Creating Mashups with Adobe Flex and AIR (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library) [Paperback]

Chris Korhonen (Author), David Hassoun (Author), John Crosby (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590599365 | ISBN-13: 978-1590599365 | Publication Date: April 29, 2008 | Edition: 1

AIR is a hot topic. Mashups are a hot topic. This book brings them together.

Mashups are the integration of data from different sources to create one unified experience. For example, you might create a music browser application that took the name of a band you entered, and supplied you with concert photos (from Flickr), videos (from YouTube), streaming songs and similar artists (from last.fm), tour dates (from the band’s blog) and the nearest location on the tour to you (displayed in Google maps). As an indication of what big-business mashups are, Microsoft has just released a beta of its own mashup-creation application: Popfly.

Adobe's AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) platform is revolutionary in that it allows web developers to create applications using familiar technologies (such as Flex, Flash and HTML) but now they can deploy them on the desktop rather than having them locked to a web browser. This means that rather than opening their browser and searching for the information in the example above, they can keep an application on their desktop and run it whenever they want to.

This book is the only title announced that covers mashups from a web designer and developer point of view, rather than a programmer. It is also the only book announced to leverage AIR to create desktop mashups and widgets. The book covers everything from the basics and background of mashups, to advanced functionality and integrating mashups with the desktop.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Chris Korhonen works as a Software Architect in Brighton, England. With a background in web development, he now specializes in developing rich internet applications for financial services, with specific focus on creating engaging user experiences.

David Hassoun is the founder of RealEyes Media, a digital media firm focused on interactive motion media and advanced enterprise-class Flash platform applications. He is a Macromedia Certified Master Instructor, adjunct professor at the University of Denver, Adobe User Group Manager, and has taught/developed many successful advanced Flash application courses. He has also provided technical and strategic advice for international industry leaders over the past years including technical, courseware, application reviews and development for Macromedia/Adobe and their clients as an industry expert.

John Crosby is the senior developer at RealEyes Media. He is also a Certified Adobe Instructor and has conducted training classes nationwide for Adobe Authorized Training Providers. John has authored and/or provided technical review for multiple Adobe Official Curriculum courses as well as number of non-official courses.

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (April 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590599365
• ISBN-13: 978-1590599365
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,887,527 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Could have been much better, June 21, 2008

By 

Shantul Nigam (Avon, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Creating Mashups with Adobe Flex and AIR (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library) (Paperback)

This book starts out ok but after the first example, it goes downhill fast. Even while working on the first example, they constantly tell you to read the api's and never go into it beyond a superficial level.

Even the writing is pretty boring which makes this very hard to read...

3.0 out of 5 stars Useful for getting a quick overview; needs more details, June 14, 2010

By 

Ivan Ilijasic "Ivan Ilijasic" (Croatia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Creating Mashups with Adobe Flex and AIR (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library) (Paperback)

After few weeks of thinking, I decided to write my thoughts about this book. In the beginning this book made a quiet an impression but later this feeling started fading away and on the end I had pretty good pros and cons for considering giving this book a recommendation.

What happened and where this book succesed and failed?

The main topic of this book is connecting your Flex/AIR application with existing web services which you probably use almost every day/week. An introduction of this book is pretty common for all the books about Flex (except Flex cookbooks and Flex books for absolute beginners). If you have some experience with Flex, starting chapters could be boring and if you just started learning Flex, these chapters could help you but you'll need aditional information. If you have a decent history in web programming you could handle these chapters well.

After opening chapters comes an interesting part of the book in which you will learn how to create a fully functional and useful applications for handling Flickr and Technorati web services. I know, a lot of books cover these topics but examples in this book are really good and useful. From my experience, they are better than examples in some other books.

Chapter 6 made an excellent impression and I would recommend this chapter to any decent Flex developer. This chapter talks about performance management in Flex application. I'm sure you can find these information if you combine several web resources but here you can find trully excellent advice how to help your application to reduce memory and processor costs.
When you're done reading about peformance management, you'll get more information about debugging and creating debugging log. Again, really good topic.

Then book goes back again to connecting Flex to web services such as Last.fm and Amazon Web services. These topics can be really useful.

After these chapters the book lost it's enthusiasm. Chapters about AIR are too short there are not enough pages to discuss about web applications on your desktop. I had a feeling that book was finished too soon. Last several chapters are not so detailed and if you want to create decent AIR applications, you need more material.

This book has it's glorious moments but at the end of reading it, these moments already faded away. Like I said, it has an excellent chapters about performance management, logging and debugging, has some cool examples for Flickr but there are so many pages that could have been used in a better way. If you are not convinced to buy this book, consider buying it with your colleague to share the costs because I think you need to read this chapter about performance management. I believe these 20-30$ will look pretty cheap if this chapter could help you to become a really good Flex developer.

6 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A bad book, May 14, 2008

By 

Stephane Boudon "Flex fan" (Paris, France) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Creating Mashups with Adobe Flex and AIR (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library) (Paperback)

A small book with many chapters dedicated to what Flex does and doesn't. It's only after several chapters that the authors enter into the stuff suggested by the title. Said differently, for the newbie to Flex a way to fast introduction to it, for the Flex user a lot of useless content. I would strongly recommend NOT to buy this book.