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Seam Flex Integration
Posted in Adobe Flex, JBoss Seam by Mohammed Khan on 11. November 2008
Off late there has been lot of integrations happening between Adobe Flex and other J2EE technologies, Flex-Spring, Flex-POJO, Flex-Hibernate, Flex-Struts and many more which have evolved maturely and have been stable over last two years. But there has been very little work on Flex-Seam integration, Seam is a very robust framework for server side technology but i have hardly seen developers working or talking about Flex-Seam integration. This was quite left topic because RichFaces has been native support with Seam frameworks apart from JSF, and you can pretty much to do a lot with them as you do in Flex except that in Flex you have a single page interaction. Also another reason was the current remoting connectors like BlazeDS or GraniteDS didn’t have AMF serialization implemented for Seam framework. Well this not the case now, major work to make Seam based apps to work Flex based apps has been initiated by Exadel, also now GraniteDS Tide supports Seam based backends and also BlazeDS can be made to work with Seam EJBs . With current introduction of work by developers like Max Katz from Exadel, it is now very much possible to develop and deploy stable Flex-Seam based Apps.
Among all possible scenarios to make Flex-Seam work, I would appreciate Exadel Flamingo connector, for the following reasons:
1. Firstly it helps me build all server side classes required for plumbing the server side with the Flex UI framework.
2. Secondly it uses Maven to work on, which i am very comfortable with and i would say even other J2EE developers would be as it gives the freedom change the structures as we want to.
3. Usually in case of BlazeDS or GraniteDS, we have only two components to work with at client side RemoteObject and Producers/Consumers for AMF remoting. But when working with Flamingo, it just does not provide server side jar files but also an AS3 library SWC file, which when included in your flex project, lets you use some Flamingo Client Side Components like Validator, CallSet, SeamBinding and SeamRemoteobject. What would this mean is you don’t have to right custom classes at your flex side to do things like string validation based on business policy or you wouldn’t have to write wrapper classes for VO.
4. It lets me use either of the protocols AMF or Hessian for serialization. Though we all have been using more AMF for data remoting, giving a try Hessian is worth (but setting it up sometime can be very tricky) also Hessian is light weight. One difference you will notice is that when working with AMF you use remote-config.xml to define destinations but when working with Hessian you will need to define destinations in web.xml.
5. Also i dont think any tool which doesnt save time is a good tool (no matter how extensible and robust it is). So when working with Flamingo i noticed that i had very little to do on coding extra classes to bind data sets, which i think is very crucial at service integration point.
With these few highlights on Flamingo, do check out Max Katz blogs as he is a commandable authority on Flamingo or anything with Seam and RichFaces. Also in coming days i would post a blog on how to start and work with Flex-Seam based projects using both BlazeDS and Flamingo.
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Sliderocket Undergoes Public Beta Stage
Posted in Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex by Shoaib Mirza on 21. September 2008
Sliderocket is a Flex RIA with a groundbreaking approach to presentations. It enables users to create superb presentations, with the ability to manage and share those presentations astutely. The software also includes online marketplace where content and services for perfect presentations can be found. In addition, it is one of the very first sophisticated consumer applications created with Flex/AIR which is packed with revolutionary features.
The company behind Sliderocket has opted to deliver the software into its public phase. The changes caused a short disruption in their official website which lasted for 15-20 minutes. However, the move proved its worth as many developers find it really interesting and some even believe it could become one of the most powerful and useful tools ever.
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Adobe AIR Has New Offerings for Flex Developers
Posted in Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex, Rich Internet Applications by Shoaib Mirza on 19. September 2008
The new Adobe Air runtime allows developers to employ Adobe Flex technology in creating RIAs or rich internet applications that can be used in desktops.
Adobe AIR is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application. AIR was designed to be a flexible runtime environment, as it enables existing Flash, Actionscript or HTML and JavaScript code to be used to build a more customary desktop-like program. Adobe positions it as a browser-less runtime for rich Internet applications that can be utilized in the desktop, instead of being a self-sufficient application framework.
Adobe AIR gives various benefits to Adobe Flex developers. One case in point is developers can use their existing skills, tools, and code to develop attractive desktop applications that rounds out web-based applications. Another key benefit is, adobe air lets developers link up desktop resources and data with web technologies to incorporate desktop and the web. These, along with several other Adobe AIR advantages will surely make the application a huge hit among Flex developers.
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Zend PHP and Adobe Flex Combined to Create RIAs
Posted in Adobe Flex, Rich Internet Applications by Mohammed Khan on 18. September 2008
Building rich internet applications has become a lot easier these days especially with the emergence of various technologies. One perfect case in point is the use of Flex on the userend as well as PHP on the backend to develop RIAs.
Zend Technologies Inc. has announced its alliance with Adobe Systems Inc. to speed up rich web application development with the deployment of PHP and Open Source Flex Framework. Zend has become popular for providing products and services used for developing, deploying, and managing Web based applications. The company builds application servers, development tools, and programming platforms that support the PHP application lifecycle.
The collaboration of the two huge companies aims to integrate the flexibility, productivity and enterprise reliability of PHP and Zend Platform with the user experience benefits of the open source Flex framework. Both companies also hope to provide technologies, content and services, to allow enterprise developers to create web applications with Flex on the client and PHP on the server. Furthermore, the team up is expected to give developers a more enhanced experience using their own development environments.
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HeatMap Featured in Adobe Flex
Posted in Adobe Flex, Rich Internet Applications by Kalpana Mada on 17. September 2008
Adobe Systems has decided to highlight HeatMap in its Adobe Flex 3.
A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors. It has been used for exhibiting areas of a Web page most often scanned by visitors which is also integrated in web analysis tools.
Adobe Flex 3 was officially released on February 5, 2008. From its beta version, it came out with major enhancements which include integration with the new versions of Adobe’s Creative Suite products, support for AIR. In addition, Flex 3 now supports the addition of profiling and refactoring tools to the Flex Builder IDE.
Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems.
