Thunderhead Explorer

The Holistic micro-architecture framework for building RIAs and RMAs (Rich Mobile Applications) "borrows" from Robotlegs , PureMVC , Cairngorm , SWIZ ,  AS3Signals and the SpringFramework . Each has one or two things that I really like about it, but what I wanted is to bring all these things into one simple, very lightweight framework that enables me to quickly and more importantly methodically build mobile, web and desktop applications. This Holistic API is designed to work on top of either the Flex web or mobile framework and takes advantage of the Flex compiler, environment and lifecycle. Several "design patterns" are utilized in the API, such as Model-View-Controller , Loose Coupling, Locator , Usage of Interface, Delegation , Dependency Injection , Separation of Concerns and Inversion Of Control , not sure if some of latter are pure design patterns per GoF , but bear with me :-) One thing that is heavily relied on, is programming to convention versus progr...

So… Google introduced an offline feature to their mobile mapping application, enabling you to view map tiles when you are disconnected from the network. This is pretty neat and very useful now that local storage is so “abundant” on mobile devices. In this post, I would like to show you how to use the mobile device local storage for offline tile retrieval using the ArcGIS API for Flex . When we built the API, we always had the vision of extensibility to enable people to do things that we did not think about. One of then was to enable the control of the URL from where the tiles will be retrieved. A while back, I did such an implementation using Amazon S3 . So, I rehashed that code using Adobe AIR File capabilities. The demo application that I am featuring here operates in two modes; an online mode and an offline mode. In the online mode, I keep a set all downloaded tiles for a particular viewing session. Before I go offline, I download the map server metadata and all the visited tile...