Realizing that Flash is a better name than Flex for a platform, Adobe is now referring to everything it does related to Flash (including the Flash Player, Adobe AIR, Flex developer tools, and Flash media servers) as the Flash Platform. That’s what I’ve been calling it anyway, so I’m glad they finally caught up. Beyond the marketing shift, Adobe will be making some more significant announcements at its MAX developer conference this week.

Adobe released version 1.5 of Adobe AIR today, incorporating Flash Player 10 (Pixel Bender, hardware accelerated graphics, improved video streaming, 3D effects) and the super fast JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish.

Maven is a tool that provides an uniform and easy build process for your projects. In real life this means generally that you describe your project in one xml file and Maven reads this information to compile and package your project. The pros of this approach are that the project can be set up quickly in new environment, you can quite transparently add new features, and you have all the time clear overview of libraries that are used in your project.

An Adobe partner have announced a new plug-in allowing .NET developers to develop Flex applications from within Visual Studio

GUI Layout is hard, but is it harder then it should be in Java? Can we do something to better the situation? My next few blogs will be about prototyping different approaches in an attempt to find something better. For my first article I'm going to attempt to apply XML to the GUI layout. The goal is to approximate some of the features of MXML from Flex. In a previous article I compared layout logic in Flex/Flex Builder to Java. I found only one layout manager that had no Java equivalent. I wrote CoordinateLayout to mimic absolute layout from Flex.

This article will describe the most common ways to bring data into a Flex application and will present the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. It assumes that the reader has a basic understanding of the Flex language. Unlike a classic web application (by classic I mean pre AJAX) where the pages are generated on the server the Flex application is loaded at startup and makes calls in order to load or to save data. Of course a Flex application can also make requests in order to load other Flex modules in the same way a Java application can dynamically load JAR libraries but that is a subject for a different article.

Writing JEE applications with Grails and Flex

As rich Internet application (RIA) technologies mature and become more widely visible to developers, inevitably they will cross with established technologies, like Java. A recent blog post from the game development company Sharendipitous Moments, entitled “We’re Moving to Flash. Here’s Why,” created discussion on whether Java is losing ground to RIA technologies, such as Flex.

Integration testing is Flex' terra incognita. The post examines how to do automated integration tests for Flex with the help of Maven and Selenium.

IntelliJ IDEA 8.0, the popular Java IDE, has been released and now supports building and debugging Flex applications.

Today, FlexServerLib, the BlazeDS extension library was announced. The goal of FlexServerLib is to provide off-the-shelf access to services Flex developers would not normally be used to coding, like email, pdf generation, etc.

X2O makes building database-driven Flex and Flash CS4 apps incredibly faster. Define your data model using the visual interface and it will generate a database, a secure CMS, web services, and a library that you can drop into your project and use to interact with your data model via an easy to use API. No hosting setup, database development or server-side programming...instead, it lets you focus on your application.

Live demo of a new Vector Graphics Editor using Flash. It has gesture recognition and uses SVG natively. This new editor has many new innovating ideas for a more natural and easy sketch and drawing. It's really fast as you can check out. There are many SVG developers and designers can use it to do quick SVG scenes and drawings. The SVG actionscript framework could be used by developers to create rich and interactive graphical applications

There is many ways to skin Flex applications. To name some that I've used: Flex CSS, Programmatic AS3, Flash, Degrafa, Photoshop (JPG's, GIF's and PNG's) and Illustrator. What usually needs to happen on a project is a combination of some or all of the above. Not having a single point of reference for skinning creates quite a bottleneck.

When you have a static number of items to display, presentation is easy. But what if this amount is dynamic? This is when the use of a Repeater can help. A Repeater is a nonvisual component that iterates over a collection of information, creating components on the fly as it moves along.

Another main difference between Java and ActionScript is in how data is communicated to and from the server. In just about any Rich Internet Application this is going to be an important part of your architecture, so it’s important that it is handled correctly.

This post describes an implementation that allows you to get around the lack of anonymous classes in ActionScript. My biggest complaint about this solution is that it moves compile time errors to runtime. It does, however, hide these issues from the consumers of the implementation.

The goal of this article is to help you gain a better understanding of the Strategy design pattern. The Strategy pattern is used to separate the areas of an application that differ from the areas of an application that remain the same. This design pattern sits on top of several fundamental OOP principals. For example the Strategy pattern uses the concept of programming to an interface rather than an implementation. Strategy also favors composition over inheritance. The reason you would use the Strategy pattern is to abstract an algorithm from a class and create a new class based on the algorithm. Using polymorphism the algorithms can be changed at runtime by the compositing class. I hope you’re as excited about the topic of design patterns as I am.

Flex provides means to create RIA applications in declarative fashion using MXML. Unlike Swing where you need to do the entire coding in Java, Flex hides a lot of complexity behind MXML tags like JSTL/taglibs do for JSPs. In JSP world, view level scripting is done in JavaScript and presentation layer server side code is written in Java which kind of provides a separation between client side code and server side code. If you really want to do some dynamic stuff on JSPs, either you write some Java code inside JSP (not recommended though) or you use/create taglibs to achieve the same effect. In Flex world, it's all about ActionScript (AS). Irrespective of whether you are writing some scripting or server side code, it's all AS code which kind of creates a confusing situation in front of a developer. It becomes very difficult to separate the scripting code from server side code. That's one of the reasons people complain about Flex as it looks like it doesn't provide a clear separation between scripting code and server side code.

In this post I’ll talk about starting the actual port and addressing some of the things that are much harder to do beforehand because they would cause compile time errors. Many of these are syntactic changes but there are some other important points about data structure usage. The following posts will address some more advanced topics.

In my last post I mentioned that we are moving to Flash. The response has been crazy, just check out the comments there. In the next few posts I will highlight some of our experiences in doing the port. It’s been an interesting ride… stay tuned for more.

The Granite Data Services project was started with the (ambitious) goal of providing to Flex the same kind of development model we were used to with modern J2EE frameworks. Read all about it here.

There are half a dozen characteristics that could be expected of a good MVC framework. The approach was to gather a pulse on what frameworks are being discussed, download and view the source, and work with some examples based on those characteristics.

This post is the first in a series regarding a complete port of a very large Java project to ActionScript. Stay tuned for the intricacies that arise in doing so.

A Flex / Actionscript development tutorial that shows you how to use the Papervision 3D egine to create 3D Flash effects in your webpage. This article shows you how to add real time physics to the Papervision 3D engine.