Adobe Labs has introduced FABridge, a new JavaScript library enables developers to easily integrate Flex applications with Ajax or DHTML code running in the browser.

The Flex Ajax Bridge (FABridge) is a small, unobtrusive library of code that developers can insert into a Flex application, a Flex component, or even an empty SWF file to expose it to scripting in the browser.

FABridge is built with the “don’t repeat yourself” principle in mind. Rather than having to define new, simplified APIs to expose a graph of ActionScript objects to JavaScript, with FABridge you can make your ActionScript classes available to JavaScript without any additional coding. Once you’ve inserted the library, pretty much anything you can do using ActionScript, you can do using JavaScript.

Flash Player has the ability natively, through the External API (the ExternalInterface class), to call JavaScript from ActionScript and vice versa.

Developers may find the FABridge library useful if
• They are using a rich Flex component in an Ajax application but don’t want to write a lot of Flex code. If they wrap the component in a bridge-enabled stub application. they can script it entirely from JavaScript – including using eval()’d JavaScript generated remotely by the server.
• They have one or two people on their team who know Flex. The FABridge library allows everyone on a team to use the work produced by one or two Flex specialists.
• They are building an integrated RIA with both Flex and AJAX portions. While they could build the integration themselves using ExternalInterface, they might find it faster to start with FABridge as a head start.