Anatole Tartakovsky

The publicity that AJAX grabbed over the last half a year is based on closing the gap between the Web applications and the desktop applications, combining the "reach" and "rich." At the same time, the gap between the technological level of AJAX and what corporate developers expect in their modern arsenal is really astonishing. After all, AJAX is neither a tool nor a platform. There is no AJAX standards committee or community process in place. While software vendors are crafting proprietary development platforms on top of AJAX (which pretty much means "from scratch"), early adopters of AJAX are left on their own. In Part 1 (JDJ, Vol. 10, issue 9) we touched on the foundation of AJAX - the ability to establish script-to-server communication. This is what makes HTML pages dynamic and responsive. Does it mean we are ready to kick-off our own version of Yahoo mail? No, ... (more)

Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex 2 and Java

A typical Java developer knows that when you need to develop a GUI for a Java application, Swing is the tool. Eclipse SWT also has a number of followers, but the majority of people use Java Swing. For the past 10 years, it was a given that Swing development wouldn't be easy; you have to master working with the event-dispatch thread, GridBaglayout, and the like. Recently, the NetBeans team created a nice GUI designer called Matisse, which was also ported to MyEclipse. Prior to Matisse, JBuilder had the best Swing designer, but it was too expensive. Now a good designer comes with N... (more)

Adobe Flex 2: Advanced DataGrid

In Part 1 (CFDJ, Vol. 8, issue 10) we introduced the destination-aware grid, formatters, and renderers. In this article we are continuing our discussion about datagrid renderers and... RadioButtonGroupBox as Drop-In Renderer We can apply similar techniques to RadioButton controls. The following code snippet suggests how the group of RadioButton controls can be used as a drop-in item renderer (and editor). Instead of an onValue/offValue pair, we are introducing an array of options (we could have gone further and upgraded to , which is similar to the Bu... (more)

Multi-Tier Application Development with Adobe Flex

This excerpt describes the process of creating a complete Flex-Java distributed application. Upgrading Flex applications to Java Enterprise Edition applications is done with Flex Data Services. FDS provides transparent access to POJO, EJBs, and JMS and comes with adapters for frameworks like Spring and Hibernate. These powerful capabilities come free for a single-CPU server, otherwise see your local Adobe dealer. Flex can also invoke any SOAP Web Service or send an HTTP request to any URL via Web Services and HTTPService components. Here we will illustrate Flex controls, HTTPSer... (more)

Working with Large Applications

In this excerpt from our book, Rich Internet Applications, we'll cover how to set up large applications intended for Web or, more broadly speaking, distributed deployment. As an example let's consider an enterprise application that consists of hundreds of screens, reports, forms, and dashboards. Accordingly, about a dozen engineers specializing in GUIs, frameworks, data layers, and business domains are working on this application in parallel. Every application "run" in Flex Builder as well as the invocation of the application's MXML file processed by the Web-tier Flex compiler r... (more)