The ADC Blog

Hopefully many of you have noticed that we have been pushing for some really great content on the topics of JavaScript and HTML5. Just yesterday we published a three-part series on Backbone.js by Adobe evangelist Christophe Coenraets and the first in a series on JavaScript design patterns by Joe Zimmerman.

• JavaScript design patterns – Part 1: Singleton, composite, and façade
• Backbone.js Wine Cellar tutorial – Part 1: Getting started
• Backbone.js Wine Cellar tutorial – Part 2: CRUD
• Backbone.js Wine Cellar tutorial – Part 3: Deep linking and application states

Late last week, we also published the second in a four part series on building applications for Android and iOS using HTML5 and JavaScript with PhoneGap. This series is by Adobe evangelist Andrew Trice.

• Getting started with PhoneGap in Xcode for iOS
• Getting started with PhoneGap in Eclipse for Android

Personally, I am excited because we have a lot more content like these coming. However, we are always looking for your feedback. As always, you can add comments or ratings to each article, but also if there is a topic you really would like to see the ADC cover, you can always suggest it via our ADC feedback forum. Our goal on the ADC is to produce content that developers want and need, so we are open to any ideas, whether they are focused on an Adobe product or not.

- Brian Rinaldi

The Adobe Developer Connection (ADC) Write and Give Program gave $3,500 USD to charities in the first quarter of 2012. The program acknowledges the writing efforts of our ADC community authors by making a charitable contribution to a charity for each author who publishes content on the ADC. Each author chooses his or her charity from a list of five preselected charities (listed below).

To date the ADC has donated over $67,000 to these charities through the program in recognition of our ADC authors. To our ADC authors, we thank you for sharing your technical expertise with the greater developer community while helping other communities at the same time!

Read on to find out more about the charities that the program supports, and to see the list of authors for this quarter who made these contributions possible!

* Benetech: Creates new technology solutions that serve humanity and empower people to improve their lives.

* Nature Conservancy: Works around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people.

* Mercy Corp: Alleviates suffering, poverty, and oppression by helping people build secure, productive, and just communities.

* Care: Fights global poverty by serving individuals and families in the poorest communities in the world.

* Feeding America: Is the nation’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization.

The authors who participated in this program from December 1, 2011 – February 29, 2012 are:

• Tom Green
• Dan Carr
• Pete Freitag
• Tommi West
• José Carlos Rivera
• Samir K. Dash
• Keith Peters
• Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis
• Quentin Thiaucourt
• David Powers
• Chris Converse

Thank you, authors, for your contributions to the ADC!

Today we launched the new Business Catalyst Developer Center. Business Catalyst is an online business platform that integrates a set of essential web features into one hosted application. Website hosting, content management, e-commerce, e-mail marketing campaigns, and built-in user case management are all rolled into one, so you can build immersive sites and online stores quickly, at a fraction of the normal cost.

To learn more about this new hosted application, check out the following ADC and Adobe TV resources:

• Introducing the Business Catalyst Platform: Learn about the hosted solution to build data-driven online businesses in the Dreamweaver authoring environment.
• Getting started with Business Catalyst: Understand the Business Catalyst workflow, the Admin Console, roles within a Business Catalyst project, and how Business Catalyst helps your clients manage their online business.
• Introducing the Business Catalyst tool: Learn how to register for a free trial of Business Catalyst, update site files with the Admin Console, and discover the features of the online editor.
• Building your first site in Business Catalyst: Follow this tutorial to develop your first online business.
• Introducing Business Catalyst: Watch how web professionals can build powerful online businesses without programming, using Adobe’s powerful Online Business platform for web professionals.

Give it a try and let us know what you think about Business Catalyst.

Lots of new goodness in the Adobe Developer Connection:

Tips for building AIR applications that can be easily updated: Note the potential pitfalls when building and deploying AIR application updates.

Using Flex Ant Tasks to build Flex projects – Part I: Creating a build script for Flex: Set up, create, and execute a basic Ant build script using the Adobe Flex Ant tasks.

Understanding Flex itemEditors – Part 2: Editing events and complex editors: Use events to make more complex itemEditors that do some simple data validation.

Flex cookbook spotlight: faqcontrib: Meet some of the regular contributors to the Flex Cookbook.

Search Engine Optimization Technology Center: The newly launched SEO Technology Center helps explain what the challenges are and provides practical steps, examples, and best practices that you can follow to overcome them.

Search optimization checklist for RIAs: Integrate search into the planning stages and production cycles you will encounter when developing RIAs.

Adobe Flash Player version checking protocol: Learn what to watch out for and what techniques to utilize to ensure that search engine spiders can enter your website’s front door.

Search optimization techniques for RIAs: Understand the challenges and adopt techniques to improve the relevance of your SWF content in search engine results.

Encoding options for H.264 video: Learn about H.264 video and encoding it for Flash Player delivery using Adobe Media Encoder or Flash Media Encoding Server.

Using timeline labels to dispatch events with the ActionScript 3.0 TimelineWatcher class: Use the TimelineWatcher class to programmatically monitor the timeline while keeping it separate from your application logic.

Foundation Fireworks CS4 excerpts: Visual effects and extending Fireworks: Create popular visual effects and understand the SWF panel development process to get the most out of Fireworks CS4.

ADC Write & Give Program: Learn how we acknowledge the writing efforts of our community authors by donating money to charities for each article they publish on the ADC.

Adobe Reader compatibility documentation: These documents provide guidance and important information regarding changes in Adobe Reader 9 that may affect enterprise workflows.

The Adobe Developer Connection (ADC) Write and Give Program gave $3,200 USD to charities in the first quarter of 2009. The program acknowledges the writing efforts of our ADC community authors by giving US$100 to a charity for each author’s published article on the ADC. Each author chooses his or her charity from a list of five preselected charities (listed below).

Last year the ADC donated $26,000 to these charities in recognition of our ADC authors. To our ADC authors, we thank you for sharing your technical expertise with the greater developer community while helping other communities at the same time!

Read on to find out more about the charities that the program supports, and to see the list of authors for this quarter who made these contributions possible!

* Benetech: Creates new technology solutions that serve humanity and empower people to improve their lives.

* Nature Conservancy: Works around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people.

* Mercy Corp: Alleviates suffering, poverty, and oppression by helping people build secure, productive, and just communities.

* Care: Fights global poverty by serving individuals and families in the poorest communities in the world.

* Feeding America: Is the nation’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization.

The authors who participated in this program from December 1, 2008 – February 28, 2009 are:

• Joseph Lowery
• Stephanie Sullivan
• Roman Villareal
• Chris Converse
• Sean Moore
• Raymond Camden
• Davis Hassoun
• Karl Sigiscar
• Alex Cougarman
• Mike Brunt
• Bill Bejeck
• Pamela Fox
• Nick Mihailovski
• Jason Peters
• Paulo Caroli
• Dave Cronin
• Dan Carr
• David Gassner
• Tom Green

Thank you, authors, for your contributions to the ADC!

Check out the latest content posted to the Adobe Developer Connection:

Creating marketing platforms with Adobe Flex: Learn how to leverage the Flex SDK to build marketing platforms.

Displaying LiveCycle ES process data in Flex graphs: Programmatically populate a Flex graph control to view a visual representation of process data.

Building a YChat! Instant Messenger application using Flash Lite for mobile devices: Create a mobile chat application that interacts with the IM Chat server to display and deliver chat content.

Building your first dynamic website – Part 2: Adding user functionality: Learn to add functionality to your page, work with your database, and lay out the page.

Creating a Spry XML data set: Learn to create basic and dynamic XML data sets with Dreamweaver and ColdFusion.

Using the Image Editing panel in Fireworks: This is an update of a previous article – learn some of the time saving features of the Image Editing panel.

Some terrific new content now posted in the Adobe Developer Connection:

Quick start: Embedding an Adobe Rich Island into an SAP Web Dynpro application: Learn to add Adobe Flex interfaces to SAP WebDynpro apps with this new Quick start.

Flex 3 Component Solutions excerpt: Introducing hierarchal data and components: Make the best use of hierarchies to better organize your data.

Code in Flex, test in Flash: Ensure a smooth workflow between design and development by coding apps in Flex and testing in Flash.

Understanding live DVR – Part 1: Implementing a live DVR player: Leverage the live DVR capabilities of Flash Media Server 3.5 by building a sample video player application.

Building your first dynamic website – Part 1: Setting up your site and database connection: Learn to set up your site and database connection.

Tableless layouts with Dreamweaver CS4: Create a two-column CSS layout from scratch and understand what you need to consider in the process.

Setting up a PHP development environment for Dreamweaver: Learn how to set up a PHP development environment on a Windows or a Macintosh computer for building PHP web applications with Adobe Dreamweaver and a MySQL database server. NOTE: This article was originally written for Dreamweaver CS3 and has been updated for Dreamweaver CS4.

Animated logos in Fireworks CS4: Learn best practices for creating and integrating animated logos into your projects.

Managing localized Adobe RoboHelp 8 projects: Learn best practices for managing the process of creating localized help in multiple languages.

Several new articles have been posted to the Adobe Developer Center:

Choose a Flex framework – Get a summary of the most popular frameworks currently available for Flex and make your choice.

Logged in: Introducing Adobe AIR Marketplace – Check out this improved resource for cool and useful community AIR apps.

Key concepts and changes migrating apps to ActionScript 3.0 – Get an overview of key concepts that will help you migrate your applications from ActionScript 2.0.

SwitchBoard: Integrate your ExtendScript – Learn how to create a simple Adobe AIR application and test it.

Code editing in Dreamweaver – Learn how Dreamweaver CS4 accommodates web coders’ workflows.

Creating a simple animation in Flash – learn how to import artwork to Flash CS4, create an animation, and change an animation after you’ve created it.

Good news!! You can now search for and find Adobe’s Platform evangelism team, as well as Adobe software engineers, product managers, and special guests on iTunes as they provide tips and tricks on how to develop first-class digital experiences with Adobe products.

We re-encoded 12 highly rated videos that were previously posted to Adobe TV and will continue to roll out more as we record them.

Click here to check them out!

Just in time for MAX 2008, Adobe released the new version of Adobe AIR 1.5, and the AIR Developer Center has a bunch of new content to help you learn about and experience the notable new features in this release, including Pixel Bender effects, 3D transformations, and encrypted local database.

Be sure to check out the new and updated sample applications, including BlackBookSafe (developed by Adobe’s AIR team), Salesbuilder (Christophe Coenraets), Apprise (Christian Cantrell), and 3D Image Browsr (Grant Skinner).

We also added 17 new Quick Start articles for HTML/Ajax, Flex, and Flash developers–to help you jump start your AIR projects.

Finally, O’Reilly released today the Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook: more than 100 recipes for building cool AIR apps, and we have a sample chapter for you to check out. Enjoy… and be sure to add your own recipes to the online version of the AIR cookbook.