Articles by Indroniel Deb Roy

A Runtime Integration Approach to Application Development

Fri, 23 May 2008 14:30:00 EDT

This pattern is a hybrid of plug-in and event-driven architecture to integrate individual plug-ins together to come up with the Plug-in Integrator Pattern. This pattern leverages the benefits of both these well-known architectures to provide an optimal solution to build an enterprise-ready rapid application development infrastructure, preferably in Flex, but it might also be implemented in other programming languages such as Java and C#.

Data Services Made Easy for Adobe Flex Applications

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:30:00 EDT

Flex has gotten popular lately because of its rich GUI capabilities. It also comes in handy with HTTPService and Web Service components connecting to back-end servers to fetch and update data. But using this mechanism to talk to the back-end server requires formulating a unique service object from the Flex side, making a request, and getting back data from the back-end either in XML or plain text format. The response data then has to be parsed and fed to the Flex objects to update the UI. For small to medium-size Flex projects it's a viable solution, but for enterprise projects with thousands of external service calls it will get quite repetitive and could result in a lot of unmanageable, buggy code.

A New Way to Look at Portals

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 05:45:00 EDT

This article looks at an easy portal infrastructure that's based on a Flex-based portal container and portlets (individual Web applications) deployed as Flex modules. This portal framework provides full support for AJAX-type message processing with a very efficient deployment of portlets and manages the portlets so that they can logically connect to any Web application, freeing developers from routing to J2EE/.NET portal frameworks.

AJAX Lockdown

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 17:30:00 EST

AJAX is definitely taking Web applications to the next level in ease of use and desktop-like user interfaces. And it can even be used to create the secure, privacy-oriented Web applications that are so needed in today's Web world.

XML Journal Feature: Transforming Large XML Documents, An Alternative to XSLT

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 18:45:00 EDT

With the evolution of XML, the XSL standard also became very popular for transforming XML data to XML, text, PDF, etc. However there are some limitations to the XSLT transformation. Today's XSLT processors rely on holding input data in memory as a DOM tree while the transformation is taking place. The tree structure in memory can be as much as ten times the original data size, so in practice, the limit on data size for an XSLT conversion is just a few megabytes. As a result it can only handle XML documents with moderate size - to be processed as the full input, DOM needs to be in the memory for any XSL transformation.

Generating XML Instances from Flat Files

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

Enterprise applications such as banking, healthcare, and so on still use flat files to import/export data between applications. Flat files contain machine-readable data that is typically encoded in printable characters. There is a growing need for these applications to interact with XML-aware applications and Web services, and to satisfy this need these applications must convert flat file data to an XML format.