Release of BlazeDS is a great help from the Flex enterprise adoption perspective. On the technical side, BlazeDS provides a lightweight replacement for LiveCycle Data Services ES. The remoting part seems to be identical to the LCDS offering. But how the LCDS implementation is different...

There are different ways of connecting Web clients written in Flex with the server-side applications being that Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP or anything else that can generate HTTP responses. Up till today, the least expensive way was by using Flex objects HTTPService or WebService....

In my opinion this is THE biggest announcement that I?ve heard from Adobe since the release Flex 2 in the Summer of 2006. This is bigger than open sourcing Flex. This is bigger than AIR. Here's the news: Adobe is open sourcing AMF protocol and messaging under LGPL V3. Christophe Coenra...

The AMF file format is a binary file format representing a serialized ActionScript object. This file type is used in many places within the Flash Player and AIR for data storage and data exchange. In Flash Player 9 and AIR, the flash.utils.ByteArray class is the primary way AMF is hand...

I assume that you are already sold on using Adobe Flex for developing the front end of your next rich Internet application. As of the end of 2007, it's the best choice you can make, really. But after spending almost two years working on real-world projects that involve Flex, I can see ...

For security reasons (similar to the Java sandbox concept), Flash clients can only access the domains they come from, unless other servers declare, explicitly or implicitly, trust to SWF files downloaded from our domain by a corresponding record in a crossdomain.xml file. But our portf...

Since people's programming background varies in Flex, these are not facts, just my opinions based on my experiences using ARP & Cairngorm for over 2 years. Furthermore, there are alternatives to Cairngorm, I just cannot try them as much as I like. Now that I'm doing product work, I can...

Any complex screen, more or less, of a business application consists of a number of containers (Panel, Canvas, VBox) and controls (Buttons, DataGrids, Comboboxes). In the best case scenario, a UI designer gives you a nice-looking screen prototype that s/he put together without botherin...

Let's recap some major announcements made at MAX 2007 in Chicago that sound interesting from a Flex developer perspective. Flex Builder 2 (and 3) becomes cheaper. Just wait till November 1st and you?ll get it for $250 (formerly $500); Flex Builder with charting should cost $100 less th...

Adobe will release Flex 3 around February of 2008. It has a number of improvements and new features, in particular it'll bring Flash designers and Flex developers together. Creative Suite 3 will have an easy way to incorporate Flex content right into the timeline of Flash IDE. Contain...

Flex has a short learning curve for Java developers, who will find that there are a lot of familiar language constructs and patterns. It also provides excellent remoting capabilities for Java programmers, allowing transparent data transfer between ActionScript and Java 1.4 data types. ...

My message to Flex team is simple, 'Guys, you did a great job with Flex framework, but it's out of the cage now, and people are actually using it as a foundation for their professional work. You can't just change API whenever you fill like it. This is not a green field situation anymor...

Adobe has published statistics on the penetration of Flash Player 9 as of June 2007. The numbers look pretty good - over 90 percent of the users in mature markets have it already installed. 90% is not a 100% and not even 98% that Flash Player 8 already enjoys. Since the penetration spe...

While using Adobe Flex for development of the front end portion of your J2EE applications quickly becomes a reality, many enterprise managers are still waiting for development of Flex ecosystem that would include a pool of professional developers as well as third-party components makin...

Farata Systems has announced the production release of ClearBI 1.0, a Web reporter and business intelligence engine for rich Internet applications. While ClearBI 1.0 is targeted for Adobe Flex and Java developers, the upcoming ClearBI 1.1 is a rich reporting component that can be used...

Adobe's LifeCycle Data Services ES offers developers powerful capabilities. Some of this software's capabilities, specifically server push, can be developed with relative ease using a utility class that has been around in the Flash APIs for a great while, and without having to pay lic...

Some people take the dog for a walk, others go play a round of golf. Not Christophe Coenraets. His idea of a good time is to illustrate Flex 2 / JMS integration by extending a simple 'realtime feed' application that he built a while back! Web Developer's & Designer's Journal is proud t...

Flex 2 and the Flash Media Server are a match made in heaven. By combining the two technologies, streaming Flash videos at my office has become a nice part of my daily routine and a good excuse to add another monitor to my desktop. Whether your musical genre taste is classical or rock ...

The authors of the bestselling book 'RIA with Adobe Flex and Java' will teach a one of a kind workshop that is aimed at Java developers with no or limited experience in developing enterprise-grade J2EE application with Adobe Flex front end.

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications? Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is cr...

Adobe Systems Incorporated has introduced Adobe® LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite (ES), an integrated family of software for automating processes that help businesses and governments engage with customers, citizens, partners, and suppliers.

'The Java backlash,' writes Bruce Eckel, 'has been building up steam, and we're starting to see some fundamental shifts because of it.' Java has been around for 10 years yet applets are not the primary way that we interact with the web. Applets are not ubiquitous, and everyone got exci...

Other than Flash Player, ClearBI does not require any additional software install on the client side. At the time of this writing, ClearBI is the only professional reporting solution on the market of rich Internet applications developed using Adobe Flex and Java. ClearBI is available i...

One of the many features available in Flex 2.0 is a ResourceBundle class, which allows for a standardized approach for internationalizing applications. Many recent projects of mine have required that applications be built that can easily be ported to other languages. Traditionally, I'...

Adobe has announced that a large portion of the next version of Flex goes open source under Mozilla Public License (MPL). Here's the partial list of what becomes open: mxml, compc, and ActionScript compiler, command line debugger FDB, Flex framework and RPC libraries and testing infras...

Farata Systems, a leading provider of Flex and Java services and components has announced availability of the Alpha version of the first community site www.myflex.org that will become a repository for commercial Flex components and Eclipse plugins developed by independent vendors.

According to Adobe's senior technical evangelist and AJAXWorld 2006 veteran Christophe Coenraets, we're seeing today the first steps of the industry's journey down a path towards 'high definition' user interfaces. 'Real time data, in-context collaboration, vector graphics-powered expre...

Event-driven programming model offers an excellent architecture based on loosely-coupled components consuming and throwing events. In this tutorial I'll show how to design component that communicate with each other via events.

In XML, namespaces are used to avoid potential naming conflicts with other components having the same names. Flex also has namespaces. Familiarity with Soprano family is a pre-requisite for reading this article.

Andrew Trice, co-author of Flex 2 articles on Adobe's Developer Center, maintains a blog at http://www.cynergysystems.com/blogs/page/andrewtrice in which he helps orient newbies and experts alike about Flex. Web Developer's & Designer's Journal is pleased here to bring a sampler of som...

What I love about Adobe Flex is that it is a framework in addition to a pretty impressive library of off-the-shelf controls, which can fit the bill for many of the Rich Internet Applications. Flex enables you to create new and extend existing components with a simplicity and elegance h...

You know the drill: a language is called object-oriented if it supports inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism. And what do we do with interfaces?

All applications, simple or complex, online or desktop, are composed of many elements: screens, forms, menus, etc. In a Rich Internet Application, those elements can also include video, audio, or images. From the programmer's standpoint, it would be great to be able to reuse those part...

The book 'RIA development with Adobe Flex and Java' is written. Check out the book site. Do you know why we are smiling? Because the writing is over! It took us longer than planned because we had to work for a living, and the time for writing this book was just stolen from our families...

Typically, Flex developers use Flex Builder IDE, but Adobe also offers free Flex SDK, and you should know how to build your applications without Flex Builder. Using a sample Flex project, this article shows how you can automate its build and creation of HTML wrappers for your swf file...

Flex framework contains a pretty impressive library of the off-the-shelf controls, which can fit the bill for many of the Rich Internet Applications needs. And yet, it is just the tip of the iceberg, because Flex enables you to create, combine and/or extend existing components with a s...

Unless your project is as simple as HelloWorld application, compilation and deployment of this application has to be automated. Creating a build script for any decent size application (i.e. hundreds of files in Flex and server-side Java) is a project on its own. Java programmers typica...

Closures is one of the cornerstones of dynamic languages. Closures are unavoidable when you use asynchronous operations or need to process an event on the other object. Almost any non-trivial action in Flex communication with the server or getting an input from user is asynchronous. Us...

Video over the Internet and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are the latest craze. With Flex 2 and Flash Media Server 2 (FMS), developers can easily create interactive media Web applications. In this article you'll create a basic video conference application that will give you the fo...

This is a short comparison table of major elements/concepts of these two languages for a quick reference.