Enterprises are enthusiastically embracing the shift from traditional client/server computing to SaaS. Inspired by customers who have embraced the Web, developers are using RIA tools to create innovative new on-demand business applications. One important factor in the shift from tradit...

Adobe Flex and Flash are the ideal technology for Rich Internet Applications because you can build those applications with reusable components that are Loosely Coupled. In his session, learn how you can create an On-Demand Authoring Environment for creating Rich Internet Applications b...

In this session Thomas will share his experience in migrating from AJAX to Flex, the advantages/disadvantages that Flex has as the primary client for a consumer web-based SaaS product, and his vision of how Flex + AIR via any desktop + Mobile (in one or more technical forms) takes us a...

4D announced the release of 4D Web 2.0 Pack v11 Release 2. The new version, a combination of two products - 4D AJAX Framework and 4D for Flex - brings a powerful set of tools, plug-ins, and components that allow 4D developers to harness the power of Web 2.0 technologies, and deliver li...

Read about Forrester's findings on RIA security included in a Forrester Research paper valued at $775 titled 'Securing Rich Internet Applications' by Jeffrey Hammond, plus find out about Curl's Security Architecture in a new Curl white paper titled 'Developing Secure Rich Internet Appl...

In today's complex web application world, developers need to test applications that go beyond simple HTTP-based pages. They need to test Rich Internet Applications that incorporate complex technologies like Adobe's Flex. Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you wo...

Following the private Beta release last month, DreamFace Interactive announced the general availability of the DreamFace-Fx Mashup Kit for Adobe Flex. As promised, DreamFace-Fx is the first Mashup Kit to reach developers in a comprehensive roadmap which will extend the DreamFace Open S...

2008 is going to be an important year for Rich Internet Applications. Most organizations are delivering or planning to deliver Rich Internet Applications; however, at the same time, most IT managers are facing a dilemma: which Rich Internet Application technology and platform to use? T...

In today's cooking class you'll add to your cookbook a delicious recipe. It's quick and won't cost you a dime. I'm sure you've been in one of these situations when you have unexpected guests arriving in 20 minutes and need to make a good impression. Let's create an application that ...

Flex 2 was released in the Summer of 2006 and it was a mini-revolution in the RIA space. Almost nobody knew about Flex 1.5, but now almost everyone has at least heard about this software. Flex 3 was released in early 2008. It has a number of useful new features, but it was not a major ...

Vectors supporting types are the part of next release - and are billed more of performance/coding help then language enhancement. Most of the Java 5 constructs are not really applicable to ActionScript 3 - for fair comparison you need to use Java 7/8 with dynamic scripting language sup...

Adobe has put an alpha pre-release of AIR for Linux up in hopes, it says, of getting feedback from the community, not to mention winning adherents. It's English-only. The company also joined the Linux Foundation to encourage the growth of RIA technologies on Linux, it said. The company...

Fast-spreading rich Internet applications require new skills for development of what was known as boring-looking enterprise applications. In the past, development of the user interface was done by software developers to the best of their design abilities. A couple of buttons here, a gr...

If I could pass just one Flex advice that would be: Use Data Transfer Objects. Use custom Data Transfer Objects to pass data between server and Flash tiers of your Flex application. Do not use XML. Yes, I know that XML cool. Do not use raw objects.

Parleys.com is a great Web site with lots of recoded videos of technical presentations on a wide variety of Java-related topics. While the original version of Parleys has been created in AJAX, more advanced Flex and AIR versions are now available too. I had a chance to chat with a man...

OK, car manufactures go Flex. Will they lose or gain customers because of that? Car manufacturers want to have fancy consumer sites. It's a world of RIA, and having interactive Web sites should bring more people to car dealerships. But poorly performing Web site can turn into lost rev...

This is the first in a series of articles that will cover best practices of Flex development using the code of the soon-to-be-released open source class library theriabook. These components were developed by Flex and Java architects from Farata Systems. Over the past couple of years we...

Earth Live is an application that EffectiveUI has created in collaboration with Discovery channel. The application helps people to learn the world by engaging them with a more effective UI, so complex information such as climate change can be digestible by a regular person. The appl...

We are entering an era of Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and many enterprise development managers are facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true Java or .NET technologies or less known (as yet) yet AJAX, Flex, OpenLaszlo...

Flex is an open source product, which means that you can fix the bugs on your own. This may fork out the product, but that's another story altogether. On the other hand, developers can vote for the bugs so the Flex team can fix them. I remain cautiously optimistic that Flex team will b...

Action Message Format (AMF) is a protocol that is used to serialize the data coming into Flash Player or going out to other programming environments that need to communicate with Flash Player. Say, if you create in Java an instance of the class MyOrder, this instance can be converted i...

The Adobe Flex enterprise market picks up really fast, and it's obvious that the need for Flex developers will only get bigger and bigger. The question is what kind of Flex developers are in huge demand. I'll share with you the experience of our company, but first, let's look at the d...

Unless your Flex 2 project has to go to production this month, switch to Flex 3. Now. Flex 3 final Beta days are almost over and it brings you lots of goodies. If you are still thinking of using AJAX or JSF for your data intensive business application, just stop it, will you! Just take...

I ran into an interesting blog written by a Flash programmer who feels that Adobe's promotion of Flex puts him and other Flash programmers at a disadvantage. And he knows how to resist!

Less than 10 years ago, still in its infancy, the Internet was a land of promise for businesses. Companies saw bright new ways to increase their agility, reach more customers and to deliver new, never-before-seen services. Unquestionably since then it has transformed the way consumers ...

The main concern of any project manager is if there are enough people in the pool of Flex developers to staff the project. Yes, there is a pool of Flex developers, but let's look at the creature called 'Flex Developer' under the microscope. If you are considering adding Flex to your se...

Redmond Developer News has published an interview with Dr. James Gosling, creator of the Java language, where among other things, he talks about JavaFX and competing technologies. And he made a comment I can't agree with. Here it is: 'If you look at something like Flash, when you get t...

Time Magazine has published their version of the 50 best Web sites of 2007. Check it out. You may or may not agree with their ranking, but I'm sure you'll find some interesting sites there that you did not know about. It's good to see that Time has started using Adobe Flex too.

This started as a Skype chat room conversation between my colleague Anatole Tartakovsky and myself, and I thought that it would be a good idea to invite more Flex developers to join this discussion. Having said this, I'd like to make it clear that over my career, I've been developing f...

In Java world, the solution to this issue is pretty simple. A typical Java application consists of a number of .jar files (think libraries or swc) and there is a concept of a class path. If a program needs to use a class MyGreatCreation, the Java class loader tries to find it based on ...

Just two of the text fields on your Flex window have to support the mouse wheel. The user turns the wheel, the numeric field in these fields is incremented or decremented. Let's do it.

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...