Several years ago I reviewed DRIA - "Developing Rich Internet Applications." At the time it was the first official Macromedia Curriculum course to teach Rich Internet Application development. I thought I'd do a follow-up on that, as things have changed in the past couple of years.

Macromedia Training has been very busy keeping the courses up to date with Macromedia's product offerings, and the DRIA class has gone through some revisions as well as new permutations.

For those developers new to Flash who simply want to learn it as a development environment, Macromedia now offers the "Macromedia Flash MX Application Development" course - a three-day class that teaches you the fundamentals of using the Flash authoring environment and ActionScript to build applications the right way.

Those of you interested in learning Rich Internet Application development (i.e., building Flash front ends that can interact with server-side resources) now have two class options for Flash development. Macromedia Training now offers a three-day course entitled "Macromedia Flash MX Training 2004: Advanced Application Development." This course teaches ActionScript and OOP concepts, RIA UI elements, communication with servers (Web services and Flash Remoting), data persistence, and techniques for linking class files (business logic) with visual elements. In other words, everything you need to know to build Rich Internet Applications with Flash. The course is designed for people with some Flash experience.

For those of you who are new to Flash and want to learn how to develop Rich Internet Applications, Macromedia Training now offers "Macromedia Flash MX Training 2004: Application Development for Programmers." This course is five-days long and, in addition to teaching everything that the "Advanced Application Development" course teaches, it also teaches the UI components, movie clip objects, and other topics that somebody who already knows Flash would be expected to know prior to the "Advanced Application Development" class. This course is designed for people with some programming background with a language other than Flash (but no actual Flash experience).

Those are the new and improved Macromedia Training options for people who want to build RIAs with Flash. The courses have been updated for the most recent versions of Flash and teach best practices and advanced concepts and development techniques better than any previous Flash course offerings. Of course, these days, Flash isn't the only tool we have for building Rich Internet Apps. Unless you've been asleep for two years, you've probably already heard about Flex. For those of you who haven't been paying attention, Flex, in a nutshell, is a server product designed to allow programmers to develop Flash front ends to their applications using a tag-based language. It encourages design pattern best practices and allows developers to create these "flashy" UIs in a language and environment that they're more likely to be comfortable with. Basically, I like to think of it as "the real programmer's Flash authoring tool" though stating that does open up a can of worms in certain audiences.

Macromedia has two classes that teach Flex 1.5 to developers and, let me tell you, they're the best courses that I've seen from Macromedia Training to date. The "Developing Rich Internet Applications with Macromedia Flex" class is an intense 14 units in three days that's geared for developers who already have a solid understanding of object-oriented programming concepts. In this class, students learn the fundamentals of the Flex Server, of MXML (the language used to develop Flex apps), and of Flex application architecture. They spend a lot of time studying various complex data and object types and how to use them, Flex UI components and layout, communication between Flex and Web services and Java Objects, using XML data, event handling, and data exchange between ActionScript and Java. They even learn how to combine several of these techniques and create drag-and-drop interfaces. The class uses Java Objects for its remote functionality in all of its labs.

The "Macromedia Flex for Web Application Developers" course teaches all of the material that is covered in the "Developing Rich Internet Applications with Macromedia Flex" course, plus two additional units. This course is four days in length and is comprised of 16 units. The additional units add additional lessons that teach the navigation component options in Flex as well as manipulating the size, look, and feel of Flex UI components. Unlike "Developing Rich Internet Applications with Macromedia Flex," this course is ideal for ColdFusion and other Web developers who don't have a very solid Java or other object-oriented programming language background. Rather than Java class files, the "Macromedia Flex for Web Application Developers" course uses ColdFusion for all of its server-side functionality.

Both Flex classes are a cut above any course I've ever taught or attended. The amount of material is staggering. Of course, that's not so impressive - anyone can fill a class with tons of material. What's truly impressive is the quality of the material in both courses. The courseware authors have gone to great lengths to ensure that code and architectural best practices are also strongly emphasised in this course. Like all Macromedia training classes, students build an application over the duration of either class during hands-on walkthrough and/or lab exercises. One other thing that makes the Flex courses unique is Macromedia's control over which Macromedia Certified Instructors are authorized to teach the classes. Instructors must show Macromedia a real understanding of object-oriented programming concepts as well as a mastery of Flex before they are permitted to teach the class. Flex does for RIA development what ColdFusion does for dynamic Web application development and is, in simple terms, Flash development for developers. I highly recommend the Macromedia Flex classes to anyone who has an interest in learning how to develop applications with Flex, and to anyone who is interested in Rich Internet Application development but finds Flash development and/or the Flash IDE unapproachable.

If you are interested in taking the Macromedia Flash or Flex classes, you can find a training partner near you by submitting the form found at http://spectra15.macromedia.com/findaclass.cfm. You can read the course outlines for the Flash classes by visiting www.macromedia.com/support/training/instructor_led_curriculum and clicking on the Flash classes that most interest you. Follow the links at www.macromedia.com/support/training/ instructor_led_curriculum/curriculum_bumper.html to read the Flex course outlines. Alternatively, you can read/download the course outlines for these classes by visiting http://training.aboutweb.com/ and selecting the classes that interest you from the menu.