Flex is a very powerful and versatile technology for creating web application front-ends. But what every good web application needs is a robust data source, be it XML, or a database. Flex is very adaptable in terms of connecting to data sources, and that is the main focus of this book.

In Foundation Flex for Developers, Sas and Koen assume that you've got the basics of Flex down already, and explores in detail how to create professional data-centric Flex 2 and Flex 3 applications. In the first half of the book, she starts off with a brief exploration of Flex and ActionScript 3.0, before looking at application essentials in detail—creating custom components, user and web browser interactions, binding, formatting, and validating data, debugging, and more.

Video is one of the most exciting features on today's Internet, with widespread adoption being made possible by advances in bandwidth and software. But simply streaming video clips to Web users is only the tip of the iceberg! Flash CS3 offers a whole host of advanced video features, allowing you to create breathtaking user experiences.

And this book, the 2nd edition of the critically-acclaimed Foundation Flash 8 Video, shows you how to make the most of video in Flash CS3. The authors start with the basics of creating video ready for use on the web using popular applications such as Windows Movie Maker and iMovie, creating FLV (Flash video) using both Flash and other applications such as Sorenson Squeeze, and importing that video into Flash.

Develop your next generation web applications with the YUI JavaScript development library.

• Improve your coding and productivity with the YUI Library
• Gain a thorough understanding of the YUI tools
• Learn from detailed examples for common tasks
  

Learning the Yahoo! User Interface Library introduces the popular open-source YUI JavaScript library and takes the user through each of the fully released components in detail looking at the classes that make up each component and the properties and methods that can be used. It includes a series of practical examples to reinforce how each component should/can be used. Author Dan Wellman takes the reader from beginner to advanced-level YUI usage and understanding.

If you want to create exciting dynamic web sites that will amaze your online audience, then the Flash platform is a great way to go, with it's many features, including powerful graphical and sound and video capabilities. To really harness the power of Flash though, you need to make use of ActionScript to provide dynamic effects, enable user interaction, and manipulate data.

ActionScript 3.0, the latest version of the Flash Platform's scripting language, offers a lot of new and powerful features. ActionScript is now a full-fledged programming language, with complete object-oriented capabilities, improved event handling, sound and video support, drawing capabilities, support for regular expressions, and much more.

Flex is the quickest and most effective technology for the creation of Rich Internet Applications for the Web. Its extensive library of components and totally customizable framework, combined with the ubiquity of Flash Player, has guaranteed its success.

The ecosystem of products that rotate around Flex 2 and Flex 3 is really broad. Flex Builder, Flex SDK, and Charting Components are all essential parts of the technology that fit the different requirements of web development.

This enormous set of possibilities can easily lead to overload for developers like you. Theres just too much to learn and too many potential places to go when you hit a brick wall. Wouldnt it be nice to have a library of solutions to solve these problems quickly and easily?

The only real tool available for creating Rich Media Applications, web-based animations, and games has been Flash‚ until now! WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight have opened the door of Rich Media Application development to Microsoft .NET developers. With Microsoft's new Blend 2 and Visual Studio 2008, you can now create compelling Rich Media Applications complete with animations and even 3D!

Foundation Expression Blend 2: Building Applications in WPF and Silverlight book shows you how to take full advantage of Blend's new interface, together with and Silverlight's vastly improved designer-developer workflow, guiding you through every step of development from downloading and installing of the development environment through creating finished, functional projects. You'll learn how to create simple drawing applications with the InkCanvas, make tabbed and scrollable interfaces, as well as build fully featured media players, photo galleries, and interactive 3D designs.

All Flex applications look the same—a blue-gray background and silver-skinned components—right? That doesn't have to be the case, though. This book shows you how to ensure that your Flex 2 and 3 projects stand out from the crowd and provide your users with an application that is both visually stunning and beautifully functional.

Flex Builder coupled with the Adobe Creative Suite (CS3) is a powerful combination, providing all the tools you need to create compelling, vibrant interfaces. This book guides you through creating applications with Flex Builder, designing layouts in Fireworks, creating custom skins for your components in Photoshop and Illustrator, and using CSS to enhance the appearance of your rich Internet applications (RIAs).

In this book, you'll learn:

• to understand the OOP features of PHP clearly
• to write manageable code
• some of the most widely used Design Patterns in PHP
• Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern
• to create objects and defining their properties and methods
• to use the new MySQL API also known as MySQLi
• about the huge repository named the Standard PHP Library
• to design your own unit tests successfully by using PHPUnit
  

From the Back Cover

A mashup is a web page or application that combines data from two or more external online sources into an integrated experience. This book is your entryway to the world of mashups and Web 2.0. You will create PHP projects that grab data from one place on the Web, mix it up with relevant information from another place on the Web and present it in a single application. All the mashup applications used in the book are built upon free tools and are thoroughly explained. You will find all the source code used to build the mashups in the code download section on our website.

CodeIgniter (CI) is a powerful open-source PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. CodeIgniter is an MVC framework, similar in some ways to the Rails framework for Ruby, and is designed to enable, not overwhelm.

In this book, you'll learn:

• the essential principles of object-oriented programming, including inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, and more
• valuable lessons on actionscript 3.0 project planning and programming, including design patterns and source control
• how to create your own extensible, reusable application framework using OOP best practices
• advanced data integration techniques such as Web services and communication between Flash and the browser Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0

If you want to get into developing web sites, the most important thing you need is a solid understanding of Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML—the language that the majority of web site content is written in.

Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference incorporates practical examples that will show you how to structure your data correctly using (X)HTML, along with styling and layout basics using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). You`ll also learn how to add dynamic behavior to your data using the JavaScript language.

In this book, you'll learn how to use:

• Microsoft Ajax Library
• Partial rendering with UpdatePanels
• Advanced client and server techniques
• Ajax Control Toolkit

In this book, you'll learn:

• The ins and outs of the Flash CS3 interface
• How to use all of Flash CS3's essential features, such as text, graphics, and animation
• How to use video and sound effectively in Flash
• The basics of ActionScript 3.0
• Building Flash user interfaces rapidly using components.
• How to populate a Flash movie with dynamic data such as XML.
• The Basics of creating Flash Lite applications (Flash for mobile devices)
• Using Cascading Style Sheets with Flash
• Optimizing and publishing your Flash movies

In this book, you'll learn how to:

• Implement best practices in corporate web design, with a focus on common sections such as About,
• Products and Services, Customer Support, and more
• Use e-mail and RSS marketing to stay in touch with customers and prospects
• Apply simple and effective search engine optimization techniques to push your website higher in search engine results
• Advertise the site through e-mail, paid search placement, banner ads, and more
• Explore server-side Reporting Services and consume them from local clients.
• Write professional, accessible, and usable pages to make your site available to everyone

In this book, you'll learn:

    *Discover the huge potential and utility of client-side reporting.
    *See how to use Report Builder and Report Viewer like a pro.
    *Master reporting with Windows Forms, ASP.NET 2.0 Web Forms, and Mobile Clients.
    *Learn how to automate reports with Windows Services.
    *Explore server-side Reporting Services and consume them from local clients.
    *Move from Crystal Reports to Reporting Services.

In this book, you'll learn:

In this book, you'll learn

* All the ActionScript 3.0 (including math and trigonometry functions) and Flash rendering techniques you'll need to start animating with code

* Basic motion principles such as velocity, acceleration, friction, easing, and bouncing

* How to handle user interaction via the keyboard and mouse

*Advanced motion techniques such as springs, coordinate rotation, conservation of momentum, and forward and inverse kinematics

*All the basic 3D concepts you need to do 3D in Flash, from simple perspective to full 3D solids complete with backface culling and dynamic lighting

Now that ActionScript is reengineered from top to bottom as a true object-oriented programming (OOP) language, reusable design patterns are an ideal way to solve common problems in Flash and Flex applications. If you're an experienced Flash or Flex developer ready to tackle sophisticated programming techniques with ActionScript 3.0, this hands-on introduction to design patterns is the book you need.

ActionScript is the official programming language of Adobe`s Flash platform. More than two years in the making, ActionScript 3.0 presents perhaps the most substantial upgrade to Flash's programming language ever. Essential ActionScript 3.0 is an update to Essential ActionScript 2.0, focusing on the core language and object-oriented programming with some coverage of the Flash Player API. 

As a Flash 8 designer, you have discovered the power of the video tools in the application. The new filters and effects and ActionScript classes allow you to create a variety of stunning visual effects in Flash. What you probably haven’t discovered is how easy it is empower your video hundreds of times more by combining the many effects and tools in After Effects 7 Professional with Flash!

Apress wrote this book to provide you with a collection of proven, modern techniques that you can refer to every day to get the most out of the time you put into your web development projects, from start to finish. You know the basics of CSS, and you don't need a guide to evangelize the merits of web standards-based development - you already know it all. Instead, we wanted to focus on context, and how each of the techniques we present fit into the lifecycle of a real-world professional project.

From the Back Cover

This unique book gives you more than just a guide to the Moodle software; it uses Moodle as a route to better teaching, more motivated students, and more successful courses.

What you will learn from this book

• Understand what Moodle can do, how it compares to other e-learning packages, and how it can support your teaching strategies
• Install the Moodle software on your own computer or a server, and understand your way around it
• Know how to create different kinds of courses. Moodle can support courses where the group works through the classes with a shared schedule, or where individual students work through at their own pace, or courses where students are free to explore the different topics in their own time. This book will show you how.
• Understand all of Moodle's learning features. Moodle provides features for managing course content, interactive resources, and social activities such as forums and wikis. This book explains what each of these features are, how they work, and most importantly how and when to use them effectively.
• Manage students – so that you can ensure that the right students are going to the right classes; allow students to enroll themselves, or invite students to join a course. You can even set up commercial courses where students pay to sign

From the Back Cover

Drupal is an exceptional Content Management System (CMS). From the ground up, it is well designed ad has an active development process that ensures a slick user experience and great performance. It is also a model Open Source project that boasts a mature and friendly community.

With the explosion in the number of blogs and forums on the Internet today, Drupal is poised to become one of the world's most useful and widespread applications. By combining a flexible and powerful CMS with an easy-to-use administration too, Drupal enables everyone, regardless of their background, to create exquisite websites.

To get the most from this potent and dynamic software, you need well considered, practical advice presented in a clear and logical manner. This book contains precisely that, and is the perfect companion for anyone who needs to make use of Drupal.

From the Backcover

This book is a fast paced tutorial to creating a website using Joomla!. If you’ve never used Joomla!, or even any web content management system before, then this book will walk you through each step in a friendly and accessible way. From installation, to initial set up and content entry and then on to customization for your own look and feel, this book will get you to a stable and working Joomla! based web site fast. You don’t have to be an experienced web developer or designer to get a great looking site with a full set of functions. This book and the freely available Joomla! are all you need.

Macromedia's architecture is like a chest filled with precious jewels, and this book is quite simply the key to open it! One of the most important tools provided with Flash is the Macromedia Component Architecture: a framework of components written in ActionScript 2, based on established design patterns, that provides a wealth of functionality you can just bolt on to your Flash applications when desired. This can save you an enormous amount of time during application development and help you improve the quality of your code. What’s more, the source code is included, so if you can’t find the component you need within the component architecture, you can just modify existing components to create your own!

Expert Flash developer and author Antonio De Donatis gives you everything you need to master Flash components. In the first part, he shows you how the architecture works, how to create effective component-based applications, and how to create your own custom components from what’s already provided. The second part shows how XML can be used to effectively describe and dynamically create not only single component instances, but whole applications based on any number of components.

The last part of the book is a comprehensive reference to using all of the components already available in the Macromedia Component Architecture. It includes a specific chapter dedicated to each of the UI components like basic usage, component management, customization, and practical examples showing usage of each component.

From the Backcover

This fast-paced and practival tutorial is packed with examples of photo manipulations, logo creation, animations, and complete web projects. With this book up your sleeve, you'll be creating spellbinding images from code in no time.