic and the way in which a pop- up menu can be activated

Creating Adobe AIR Native Menu with Flash CS4

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:00:00 EDT

Menus are an integral part of your life as a software user. You find them on the Web, in desktop applications, on your own operating system, and even on mobile devices like cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) . You often don’t realize how important menus are when you use them. It’s so obvious to have them that you only realize how important they are when they aren’t available. On the Web, you normally have menus regarding the browser, which allow you to access the content of the site you are using. You rarely have menus that give you access to the specific commands and functions of the website. However, things are changing slowly with the advent of Web 2.0 applications, and menus—not only browsing menus but those specifically related to the web application—are becoming more and more frequent. As Flash web developers, you have the following options to create menus for your applications: Adding items to the context menu provided by Flash Player Creating your own menus Both options work very well, but the option of using Flash Player’s context menu doesn’t give you much flexibility. The other option requires a substantial amount of time and effort to obtain valid results if you create the menus for your web application from scratch. When you develop Adobe AIR applications with Flash CS4, you don’t need to worry about how to offer advanced functions with a menu. The framework itself provides various solutions to choose from according to your needs. AIR implements two new classes that aren’t available for Flash Player in a web environment in the flash.display package : NativeMenu NativeMenuItem These classes allow you to create native system menus to use as application menus (on Mac OS X systems), window menus (on Windows systems), pop- up menus, and context menus.

Retrieving Data on a SQL Anywhere Server Using AJAX

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:36:00 EDT

AJAX has dominated the web space so extensively that it needs no introduction. Connecting to a server via XMLHttpRequest and making a partial page refresh is what makes this technique so attractive. However, use of these AJAX requests, although very attractive, can pose dangers as well. JavaScript acts as a vector to infect websites with worms, such as SAMY, using cross-site scripting, also known as CSS or XSS.

Reporting Portals: Tips from a Warehouse Shopper

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:00:00 EDT

Most of us have experienced warehouse shopping, which can be time-consuming, frustrating, and sometimes rewarding. Using this analogy, this article provides some guidelines for creating a reporting portal's UI, providing a no-pain, all-gain "customer" experience.

Deploying an ASP.NET AJAX RSS Reader on Linux

Thu, 22 May 2008 07:30:00 EDT

Have you ever wished you could run ASP.NET applications on Linux, without having to rewrite your code or leave the Visual Studio development environment? In this article, I show you how to port Steve Clements' AJAX ASP.NET RSS Reader to native Java and deploy it to Apache Tomcat on Linux. I also show you how to add an AnimationExtender and a HoverMenu from the AJAX Control Toolkit in Visual Studio, while targeting Java.

AJAX Testing - Best Practices

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:00:00 EST

This is truly the age of the browser interface. Internet Websites and Web applications increasingly offer rich, dynamic, browser-based user interfaces that deliver everything you expect from an installed desktop application. These applications deliver function and ease-of-use without requiring expensive desktop software installs.

JavaServer Faces and AJAX for Google Fans

Sat, 21 Oct 2006 19:45:00 EDT

This is our last article in a series of four that have been introducing the concepts of creating AJAX-enabled JavaServer Faces (JSF) components. In this article we are going to summarize and encapsulate the concepts that were introduced in the three previous articles starting with the 'Rich Internet Components with JavaServer Faces', and design a Google-like InputSuggest component.