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 article shows how to treat PDF printing as a feature of your application.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 displayed in exactly 20 milliseconds, as there is some OS/browser overhead. Besides, some browsers may impose restrictions on plugins to lower CPU utilization on the user?s machine.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 short, one blind man touched the elephant's head, the other one touched the tail, someone was by the leg. And each of them visualized an elephant differently based on what he touched.

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.

This sample application shows the data exchange between Adobe Flex and Microsoft Excel

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.

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 meter.

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 application. It stores the size and position of the main application window, keeps track of its children, such as floating popups and modal windows.

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