Agile Enterprise Application Development with Flex

Preface

Four years ago, the authors of this book were looking for a solid platform and a robust component framework to develop rich Internet applications (RIAs) for enterprises. We worked with AJAX. We worked with Java Swing. But when Adobe released the alpha version of Flex 2, we realized that this was exactly what we’d been looking for. To prove our convictions, we even created a company, Farata Systems, dedicated to the creation of enterprise solutions that utilize Adobe Flex on the frontend.

Since then, we have worked on lots of large- and small-scale projects that involved either Adobe Flex or Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) technologies. During these years, we have faced recurring issues and have been able to apply the same or similar solutions over and over again. Many solutions involved adding missing features to the user interface (UI) components that came with Flex SDK. In some cases, we had to enhance the communication layer of BlazeDS or LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS). All these enhancements were possible because the Flex framework was well designed as an open framework that allowed customization of its parts that didn’t meet specific needs.

We’ve always shared our findings in the form of technical blogs or articles, but when the amount of accumulated materials reached critical mass, it was clear that the time was ripe for a book targeting enterprise RIA developers and managers.

Having O’Reilly as a publisher of your book is an honor in itself, but you might not know that to get this little “Adobe Developer Library” logo on the cover, our book outline had to get approval from Adobe Flex team members—the most respected software engineers in the field.

Typically, technical books on a particular software include the appropriate version number in the title. This book is different, however; it doesn’t focus on an application programming interface (API) that’s specific to any version of the software. Rather, it explains the approach to efficient design of scalable Flex applications, building component libraries, and dealing with performance issues. Code examples from the book will work in Flex 3 and Flex 4 (in beta at the time of this writing).

The last chapter of the book is dedicated to LCDS 3.0, which was released just before press time and offers a new model-driven approach to developing data-intensive applications. Though the chapter on AIR is based on AIR 1.5, it offers a unique and original solution for data synchronization using AIR and BlazeDS, which will work just fine with AIR 2.0, which, as we write, is currently in beta.

Who Is This Book For?

This book is intended for Flex and Java application architects, team leaders, and senior developers who are interested in getting to know:

• How the Flex framework works under the hood

• The pros and cons of some of the third-party libraries

• How to build reusable component libraries for their enterprises

• How to select and improve (if need be) Flex-to-Java communication

• What to watch for from a performance perspective

• How to modularize the Flex RIA

• Which design patterns to apply

• How to select third-party frameworks

This book will be very useful for Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) developers who are still not sure whether the Flex SDK is a good fit for their cross-platform RIAs. We are positive that after reading the first several chapters, you will appreciate the power and flexibility of the open source Flex SDK, third-party libraries, and their server-side tools.

This is not an introductory book, and we assume that the reader already has some experience with developing Flex applications and a good understanding of object-oriented design principles.