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.

Some people take the dog for a walk, others go play a round of golf. Not Christophe Coenraets. His idea of a good time is to illustrate Flex 2 / JMS integration by extending a simple 'realtime feed' application that he built a while back! Web Developer's & Designer's Journal is proud to bring you each month two of the month's best tips from Adobe's intrepid Flex Hero.

Flex 2 and the Flash Media Server are a match made in heaven. By combining the two technologies, streaming Flash videos at my office has become a nice part of my daily routine and a good excuse to add another monitor to my desktop. Whether your musical genre taste is classical or rock 'n roll, it's relatively easy to quickly create a desktop library of Flash videos. In this article, I'll describe one approach that will have you streaming in no time.

The authors of the bestselling book 'RIA with Adobe Flex and Java' will teach a one of a kind workshop that is aimed at Java developers with no or limited experience in developing enterprise-grade J2EE application with Adobe Flex front end.

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications? Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is created for people who think that they are way too busy to take several days off and spend them in the class. Just take one day off and attend the Real-World Java event. The discounted rate for this event is $395. To get this discount, enter the coupon code ?JUGgold' while registering

Adobe Systems Incorporated has introduced Adobe® LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite (ES), an integrated family of software for automating processes that help businesses and governments engage with customers, citizens, partners, and suppliers.

'The Java backlash,' writes Bruce Eckel, 'has been building up steam, and we're starting to see some fundamental shifts because of it.' Java has been around for 10 years yet applets are not the primary way that we interact with the web. Applets are not ubiquitous, and everyone got excited about AJAX instead.

Other than Flash Player, ClearBI does not require any additional software install on the client side. At the time of this writing, ClearBI is the only professional reporting solution on the market of rich Internet applications developed using Adobe Flex and Java. ClearBI is available in two versions: ClearBI Plugin and ClearBI End-User.

One of the many features available in Flex 2.0 is a ResourceBundle class, which allows for a standardized approach for internationalizing applications. Many recent projects of mine have required that applications be built that can easily be ported to other languages. Traditionally, I've used a series of XML files for this, one for each of the various languages that need to be supported. This strategy is still viable, and I still use it on some of my projects. However, I've recently discovered a different approach, which is available natively in Flex.

Adobe has announced that a large portion of the next version of Flex goes open source under Mozilla Public License (MPL). Here's the partial list of what becomes open: mxml, compc, and ActionScript compiler, command line debugger FDB, Flex framework and RPC libraries and testing infrastructure.

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.

According to Adobe's senior technical evangelist and AJAXWorld 2006 veteran Christophe Coenraets, we're seeing today the first steps of the industry's journey down a path towards 'high definition' user interfaces. 'Real time data, in-context collaboration, vector graphics-powered expressiveness, rich media integration, and offline capabilities will soon become standard attributes of any client application,' says Coenraets.

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.

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.

Andrew Trice, co-author of Flex 2 articles on Adobe's Developer Center, maintains a blog at http: //www.cynergysystems.com/ blogs/page/andrewtrice in which he helps orient newbies and experts alike about Flex. Web Developer's & Designer's Journal is pleased here to bring a sampler of some of his more recent shared insights.

What I love about Adobe Flex is that it is a framework in addition to a pretty impressive library of off-the-shelf controls, which can fit the bill for many of the Rich Internet Applications. Flex enables you to create new and extend existing components with a simplicity and elegance hardly ever offered by other GUI development systems. In this article I'll show you how to start extending a standard ComboBox component, which is a combination of edit field, button and a dropdown list. We will be customizing the API and adding some new functionality, making our ComboBox a bit handier than a standard one.

You know the drill: a language is called object-oriented if it supports inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism. And what do we do with interfaces?

All applications, simple or complex, online or desktop, are composed of many elements: screens, forms, menus, etc. In a Rich Internet Application, those elements can also include video, audio, or images. From the programmer's standpoint, it would be great to be able to reuse those parts so that they can be incorporated into different places of the application, or in different applications, using the same component.

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 and our sleep.

Typically, Flex developers use Flex Builder IDE, but Adobe also offers free Flex SDK, and you should know how to build your applications without Flex Builder. Using a sample Flex project, this article shows how you can automate its build and creation of HTML wrappers for your swf files.

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 simplicity and elegance hardly ever offered by other GUI development systems.

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 typically use one of the open source build tools such as Ant or Maven to formally describe and execute all steps required to build and deploy their projects.

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. Using closure automatically gives you the reference to the class instance in which you have your function to the external object processing the event.

Video over the Internet and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are the latest craze. With Flex 2 and Flash Media Server 2 (FMS), developers can easily create interactive media Web applications. In this article you'll create a basic video conference application that will give you the foundation to take you to the next step.

This is a short comparison table of major elements/concepts of these two languages for a quick reference.

For over a decade now, we have been trained to use the 'back' and 'forward' buttons in our Web browser to review or backtrack previously viewed content. We are trained to the point that there are even keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, this can be a problem when browsing Flex applications. Being the well-trained users that we are, we often forget that we could cause the Flex application to reload unwittingly.

This article is about creating a Flex tree control that uses a component hierarchy as the data provider. As with most of my Flex development, after struggling for days and then finally getting something to work, I later find out that there is a much easier way to do it that none of my searches ever turned up. I am a beginner Flex 2 developer, so any constructive feedback would be greatly appreciated.

This article is based on a presentation that I made at the Adobe Flex seminar in August 2006 (www.flexseminar.com/), after which the master of ceremonies Jeremy Geelan asked me to explain how to make great mapping mashups using Adobe Flex.

Christophe Coenraets, a senior Flex Evangelist from Adobe has published a blog showing a number of sample Flex applications that communicate with Java on the server side.

When I joined Macromedia/Adobe Consulting, my role as Practice Leader was to grow a practice in EMEA around Rich Internet Application technologies. , reflecting the recurrence in opportunity for us to fuse these client and server technologies together to solve a number of enterprise business problems. As I assume the responsibility to grow this combined practice in EMEA, I'll extend my blogging to share some of the excitement and thinking we have around how the technologies from our Enterprise Developer Business Unit - including Flex, Flex Data Services and the numerous LiveCycle technologies - converge as an enterprise business platform.

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

The subject of this piece is how to pass parameters from HTML to a Flex 2 application using flashVars parameters.

Flash Player 9 enters pre-Alpha stage on Linux. Adobe marketing needs to work harder.

We are about to enter a new era, when plain looking Web applications will gradually be replaced with RIA delivered over the Web that can actually land on the PC and work in a disconnected mode as well. How this will affect the evolution of Business Intelligence (BI) applications?

Flex 2 applications may have complex architectures and they are usually made up of multiple files: MXML, Actionscript and CSS.

You read the blogs, see a couple of articles, and hear all the buzz about Flex 2 and how it can really transform how your users can fluidly interact with information and the business in an exciting and efficient new way.

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.

Traditional application development processes make it challenging to meet the time and budget constraints facing businesses today. Going from the requirements gathering phase to writing up design documents to delivering applications can take many months-which is often too long for executives wanting to address new market opportunities or solve old business problems.

We've all seen Google finance, and the great job that it does at mixing HTML content with Flash content, as seen on company stock quotes. Google has done a great job at using Flash where it makes the most sense, in the graphs for company quotes, with HTML where it makes sense (linking to news items). Today, I'll show you how to build your own Google-finance type site, using a combination of Ajax, JSON, PHP and Flex / Flash. And, best of all, we'll do it all for free.