Aral Balkan is a Flash consultant and trainer. He is the founder and coordinator of OSFlash, the open source community and resource site, and blogs on aralbalkan.com. Aral is the author of six courses for the Flash Platform that cover topics ranging from introductory Flash and ActionScript 2 to Flex 2, ActionScript 3, best practices and open source development. He is also the author of the widely-used open source pattern-based RIA framework Arp and is a contributor to several books and magazines. Currently, Aral provides consulting and training services and is having fun while working on several pet development projects of his own.