Announcing a New Class For The Fall Semester: MM491 Mashups and RIAs

I will be entering my fifth year of teaching at Bradley this fall. In that time I have taught several classes on multimedia authoring, using tools like Director and Flash to produce microsites, games and simple applications. I have also taught a senior level capstone class where Rich Internet Applications were designed and prototyped, then composited with devices in original video shot by my students in a “Starfire”-like what-if video depicting ubiquitous wireless connectivity. You can see that one here. Additionally, I have taught course on server side development using PHP/MySQL and a intro to web design class that focuses on web standards and covers XHTML/CSS and JS. Well, I have another one to add to that. Read on to find out more about it.

Introducing: MM491 Mashups and RIAs

In this class, students will use HTML/CSS, PHP, AJAX and Adobe Flash/Adobe Flex/Actionscript3/Adobe AIR to access and digest webservices and APIs made public by third parties to create and publish mashups, web applications that combine data from more than one source into a single integrated tool, on the web and desktop. Additionally, rapid application development tools will be used to create client side rich applications that connect to existing services or web sites to provide application functionality to the user.

Students are required to have completed Multimedia 213, Multimedia 215 and Multimedia 365 prior to enrolling in this course. Students are recommend to have completed or be cross enrolled in Multimedia 313, and Multimedia 465 before trying this advanced field of web design and development. While user interface design patterns and strategies will be explored, with students getting a chance to exercise their CSS skills and user interface skinning ideas, a good portion of the time in this class will be spent editing code and connecting XML and other data formats to the components to complete their masterpieces.

Students will be expected to download and install the freely available Adobe FlexBuilder and the Adobe Air SDK to their development computers prior to class commencing. Students are recommended to read and complete the tutorials on Adobe Flex at Adobe.com’s Develop center over the summer. Students will be required to register for a free account at programmableweb.com for posting their mashups to the web.

All in all I’m very excited about this on… it should be great!