Best practices Flash and Flex Development

View the e-brochure: FlashPaper (165kb), PDF (452kb)

New: All courses in 2006 will be taught using the latest Macromedia Studio 8 with Flash Professional 8.

We have learned some important lessons in our industry. Here are three striking ones:

• 70% of all IT projects fail.*
• The most costly part of development is not the initial development cycle itself but maintenance.
• Development of a web site or Rich Internet Application is seldom a solitary affair but instead requires a team of experts to communicate and work together efficiently.

Faced with these facts, it is imperative that you take every precaution to lower the risk of your development projects, lower the cost of maintaining and scaling your applications and facilitate efficient teamwork and communication among members of your development team. This is what best practices development methodologies and use of software design patterns allow you to do. Applying best practices to Flash and Flex development and using software design patterns in ActionScript 2 to build maintainable, scalable applications in a team environment is the topic of this course.

Best Practices Flash Development is aimed at developers, designers and programmers who have taken Foundations of Object-Oriented ActionScript 2 and/or have an intermediate-level of knowledge of Flash (or Flex) and ActionScript 2 or another modern Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) language (such as C# or Java). Previous knowledge of design patterns is not required.

You will be taught by one of the leading Flash developers in the world. Aral Balkan is internationally recognized as an expert in Flash and ActionScript, regularly speaks at international events, is a published author in the field, and is a Macromedia Certified Instructor. He is also the author of the Ariaware RIA Platform (ARP), the only best-practices pattern-based ActionScript 2 framework that supports both Macromedia Flash and Flex.

The course covers forms-based development using lightweight, movie clip-based ArpForms, Flash MX 2004 Professional forms and MXML and Flex forms. You will see how simple ARP makes it to move between each of the above systems (including migrating from Flash to Flex.)

After taking this course, you will be able to architect Flash and Flex applications using best-practices methodologies and software design patterns. This means that you will lower the risk of development and create easy-to-modify/maintain (maintainable) and easy-to-grow/scale (scalable) applications and web sites.

To maintain an extremely high standard of instruction and ensure a level of personal attention that would otherwise not be possible, the class size will be limited to only six students.
________
*WebReference.com, Jan 2, 2002 and other sources. Failure in the context is defined as a project that is scrapped before completion or completed but does not meet user or client acceptance.

Course Feedback From Previous Students:

“Spot on. . . It was great.”

Stefan Richter
Pop View

“XP techniques will be very valuable to my business. . . Great job Aral!”

William Prater
Technology Director/Co-Founder
Mercury Cloud (Seattle, USA)

“Aral is a brilliant teacher and leaves you wanting to learn more from him.”

“Excellent! Friendly, flexible and knowledgeable . . . very thought provoking.”

“I liked speaking to the instructor on various specific problems at hand and get immediate answers.”

Setty Sivanand,
IFX Markets Ltd

“I liked working with tools that increase my productivity. Working with Flex made a lot of sense and Aral made it very simple to understand.”

John Dalziel,
Banner Corporation plc.
Founder, Flash Magazine (flashmagazine.com)

Topics covered:

• Development process: Agile vs. Waterfall methodologies
• User-Centered Agile Product Development (an amalgamation of User Centered Product Development and eXtreme Programming.)
• Unit testing and test-first development
• Usability design and testing
• Source control (using Subversion, the open-source SCM that is heir to CVS)
• Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
• ActionScript 2 (Refresher)
• Developing with Version 2 components and Flex components
• Software Design Patterns
• Applying software design patterns to ActionScript 2
• Using the Ariaware RIA Platform, a best-practices, pattern-based ActionScript 2 framework for Macromedia Flash and Flex development
• Event-based programming
• Observer, Decorator, Factory, Command, Controller, Business Delegate and Service Locator patterns in AS2
• Flash Remoting
• Forms-based development using lightweight, movie clip-based forms (ArpForms)
• Forms-based development using Flash MX 2004 Professional forms
• Forms-based development using MXML and Macromedia Flex

For more information, please see the e-brochure: FlashPaper (165kb), PDF (452kb)

The course price is £895 + VAT and the courses will be held at our venue in Brighton. Early-Bird Discounts available, please e-mail us for details. Group signups (two or more people) get £50 off and if you sign up for both this course and Foundations of Object-Oriented ActionScript 2 , you will get an additional £100 off the combined price.

If you're interested in signing up, please contact Ariaware Training at tr.nosp@m.aining@ariawa.nosp@m.re.com, call +44 (0) 1273 696369 or fax +44 (0) 870 7517482.