Been a while since my last post. French riviera took all of my free time ;) Let me return with a rather interesting post of a developed Rich Internet App i did just before me leaving.

The app is called ‘Watermanager’ and is a flash ‘RIA’ conversion of an existing desktop application. It’s intention is to let visitors view the current state of the rivers in the Netherlands and examin the effects on the water levels when they turn certain ‘measures’ on and off.

The Watermanager was my first real project developing RIA’s. It was a major challenge because it’s functional specification was kind of a big deal. The existing desktop application had some nice features in it, which where challenging to fit into a Flash interface.

I also tried out Macromedia Flash Professional’s project management functions in this project. Although they could use some tweaking, they did do their job correctly. I used an interface to Microsoft SourceSafe for maintaining script files and version controls. No problems there. You might want to try certain project management functionality out for yourself. They have the potential to safe you some headaches if you loose a file or two.

A few components where used in the application. e.g. the datagrid component which was a breeze to use. Just follow the instructions and it should work out fine. I linked the datagrid component to an xml datasource through AS. I still am surprised by the speed of flash 2004 when parsing xml files btw. Every time you click on the interface of the watermanager, a xml request is being send to the server. And a whole new xml tree is being parsed. A 10k xml file takes less then a second to convert into interface information.

Take a look into the app if you like. Any feedback is more then welcome.