Articles for June, 2007

Dan Thomas (“Danny-T”) has written up a nice concise intro to database concepts, geared toward working with databases in AIR (more…)

Problem (and solution): Any AIR app can read any other app’s databases

Posted June 21, 2007 11:06 am
Filed under: AIR, Application Design, Articles by Paul, Tutorials, local SQL database

In a side note on a recent post about the AIR functionality for working with local SQL databases, Tim Anderson raised some concerns about the security model for AIR local SQL databases, that I thought would be valuable to discuss more.
Tim also raises other concerns which aren’t so much issues to keep in mind when […]

» Keep reading Problem (and solution): Any AIR app can read any other app’s databases

10 comments so far

Why doesn’t Adobe’s AIR dev guide mention SQLite? A response to Tim Anderson

Posted June 19, 2007 11:11 pm
Filed under: AIR, Articles by Paul, Opinions, Writing, local SQL database

Yesterday Tim Anderson asked a question: “Why doesn’t Adobe’s AIR dev guide mention SQLite?” As the author of the “Working with local SQL databases” chapter in the AIR Developers Guide that Tim refers to, as well as the related sections of the AIR language reference, I guess I know better than most people the answer […]

» Keep reading Why doesn’t Adobe’s AIR dev guide mention SQLite? A response to Tim Anderson

17 comments so far

If you’re looking to simplify the local database access part of your AIR app, this might be the ticket. Brandon Ellis has written a no-frills wrapper class for AIR local database operations. The biggest benefit it provides is that if you add, delete, or update data in a table, it automatically updates whatever component is displaying the data from the related SELECT statement.

The part that caught my eye the most was that the wrapper class doesn’t dispatch any events to notify the view when the operations have completed. How, I asked myself, does it notify the view when the updated data loads? After a few seconds I realized the answer — it’s the magic of Flex data binding. The DataAccess class exposes the SELECT results as a property (dbResult) that’s a Flex ArrayCollection, and it’s marked [Bindable]. A Flex control can bind to that property as a data provider, and whenever the DataAccess instance reloads its data and updates the ArrayCollection. Then the Flex framework takes over, and the view gets updated automatically. Pretty slick; and it definitely saves a lot of event-handling code. So I guess seeing this in action gave me further appreciation for the power of data binding.

It has a couple of minor issues that I’ve noted in the comments on that page (but mostly they should be fairly easy to fix, if Brandon or someone else decides to do so).

(via: Greg Hamer)

AIR, local SQL databases, and my role

Posted June 11, 2007 5:37 pm
Filed under: AIR, AS3, ActionScript, Articles by Paul, SQL, Writing, local SQL database

As everyone knows, today Adobe released a public beta of AIR (formerly “Apollo”). As you likely know, since it was announced last week, one of the big new features in this release is an integrated database engine that allows AIR applications to create and use local SQL databases. I’m really excited about this, both because it’s really awesome to be able to access a database directly from ActionScript, and (on a personal level) because it means I can finally talk about what I’ve been working on for the last couple of months. Yes, in fact, my latest assignment at Adobe primarily involves working on the AIR local SQL database functionality.

» Keep reading AIR, local SQL databases, and my role

15 comments so far