| | Adobe Flex is becoming a popular choice for generating the client side of enterprise Java applications. In this first of two articles, Dustin Marx demonstrates how Flex can help you deliver highly interactive user interfaces that access your Java EE application's enterprise logic. Get a hands-on introduction to perfecting a simple Flex client, then enable it to communicate with your Java EE server. Level: Beginner | July 3, 2006—Looking to increase adoption of its Flex rich Internet application development technology, Adobe Systems is releasing its Flex 2 product line, which features free versions and the ability to push data to clients. | As a way to overcome some of the limitations defined above, consider Rich Internet Application development. An RIA gives the user a thick client with extended capabilities not available in browsers today. The most common RIA clients for J2EE are Java and Flash. When it comes to developing large, data-centric applications, RIAs are generally strong . Several solutions are available for developing Rich Internet Applications including JDNC (JDesktop Network Components), Laszlo, Thinlet, Java Web Start, and Macromedia Flex. | As a founder of iteration::two, Steven is recognized as a Software Engineer with a strong understanding of J2EE Design, Architecture, and development methodologies, working at the forefront of rich-client development using Flash MX 2004, Flex, Enterprise Java and .NET. | First announced by the company last fall, Flex is targeted to enterprise dev teams who want to put richer interfaces on their Web-based enterprise apps. It was developed to overcome some of the limitations of traditional page-based HTML applications. Macromedia's vice president of product management, Jeff Whatcott, said that HTML has fallen short of delivering what his company calls "rich Internet applications." Macromedia has long touted its own Flash technology as the best vehicle for this kind of interaction. The company claims that its Flash player is the most distributed piece of software on the Web, and is installed on about 98% of Web-enabled desktops. | The sessions I attended yesterday ranged in scope and depth, and only one session was a disappointment, but I won't talk about that one here. (People who were in that session know which one it was, sadly.) But one bad egg does not make a dozen (or something like that). The standout sessions yesterday was a session on integrating Flash Video with your Flex application, and one titled as "Getting Beyond Point and Grunt!", which dealt with creating a better user experience in your Flex app by offering alternative gestures and command-line-driven interfaces. Both were stellar. But the best part of the Flex|360 conference so far has been talking with people about what they're doing with Flex and what sort of problems they're running into. There's a fair mixture of Flex experts and noobs like me, so this is a great place to learn more about what you can do with Flex and get advice for projects you're working on. -30- | Adobe Flex enables the rapid development of internet applications with rich and engaging user experiences. Adobe AIR extends that development to applications beyond the browser. Start building the rich applications YOU want with a new title or two on developing with Flex and/or AIR. | | More frequently than not, Rails applications are written using a RESTful approach, which provides a coherent way of organizing your controller actions for applications that serve HTML pages. It also has the added benefit of exposing your application as a service that can be accessed via an API. This capability is important because it enables our Flex application to communicate with the Rails application by passing XML data using the Flex HTTPService components. In Chapter 2, Passing Data with XML, we looked at the underlying mechanisms of using the HTTPService component and the implications of using XML. In this chapter, we will look at the larger picture of how to access a RESTful Rails application and how to consume nested resources with custom verbs, which are common in RESTful applications. You should still be able to follow this chapter, even if you are not familiar with RESTs. This chapter will guide you through building the "Stock Portfolio" application, which will introduce REST concepts, such as CRUD verbs and nested resources, and use custom REST actions. You will see how to code this application from both a Rails and a Flex perspective. | Have a question or opinion about ActionScript 3? Discuss this article in the Articles Forum topic, ActionScript 3: The Language of Flex. | The ability to quickly and effectively create rich user interfaces is becoming increasingly important to developers. Choosing the right tool for the job, however, is made harder by the ever-increasing choices in rich-client tools and APIs. When Sun announced JavaFX at this year's JavaOne, few developers thought that rich-client Java would compete with, or even replace, other rich-client UI technologies. Indeed, Ajax frameworks, JSF libraries, Flex, Swing, and lately Microsoft's Silverlight, often complement one another in ways not immediately obvious from brief news announcements and project descriptions. | In this interview with Artima, IntelliJ lead developer Dmitry Jemerov explains key focus areas for the upcoming IntelliJ 8 release, including differences between developers relying on the Java and .NET ecosystems, on the one hand, and those using languages and tools outside of Java and .NET, on the other. In addition, Jemerov talks about key features of IntelliJ's recent Flex support. Finally, Jemerov discusses his views on Scala. | Flex also comes with a data binding framework. If you have data in one place, and you want that data to affect some other parts of a Flex application, you can bind the affected object's data model to a data binding source. We use curly-braces syntax for data binding that sets up a watch on the objects you're binding against. Whenever those objects change, the UI will change accordingly. If you have a data grid, and its data provider is bound to an ArrayCollection, which is a type of array that can serve as a data binding source, when that collection changes, the objects displayed in the data grid will also change. |
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