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 release. In my opinion, a more modest 2.5 would suffice. We are expecting more now. Flex 4 will come out to the world next year and while the Flex team has announced a number of very interesting syntax improvements, I'd love to see more fundamental improvements in this great RIA tool.

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 will auto-generate a Flex-Tomcat-BlazeDS-DB2 application.

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 support - and then the way you speak that language changes. Compare how enum support evolved in Java over the years - starting with patterns - and you would think of language as of evolving environment. I was coming to Java in '97 from C++ and I thought of it as a very poor language. 10 years made it almost tolerable - but I still miss ability to redefine operators - does it really matter to anyone who never did it in first place?

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 says Linux developers can use HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that deploy to desktops across operating systems.

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? The number of different frameworks and libraries is too vast to even consider evaluating a fraction of them.

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 grid there, gray background. Their users were happy because they did not see any better. This is about to change...

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 behind this project.

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 revenues.

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've been successfully using various coding techniques and custom components that turned the application development in Flex into a RAD project.

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 application uses digital imagery so the user can interactively create a climate picture of the planet Earth. The UI offers several layers, and you can load the content of the layer (i.e. rain) onto the 3D image of the globe.

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 be more responsive than their Java colleagues. Time will tell.

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 into a string of bytes, sent over the wire to Flash Player and then recreated there as an instance of the ActionScript object. The rules of how to do this are defined by a communication protocol, such as AMF.

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 diagram from the popular job aggregator.

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 care of your business with Flex 3, AIR, and BlazeDS.

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 and businesses exchange information and has become a vital part of nearly every organization's communication and operational architecture.

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!

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 set of skills, it?s still early in the game and you can join the fast growing Flex community. Decide which group of the Flex developers looks most appealing to you. Set a goal and go for it. Be what you can be.

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 to the much more advanced stuff - richer interfaces, more complex network protocols, more complex APIs - it really falls short.'

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 frameworks myself and truly respect people who are capable of creating frameworks, and Anatole has huge experience in this area as well. Here we're just questioning the need to create frameworks not for a general-purpose language like Java, but for a domain-specific framework like Flex.

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 the classes or jars listed in the classpath. If there is more than one version of this class in the path, the class loader will grab the first one. This greatly simplifies deploying any patches in Java production applications. Just make changes to your class and place it in the jar that is listed first in the classpath. Then deploy just this jar in production, and the loader will be happy to pick up the brand new version of MyGreatCreation.

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 from BlazeDS? What's under the hood?

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. You did not have to purchase any expensive communication software to use these two Flex objects. Adobe has released Beta version of BlazeDS. This changes the market of the fast Web 2.0, but there other players here too.

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 Coenraets, a Senior Flex Evangelist from Adobe, told me about this new free product called BlazeDS. While many people are using Flex for creating cool widgets that can make your Web page prettier, enterprise Flex developers have to deal with such boring things as bringing data to the client. And they want to do this as fast as possible. AMF3 protocol allows your Web application to send the data over the wire at lease 10 times faster than a regular HTTP.

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 handled.

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 a number of roadblocks that prevent Adobe Flex from being the only solution for RIA.

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 portfolio SWF wasn't loaded from finance.yahoo.com, and we aren't allowed to install crossdomain.xml on the Yahoo! servers. We'll use another technique called Flex proxy.

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't just 'try this framework on this new project'. I live in the same code base longer supporting existing clients, and can't do dramatic re-factoring without getting fired.

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 bothering too much about which Flex components you are going to select to implement the required functionality. Now what? Just look at this screen below that consists of a number of nested components and containers, which I numbered for easier reference. For simplicity (or should I say for better abstraction?) I didn't use the actual components such as panels and dropdowns, but I'm sure you can extrapolate this image to your real-world business application.

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 than the list price, but even today Amazon.com offers it for $700. Maybe they'll also drop the price in November. Actually, each of these prices are one dollar less, but I'm sure Flex developers will be purchasing Flex Builder not because it costs $249, but because it make your work more productive. Flex Builder 2 with Charting will turn into Flex Builder 3 professional and will include new advanced datagrid component, which will have some really useful improvements. Looking forward to the production release of Flex Builder 3 with a hope that it'll perform better.

Adobe will release Flex 3 around February of 2008. It has a number of improvements and new features, in particular it'll bring Flash designers and Flex developers together. Creative Suite 3 will have an easy way to incorporate Flex content right into the timeline of Flash IDE. Containers created in Flash will be able to have content developed in Flex. Earlier this year I saw a presentation of Silverstream from Microsoft. I was impressed by the ease of developing fancy GUI applications by a Web designer who did not know programming. He?d just create fancy graphics (using the timeline) and effects adding the place holders for the code to be written by Sillverlight developers. Now Flash designers will also easily incorporate Flex code in their creations.

Flex has a short learning curve for Java developers, who will find that there are a lot of familiar language constructs and patterns. It also provides excellent remoting capabilities for Java programmers, allowing transparent data transfer between ActionScript and Java 1.4 data types. With Java version 5 and above in production for a while now you have a lot of Java data structures that use enum and need marshaling to/from the Flex applications. This article provides a working example of the ActionScript language extension for an enum data type.

My message to Flex team is simple, 'Guys, you did a great job with Flex framework, but it's out of the cage now, and people are actually using it as a foundation for their professional work. You can't just change API whenever you fill like it. This is not a green field situation anymore. Look at Java - there is tons of deprecated API that's carried over from release to release. Of course, it leads to a lot of unused code in JDK itself, but at least it gives third-party developers a chance to plan upgrades of their software accordingly.

Adobe has published statistics on the penetration of Flash Player 9 as of June 2007. The numbers look pretty good - over 90 percent of the users in mature markets have it already installed. 90% is not a 100% and not even 98% that Flash Player 8 already enjoys. Since the penetration speed looks pretty similar for the version 8 and 9 of the player, it?s safe to assume that Flash Player 9 will reach its 98% mark in the Summer of 2008.

While using Adobe Flex for development of the front end portion of your J2EE applications quickly becomes a reality, many enterprise managers are still waiting for development of Flex ecosystem that would include a pool of professional developers as well as third-party components making Flex-related projects more productive.

Farata Systems has announced the production release of ClearBI 1.0, a Web reporter and business intelligence engine for rich Internet applications. While ClearBI 1.0 is targeted for Adobe Flex and Java developers, the upcoming ClearBI 1.1 is a rich reporting component that can be used with any AJAX application.

Adobe's LifeCycle Data Services ES offers developers powerful capabilities. Some of this software's capabilities, specifically server push, can be developed with relative ease using a utility class that has been around in the Flash APIs for a great while, and without having to pay licensing fees for LifeCycle Data Services ES. The utility class spotlighted in this article is flash.net.XMLSocket, and it provides all the client-side plumbing required for implementing server push.