Obecto Training Portal

I’m very pleased to welcome all VMware developers to the Obecto Training Portal. We’ve setup this blog with the intend to open a portal to the knowledge we have in the field of RIA and especially Flex and Flash. This is a portal, but also this is an open conversation – feel free to write comments and to ask all your questions.

Even though we’re bulgarians, the official language of the portal is English. The reason for that is to make our discussions as reusable as possible and as open as possible to everyone else interested.

If you find it difficult to express yourself in English (or just don’t want to), here’s the Bulgarian Flex User-group which has its Google Group – the preferred language there is Bulgarian.

The topics in the course

The topics in the course are updated according to the feedback we’ve got from the first group who attended the course:

1. Overview of the Flash Platform
2. Introduction to ActionScript 3 & MXML
3. DataBinding – a Look into the Generated Code
4. Overview of the Flex SDK
5. Creating & Extending Flex 3 Components
6. Remoting
7. Flex Applications’ Architectures
8. MVCS Example and MVC Example – Refactored
9. Creating Modular Applications
10. Flex 3 Localization Support
11. Test Driven Development
12. Optimizing Flex Applications

The MVCS Sample is moved closer to the beginning, because the concept is quite important and it brought lots of controversy and confusion during the last course. The whole idea is revised and some issues and aspects noticed by the seniors (special thanks to Alex and Stefan) that attended are going to be further clarified.

What’s left out of the course

There are quite a lot topics that are out of the above topic list:

• Skinning and Styling Flex Components
• Preloading Flex Applications
• Integrating Flash Content
• Using Shared Objects
• Printing from Flex Application
• Introduction to Gumbo

Recommended List of Books

Today, I was asked to provide a list of books about Flex. The problem is, I’ve never read a book about Flex. Well at least not published in paper. I can recall reading Creating & Extending Adobe Flex 3 Components and you can find this title also here in the sidebar. I can recall also using Essential ActionScript 3.0 as a reference in some Flash related tasks. And that’s about all I’ve ever read in paper about Flash and Flex.

ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns: Object Oriented Programming Techniques – the contents of this book looks pretty intriguing, but I haven’t read the book. Anyway it looks really promising.