The Flex-Ajax-Bridge is a library which exposes Flex application to scripting within the browser. As stated on the Adobe Labs wiki:

After you insert the library, essentially anything you can do with ActionScript, you can do with JavaScript.

We introduced the Flex-Ajax-Bridge in our talk Mixing Ajax, Flash and Swing. It seems Adobe has now decided how they want to distribute it: They moved it out of Life Cycle Data Service 2.5 (limited free use only) and into Flex SDK 3 beta. Which is certainly good news.

And there is more Ajax support: With Ajax Data Service Adobe provides Flex Data Management Services capabilities (pushed updates, conflict management, lazy loading, and direct integration with back-end domain models) for Ajax applications. Ajax Data Service is available in Adobe® LiveCycle® Data Services ES.

Here are some links on Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that caught my eye during the past week:

James Breeze is looking for research on RIA usability. He lists some articles on usability, but most of these are fairly old from Macromedia times.

The most recent article he points to is:

• The Business Case for Rich Internet Applications, Forrester report by Ron Rogowski.

Needless to say, I am interested in hearing about other research reports as well.

Tim Anderson tried out Tafiti, a search application based on Microsoft’s Silverlight and Live Search.

RIA on Mobile Devices

Ryan Stewart writes:

RIAs can help bring the worlds of desktop, web, and mobile together and that’s going to bring about all kinds of new use cases for applications as well as new business models and modes of communication.

In my opinion, posts such as this one or this one are first indicators that RIA on mobile devices will become important.

Planet RIA

For further blogs, see Canoo’s RIA aggregator at: http://www.planet-ria.org
And feel free to add your favorite feeds.