In today's cooking class you'll add to your cookbook a delicious recipe. It's quick and won't cost you a dime. I'm sure you've been in one of these situations when you have unexpected guests arriving in 20 minutes and need to make a good impression. Let's create an application that will auto-generate a Flex-Tomcat-BlazeDS-DB2 application.

Adobe has published their first plan of what should be included in Flex 4 that is scheduled to release next year. Since Flex is an open source product, you have a say in this too. Obviously, there's a hope that upcoming Thermo release will bring together developers and designers. I'm cautiously optimistic here. It's great that a designer's tool will automatically generate MXML. A developer will pick it up and re-factor. But will the tool be smart enough to reverse-engineer the re-factored code and present it back in a visual form to the designer for further work? That is a million dollars question.

Vectors supporting types are the part of next release - and are billed more of performance/coding help then language enhancement. Most of the Java 5 constructs are not really applicable to ActionScript 3 - for fair comparison you need to use Java 7/8 with dynamic scripting language support - and then the way you speak that language changes. Compare how enum support evolved in Java over the years - starting with patterns - and you would think of language as of evolving environment. I was coming to Java in '97 from C++ and I thought of it as a very poor language. 10 years made it almost tolerable - but I still miss ability to redefine operators - does it really matter to anyone who never did it in first place?

Adobe has put an alpha pre-release of AIR for Linux up in hopes, it says, of getting feedback from the community, not to mention winning adherents. It's English-only. The company also joined the Linux Foundation to encourage the growth of RIA technologies on Linux, it said. The company says Linux developers can use HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that deploy to desktops across operating systems.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is nothing new. The technologies behind AJAX have been around for quite a while. Jesse James Garrett just gave the amalgamation of XML, DOM, and JavaScript a catchy new name. Many CF developers hear buzzwords like AJAX and Web 2.0 and simply tune out because they think it's too much to comprehend.

One of the most annoying things about the Web page paradigm is that you have to reload the page whenever you want to do something on the server side. If you want to do a site search, it's sprinkled across two pages.

Taconite is a framework that simplifies the creation of AJAX-enabled Web applications. It's a very lightweight framework that automates the tedious tasks related to AJAX development, such as the creation and management of the XMLHttpRequest object and the creation of dynamic content. Taconite can be used with all modern Web browsers (Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera, and Konqueror, to name a few) and can be used with any server-side technology, including Java EE, .NET, PHP, ColdFusion or any language that lets you return XHTML.

If you've been to Adobe Labs lately or keep up with the blogosphere you've probably heard the buzz about Spry. It's a new AJAX framework from Adobe. It lets designers build rich Internet applications with little or no programming. The Adobe-Macromedia combine has been pushing RIAs for years and its vision is just now moving into the mainstream.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. , the creator and leading advocate of Java(TM) technology, today furthered its support for the AJAX community by launching two new comprehensive online resources for AJAX application development as well as Project jMaki, an open source JavaScript Wrapper Framework for the Java Platform. As a proud sponsor of The AJAX Experience 2006, an international two-day conference exclusively for the AJAX community, taking place May 10-12 in San Francisco, Sun is reinforcing its commitment to AJAX and the next generation of Web application development on the Java Platform.

AJAX has become an increasingly popular tool to develop RIAs. With AJAX, as with many new technologies, developers often overlook core application issues such as error handling. While many current AJAX frameworks come with ways to handle errors, the built-in error-handling methods might not be quite what you need, and it's possible that you might not even want to adopt a specific AJAX framework at all. So how do you handle errors in AJAX?