Axure RP 6 Prototyping Essentials: Advanced Interactions

This article covers some advanced topics such as conditions, raised events, and so on.

In this article by Ezra Schwartz, author of Axure RP 6 Prototyping Essentials, we will cover a set of features such as raised events, conditional logic and variables, introduction to a terminology which is usually associated with programming and suggests complexity. It is understandable if you are not interested in, or are intimidated by, the prospect of coding, and wish to avoid using this set of Axure features as long as possible. You should not.

First, rest assured that no coding is involved. By now, you are familiar with Axure's Interactions and the Case Editor features, which require you only to select from a contextual selection of options and construct interactions by pointing and clicking. The only typing required is the labeling. You will find a similar easy-to-use interface when you use features such as the Condition Builder or simulate "drag and drop".

Secondly, think about some of the terminologies and methods we use in interaction design. We use branching logic to determine use cases, scenarios, and how functionality responds to user interaction under certain conditions. Axure makes it fairly easy to model the logic we need, in order to visualize branching paths, and express it in the interactive prototype.

Away3D 3.6: Applying Light and Pixel Bender materials

Away3D includes a large selection of materials. There are various shading techniques that can be used by these materials, which allows for a selection of materials ranging from those that display a simple texture map to those more advanced materials, which produce more interesting detailed results like reflections, lighting, and shadowing.

In this article by Matthew Casperson, author of Away3D 3.6 Essentials, we will cover Pixel Bender, and seen how it has been used by Away3D to create some of these advanced materials. Those materials that can be lit from an external light source are listed, along with a table that breaks down the types of light sources that affect these materials. We will also see how resources, like textures, can be embedded into the final SWF, or loaded from external resources.

Away3D 3.6: Applying Animated and Composite materials

In this article by Matthew Casperson, author of Away3D 3.6 Essentials we will explore Animated and Composite materials. A number of materials can be used to display animations on the surface of a 3D object. These animations are usually movies that have been encoded into a SWF file. You can also display an interactive SWF file, like a form, on the surface of a 3D object. Composite materials are used to display a number of effects like shading, bump mapping, environment mapping, and lighting. The reader will comprehend this article better by referring the previous articles on:

• Materials, Lights and Shading Techniques with Away3D 3.6.
• Away3D 3.6: Applying Basic and Bitmap Materials.
• Models and Animations with Away3D 3.6.

Autoproxy in Spring Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP)

Spring allows us to use "autoproxy" bean definitions, which can automatically proxy selected bean definitions. There are three kind of autoproxies provided for automatic creation of beans. In this article by Massimiliano Dessi, we will look at this in detail.

Authorizing User Access to BPEL Process

In the previous article, Securing a BPEL process, we saw the principles of securing BPEL processes.

In this article, by Matjaz B. Juric, author of WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with IBM WebSphere 7, we will look at how to secure BPEL processes, so that they can be accessed only by authenticated users. In a nutshell, we will:

• Configure the web service export of a BPEL process to propagate user identity to the process, so that a process instance ownership can be claimed in that user's name
• Protect a BPEL process at SCA level as a component to implement access to the process for authorized users only

Authoring an EnterpriseDB report with Report Builder 2.0

This article by Dr. Jayaram Krishnaswamy shows step-by-step how you may retrieve data from a database on a Postgres Plus server and display the results in a report generated using Report Builder 2.0. Report Builder 2.0 is a report building and maintaining tool provided with SQL Server 2008. The evaluation version of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition was used in this tutorial. Report data is obtained via an ODBC DSN. The connection uses an EnterpriseDB ODBC driver that gets installed on the computer when EnterpriseDB is installed.

Author Podcast - Bob Griesemer on Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g

Listen to Bob Griesemer, author of Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g: Getting Started, speaking with Dain Hansen, Director of Product Marketing for Oracle Fusion Middleware, about his book, data integration, and the benefits of Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g in data warehouses.

Authentication with Zend_Auth in Zend Framework 1.8

In this article by Keith Pope, we will focus on how we can control access to parts of the application—Storefront and how users can log in to use the services provided by the it.

We will learn how to implement authentication in Zend Framework 1.8.

We will cover the following topics in this article:

• Authentication versus Authorization
• Using Zend_Auth

augmentedTi: The application architecture

Augmented Reality application is clean, efficient and usable. It shows how to hide the processing from the user and build a display which updates and rotates smoothly.

This article by Trevor Ward, author of Augmented Reality using Appcelerator Titanium Starter, dives into the open source code base of the augmentedTi example application, explaining how it has been implemented.