Professional BlazeDS: Creating Rich Internet Applications with Flex® and Java®

Chapter 1. Flex for Java Developers

This book is a comprehensive resource on leveraging Flex and Java together to create robust enterprise-grade Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). The book chooses the popular open source data services product from Adobe, BlazeDS, as the critical integration layer that makes Flex and server-side Java work together. BlazeDS is a piece of Java code and works within a Java virtual machine (JVM). More precisely, it's a web application that can be successfully deployed in a Java application server or even in a minimalist Servlet container like Apache Tomcat. The book, therefore, talks more Java than Flex and focuses on how BlazeDS can be configured, customized, and extended to integrate with all things Java. However, it's not practical that integration be studied without looking at both sides of the puzzle. Therefore, in this chapter, we start by talking about Flex, Java's counterpart in the context of this book. It's not a comprehensive treatment of the subject. It can't be in mere 40-odd pages. It's just enough information to help you understand the basics and to present to you the interfaces and integration points. The illustration and discussion is biased toward addressing the Java developer more than anybody else, although nothing in this chapter really requires knowledge of Java itself.

Let's begin exploring and understanding the fundamentals of Flex.