A little rant here.  I know Adobe AIR is new sexy and everyone’s trying to build apps that run naively on the desktop, but please, if you’re not making use of local filesystem, native windows, drag-and-drop, SQLLite, native menus, or any other of the useful AIR APIs, you should really consider not releasing it as [...]

To read the article, click Use Adobe Air Only When Flash/Flex Doesn’t Suffice!.

Today, I decided it would be easier for me to demonstrate my AIR application to end users if they could just go to a link on a website.  However, getting AIR code to compile into a Flex SWF file, isn’t as simple as I initially thought.  Naturally, there’s the additional APIs that AIR allows the developer [...]

To read the article, click How to compile both Flex and AIR Application from the same codebase..

In my quest to have high-quality content in my news reader, I’ve found ten must-have blogs. I tried subscribing to a Technorati search for Apollo/Flex, but it generates 100s of articles to read, mostly of low-quality news re-postings. It has taken me awhile to soak up the full Flex development community, so I [...]

To read the article, click In 30 Seconds: Ten must-read blogs for the Adobe Flex/AIR Developer.

As an alternative to SOAP, XML-RPC, etc., REST stands for Representations State Transfer, and it provides simple, platform-neutral data exchange using the HTTP transport.  You’ve been hearing about it a lot from Ruby on Rails guys (as of Rails 1.2 built-in APIs exist for exposing all your models to the web with a line or two of [...]

To read the article, click In 30 Seconds: A Quick Guide to RESTful Web Services.

I’m really fired up on Adobe Apollo right now. I think Adobe’s Apollo has the potential to be a lot more than a tool allowing current web developers to write rich Internet applications. With a bit more functionality, I see it as a total competitor against all those old Visual Basic and newer .NET WinForms [...]

To read the article, click Adobe Apollo Wish List.

I initially started researching Silverlight with the goal of using IronPython (eventually IronRuby) as a language of choice to develop rich client applications, but came to the conclusion that Silverlight is much less than just a watered down WPF. There are no input controls, and unless you’re willing to invest the time to create your own ComboBoxes, Checkboxes, etc. it’s not worth the effort. Adobe Appollo is looking much more promising each day, unless Microsoft figures out a way to make WPF cross-platform. My idealistic goal would be able to develop cross-platform applications in Python or Ruby that can be installed to Windows or Macs (even Linux). One good thing about Silverlight is that the streaming video quality looks fantastic.

To read the article, click Microsoft’s Silverlight Disappoints.

Using Google’s custom search options, I’ve created a Google search that searches many Python references over the web. I’ve even created a quick link to add the Python search to your Firefox Search toolbar.

To read the article, click Google Python Search.

Read this article to learn some reasons why learning the Python programming is a worthy investment in your time.

To read the article, click 10 Reasons to Learn the Python Programming Language.