The second entry of the 3 part series of excerpts from Beginning AIR from Wrox has now been posted at InsideRIA.com. This excerpt covers how to use the File class to create, move, copy, and delete files. It will also demonstrate the usage of the FileStream class for working with the contents of individual files.

My friend Tom Gonzalez who is the owner of BrightPoint Consulting has decided to contribute one of his custom gauge components to the community under the MIT license. Check it out here and please say thanks to Tom for his contribution.

Adobe Developer Week starts today. This is a great chance to score some free training. Check out the full list of events here.

The schedule is heavy on RIA technology and is FREE!

Are you interested in learning about AIR? AIR Central is open once again and now has many new AIR specific tutorials on how to do things like write files to the operating system, create images from AIR, use the AIR HTML control, Drag and Drop from the desktop into AIR, use the AIR/JavaScript bridge, and talk between AIR and the browser via LocalConnection. Check out these tutorials within AIR Central.

I teased this a little last week and will now release the details. For the past few months I have been working with O’Reilly putting together a team of all stars within the RIA community to build a brand new community portal for Rich Internet Applications. The site will be officially launched later this month at InsideRIA.com.

What is InsideRIA?:

InsideRIA.com is an online community developed by O’Reilly and sponsored by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Our goal is to create an invaluable resource for information on the ever-changing state of design and development of rich Internet applications (RIAs).

InsideRIA brings some of the leading members of the RIA community together, where you can engage with them in an ongoing narrative about where RIA technology is headed. We hope InsideRIA will become your first-stop resource to stay on top of news, events, opinions, and learning. The site and the community will evolve over time, and you’ll see a healthy amount of tweaking (based on your feedback) in the coming months.

We’ve started with general topic areas on Design, Development, and Standards, which will feature blog posts and multimedia content. InsideRIA will also feature articles each month on a variety of RIA-centric topics. Community involvement is extremely important to the success of InsideRIA, and you and other members of the community can participate by sharing your ideas through feedback on articles, videos, tutorials and other features. We’re hoping some of you will even join us as guest bloggers.

Our first group of featured articles include:
ActionScript 3.0: Is It Hard or Not? by Colin Moock





Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA Part 1: The Tools You’ll Want by Tony Hillerson





What is RIA? by a combination of InsideRIA experts and RIA community members.





Where’s this all headed? Help us find out. Join us, tell your colleagues, and we’ll see you online.

Meet the team:

Site Manager: Steve Weiss
Steve Weiss is an executive editor at O’Reilly Media and has been in tech publishing since ‘93, after finishing studies in film and in technical communication at Purdue. He specializes in developing publishing strategies based around creative and interactive technologies.

Community Manager: Rich Tretola
Rich Tretola currently holds the position of Rich Applications Technical Lead. He is an award-winning Flex developer and was the lead author of Professional Flex 2 (2007 ISBN: 0470102675) and sole author of Beginning AIR (2008 ISBN: 0470229047). Rich has been building Internet applications for over 10 years and has worked with Flex since the original Royale beta version of Flex in 2003. Other than Flex, Rich builds applications using ColdFusion, Flash, and Java. Rich is highly regarded within the Flex community as an expert in RIA and is also an Adobe Community Expert. He runs a popular Flex and AIR blog at http://blog.everythingFlex.com, and was also a speaker at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference in Chicago.

Lead Expert: Andre Charland
Andre Charland is the co-founder and CEO at Nitobi Inc. He’s been involved in Internet software development for almost a decade. As an advocate for usability and user experience, he speaks regularly on Ajax and web usability. Most recently Andre presented at MAX, the Adobe AIR Bus Tour, and the Ajax Experience. Andre is the co-author of “Enterprise Ajax”, published by Prentice Hall this summer, and maintains his own blog at http://blogs.nitobi.com/andre.

Design Experts

Tony MacDonell
Tony MacDonell is a visionary in the Rich Internet Application space. He is a founder of Teknision Inc, a company that specializes in developing RIAs and Rich Media experiences, founded in 2001. Tony is known for his work for clients including Finetune, Sony,SNL Financial, PermissionTV, Walmart, and many more. He makes regular appearances at RIA conferences around the globe, speaking about design, usability, tooling and best practices.

Gabor Vida
Gabor Vida is the president of Canadian RIA development firm, Teknision. Gabor leads Teknision’s user experience consulting and plays an active role furthering the concept of applications as brand building vehicles. Spanning the last 12 years, Gabor has an extensive background in both application development and branding.

Development Experts

Raymond Camden
Raymond Camden is the owner of Camden Media, Inc, a web development and training company. A long time ColdFusion user, Raymond has worked on numerous ColdFusion books including the ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit and has contributed to the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update and the ColdFusion Developers Journal. He also presents at numerous conferences and contributes to online webzines. He founded many community web sites including CFLib.org, ColdFusionPortal.org, ColdFusionCookbook.org and is the author of open source applications, including the popular BlogCFC (www.blogcfc.com) blogging application. Raymond can be reached at his blog (www.coldfusionjedi.com). He is the happily married proud father of three kids and is somewhat of a Star Wars nut.

Jonathan Snook
Jonathan Snook moves effortlessly from client-side, front-end work to hardcore server-side challenges, and his fluency in CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL make make him the “turn-to” man for many high-profile clients. Coauthor of Accelerated DOM Scripting and The Art and Science of CSS, he writes regularly for Digital Web and Sitepoint while also maintaining his popular blog at Snook.ca.

Andrew Trice
Andrew Trice is a Technical Lead for Cynergy Systems, based in Washington, DC. He specializes in data visualization, client-server architectures, Object-Oriented principles, and rich application development. He has been developing for the web for over 10 years, with over eight years development for the Flash platform. Andrew has developed with Flex since version 1.5, and he thrives off the creativity and flexibility that the Flex/Flash platform enables. Andrew possesses over seven years experience with ColdFusion, is a Microsoft Certified Application Developer, and has a wide range of knowledge regarding relational databases, AJAX/Javascript, .NET, and Java web applications.

David Tucker
David Tucker is a web and application developer at the Savannah campus of one of the nation’s premiere educational institutions, Georgia Tech. He is an avid blogger and writes primarily about Adobe AIR, Flash, Flex, and ColdFusion at his blog, davidtucker.net. David spends the rest of the week planning media strategies for educational institutions and not-for-profit organizations. When he isn’t staring at a computer screen he loves to play guitar and experiment with audio recording.