Here is a cool tool to come out of Macromedia Consulting. It's a Flex CSS explorer. You can interactively control the look of all of Flex’s built in components and it will generate the appropriate CSS code. It doesn’t see to work correctly with some custom colors, but it works well enough that you can use it to see what the CSS property is to produce a particular result. Although the application doesn’t like some colors, Flex itself seems to compile them just fine.

All the buzz in the last couple of weeks has been around the AJaX Summit in San Francisco. If you’ve never heard of AJaX, it’s probably because the term was only coined about three months ago. AJaX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. In a nutshell, it’s a specific way of using DHTML involving XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, XSLT, and most specifically, using the XMLHttpRequest object to load data from the server without reloading the web page..

AJaX isn’t anything earth-shatteringly new; it’s just a new way of applying established technology to create Rich Internet Applications (without necessarily using Flash). By hitting the server and only requesting specific data, the web application runs almost like a desktop application in terms of speed and ease of use. Some of best examples of AJaX is Google Maps, Google Suggest and GMail.

Developers have already started creating products and open source code to help with the infrastructure and cross-browser issues relating to this type of development. Backbase is one of the first commercial products to come out using this type of development style. Other projects such as Ruby on Rails and Prototype are creating some great open source code libraries to help with the issues of handling asynchronous data and cross-browser compatibility.

So what does this all mean for Flash? At the very least, (depending on the application) AJaX offers an alternative to RIA development that some people may turn to instead of using Flash. More likely, this expanded consideration of RIAs puts more of a focus on user experiences and probably creates an opportunity for increased RIA development. Mike Chambers and Christian Cantrell made an AJaX application for the Macromedia weblog aggregator that integrates JavaScript and Flash in an AJaX style application.

Tools like Prototype make creating these types of applications very approachable (even if you're not a wiz at DHTML). It handles all of the browser compatability issues for you. It will be interesting to see how this technology is developed and implemented over the coming months.

Well, I finally decided to create a Flash blog. If you don't know me, I'm a writer for ActionScript.com. I've been a Flash developer and consultant for about five years.

The main reason I created this blog is to let everyone know about some community projects that I've been working on. The first community project that I'm working on is ActionScriptReference.com. Basically, I'm taking all of my notes and reference material that I've created over the years and putting it online as an alternative ActionScript dictionary. I'll also use that site to post custom classes and documentation about the components I've created. The site is very new and under much construction.