The second installment of a series of articles on the latest Scala release, Scala 2.8, Martin Odersky explains how and why packages and imports have changed in 2.8.

With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase shows how to use the Parallel and Sequence effects to choreograph complex effects.

With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase shows how to use the new component architecture in Flex 4 to create custom skins for standard UI components.

Sean Landis, author of Agile Hiring, lists ten ways an employer can screw up an on-site interview.

In the first of a series of articles on the latest Scala release, Scala 2.8, Martin Odersky discusses the new collections API.

With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase shows how the new graphics primitives in Flex 4 use linear gradients to get a richer look.

With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase shows how the new graphics primitives in Flex 4 use fills to achieve different rendering effects for the shapes.

With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase shows how the new graphics primitives in Flex 4 use strokes to achieve different rendering effects for their outlines.

With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase shows how to use Flex transitions to animate changes in application state to help the user stay connected to the application experience.

Sean Landis, author of Agile Hiring, discusses why he thinks sloppy résumés should not be tolerated.

With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase shows how Flex 4 enables a new, declarative model of drawing custom graphics objects in Flex code.

Sean Landis, author of Agile Hiring, describes why he thinks hiring should be considered a core competence of software organizations and an important skill for software professionals.

With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase shows how to automate changes in property values when an application changes state.

Last month, Adobe released both the latest version of the open-source Flex SDK and its payware, Eclipse-based Flex development tool, FlashBuilder 4. Many new features in Flex and FlashBuilder are aimed to increase Flex developers' productivity. This article reviews the most important new FlashBuilder productivity boosters.

With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase shows how to show components only in specified application states in Flex 4.

With a demo app from his book, Flex 4 Fun, Chet Haase explains pixel shaders in Flex 4, which allow you to provide arbitrary calculations on images at the pixel level.

Adobe's Flash Player provides a sophisticated platform for client-side imaging applications. This article illustrates how to use the latest Flash Player 10 features from Flex 4 applications to efficiently manipulate images on the client, focusing on Pixel Bender image filters.

An increasing number of organizations are taking the plunge to Scrum, with or without professional coaching. Developers transitioning to Scrum can avoid many pitfalls by following a handful of hard-learned principles. In this article, I discuss a common mistake with the popular "user story" requirements format: poorly defined done criteria.

Flex 4 introduces a new API to define effects for rich-client applications. This article provides an overview of new features in Flex 4's effects and animation-related APIs.

This article describes a Scala design pattern in which traits provide stackable modifications to underlying core classes or traits.