I’ve recently started checking out the Ariaware RIA Platform. If you are building RIAs, do yourself a favor and download, install, and learn this framework.
The biggest thing that kept me away from learning more about this was the misconception that it was tied to MX 2004 screens/forms, which are tied to UIComponent and UIObject which I avoid like the plague. But this is not the case. You can use the framework with your own custom classes and components and not touch UIObject in any way.
ActionScript as a language is still growing up. AS2.0 is just over a year old. It doesn’t have a rich tradition of patterns and best practices that other, more senior languages have. Developers are still figuring out how to cross-apply these things from other languages into AS.
Furthermore, I think my own story is pretty typical for the average Flash developer. I’ve dabbled in programming before, but didn’t have any formal training in it or any extensive professional experience. I got into Flash in the late 90’s because it was “cool”. My programming experience has grown along with ActionScript, and I’ve been branching out into other languages and ideas as I go. I think that a large portion of Flash developers are just learning about patterns and practices and frameworks, at the same time that ActionScript itself is “learning” about them.
The guys at Ariaware obviously do not fit this description. They know patterns and best practices. And they have taken them and built a framework for application development in Flash. This is pretty much what I have been looking for for many months. My projects at work are getting larger and more complex, and while my coding skills in ActionScript are what I would consider pretty expert, when it comes time to tie a huge system together in some logical way that is easy to understand, scale, debug, etc., I just couldn’t get it down.
I’ve taken a few hours a day over the last few days to read the docs and start creating some apps. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but the result is beautiful. Each part of the system is compartmented, simple to understand, does what it’s supposed to and nothing else. The parts communicate with other parts in predescribed ways.
Best of all, since it is based on existing patterns, my coworkers – Java and PHP developers – can look at it and know exactly what is going on. I can tap them for knowledge on how to best architect pieces. We are now speaking the same language. Although, it does take away some of the mystique of doing something that nobody else can understand. 🙂