By Yakov Fain  During the last week I had to interview five developers for a position that required the following skills: Flex, Java, Spring, and Hibernate. Most of these guys had demonstrated the 3 out of 10 level of Flex skills even though each of them claimed a practical experience on at least tw... Jul. 18, 2009 02:30 PM EDT Reads: 11,254 Replies: 39 |
By Anatole Tartakovsky  There are three ways of creating PDF documents from Adobe Flex applications: by using the forms/LiveCycle designer, by treating PDF printing as one of the features of your Flex application, and by using Snapshots available in LCDS, which uses bitmaps to represent Flash content. This ar... Jan. 22, 2009 11:00 AM EST Reads: 17,633 |
By Flex News Desk  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. Mar. 26, 2007 12:15 PM EDT Reads: 18,329 |
By Yakov Fain 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. Feb. 26, 2007 10:00 AM EST Reads: 26,508 Replies: 1 |
By Yakov Fain 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. Feb. 11, 2007 07:00 PM EST Reads: 15,337 |
By Yakov Fain You know the drill: a language is called object-oriented if it supports inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism. And what do we do with interfaces? Jan. 30, 2007 09:00 AM EST Reads: 23,796 |
By Yakov Fain 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... Dec. 21, 2006 01:45 AM EST Reads: 21,222 |
By Victor Rasputnis  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... Dec. 9, 2006 03:00 PM EST Reads: 35,761 |
By Yakov Fain 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... Dec. 5, 2006 05:00 AM EST Reads: 21,247 |
By Anatole Tartakovsky 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... Dec. 4, 2006 06:00 PM EST Reads: 18,807 |
By Yakov Fain This command will build the swf file with the frame rate of fifty frames per second. Display list rendering and the ActionScript execution take turns, hence the frame rate can affect your application performance. Setting the frame rate to fifty does not mean that each frame will be di... Nov. 21, 2006 09:45 AM EST Reads: 22,461 Replies: 2 |
By Yakov Fain This is a short comparison table of major elements/concepts of these two languages for a quick reference. Nov. 12, 2006 01:30 PM EST Reads: 30,202 |
By Yakov Fain Every now and then we create reusable components, and so far we are giving them away for free. Some pathetic bloggers call this 'giving back to the community'. We look at it simple: if we do not have time to productionize the component, we donate it. Nov. 1, 2006 07:30 AM EST Reads: 19,813 |
By Yakov Fain When I was learning how to work with AJAX, I went through a number of 101-type articles. The biggest problem with these tutorials is that the authors are trying to explain several things at once, which is confusing. I'll try to offer you a very simple example of an Ajax application. Oct. 30, 2006 12:30 AM EST Reads: 27,425 |
By Yakov Fain Ten years ago I've been doing PowerBuilder and my mentality was different: first, I was the best friend of business users, and second I did not really worry about what's under the hood. I could do stuff quickly, or using the modern jargon, I was an Oct. 20, 2006 08:00 AM EDT Reads: 17,883 |
By Yakov Fain  Here's the assignment: write a Flex application that can run against different servers (dev, uat, prod) without the need to recompile the SWF file. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the URL of the server should be passed to SWF as a parameter, and we’ll do this by... Oct. 12, 2006 07:30 AM EDT Reads: 42,974 Replies: 1 |
By Yakov Fain In Java, if you've created an object from a particular class, you can use only properties and methods that were defined in this class. This is not the case in ActionScript 3. This is one of the examples of unusual (from the OOP perspective) programming techniques. Oct. 3, 2006 07:15 AM EDT Reads: 25,069 |
By Yakov Fain Each of our students comes with different understanding of how to program in Flex according to their 'legacy' background. So I'll tell you the story that might have happened in a real life, but first, let me remind you of an old Indian tale about seven blind men and an elephant. In sho... Sep. 24, 2006 07:30 PM EDT Reads: 20,589 Replies: 2 |
By Anatole Tartakovsky While a large Flex application is loaded, the user may experience unpleasant delays, which can be used productively to logon to this application. Besides, it'll give the user perception that your application loads faster. Sep. 21, 2006 02:45 PM EDT Reads: 19,972 |
By Yakov Fain This sample application shows the data exchange between Adobe Flex and Microsoft Excel Sep. 18, 2006 11:15 PM EDT Reads: 19,330 Replies: 1 |
By Yakov Fain Can you put Flash Player's pretty face on your Web application written in Java/.Net/Python/PHP et al? Yes. Can you do it for free? Yes. Aug. 27, 2006 11:15 AM EDT Reads: 20,850 Replies: 2 |
By Anatole Tartakovsky There are quite a few developers that a) become impatient if the build takes more then 5 seconds and b) concerned that their application will be delivered to the user with similar attention span that could walk away in 10 seconds or less - regardles of the artwork in the progress mete... Aug. 25, 2006 07:00 AM EDT Reads: 14,044 |
By Yakov Fain The SystemManager is the main manager that controls the application window, creates and parents the Application instance, popups, cursors, manages the classes in the ApplicationDomain, and more. The SystemManager is the first class that is instantiated by Flash Player for your applicat... Aug. 3, 2006 11:15 AM EDT Reads: 29,456 Replies: 1 |
By Yakov Fain Adobe Flex Builder has many convenient keyboard commands and hints that make your programming faster. But this is a list of Flex Builder shortcuts that I use on a regular basis Jul. 21, 2006 10:00 PM EDT Reads: 21,558 Replies: 2 |