Creation of RIAS and e-commerce web applications using Adobe Flex 3

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 54-55)This is a thesis/project focusing on the development of data-centric Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) using the Adobe Flex 3 framework. Flex 3 is a framework that enables developers to create fully functional web applications and e-commerce websites in an organized manner. Theses web applications and e-commerce websites can be run on any platform and any web browser having Flash Player plug-in installed. Traditional HTML page-based web applications rely on incorporating different technologies to provide modern functionalities and Web 2.0 features. For example, they use JavaScript and PHP to make dynamic pages, and they rely on AJAX to make asynchronous communication with web servers to exchange data. However, Adobe Flex 3 framework provides all of these technologies in an organized way through its user friendly environment and the powerful ActionScript 3.0 object-oriented language. Moreover, Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) can be used to run Flex-developed applications locally as desktop applications without web browsers. The objective of this project is to demonstrate the RIA development capabilities of the Adobe Flex 3 framework and to assess its suitability for this task in comparison with other RIA development techniques. To perform this investigation, two data-centric web applications were developed using different tools and methodologies. The first was developed using only Adobe Flex 3, and the second was developed with a more traditional mixture of HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. The two applications are very similar, and they provide the same functionalities. For the back-end part of both applications, one common group of PHP scripting language classes is used to communicate with databases and to retrieve information in XML format. After implementing the two applications and comparing the methodologies and approaches, I determined that because of the increasing importance of issues such as reliability, scalability, and security, Adobe Flex is a preferred choice for developing data-centric RIA's