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Table of Contents
Subject of the Book
Sample Chapter
Blitz Interview

Chapter 11 Samples

Errata/Updates

ISBN 0-9777622-2-X
Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters Perfect AC (USA)

"I think that Flex for rich Internet client applications can become a major player. Its easy cross-platform support removes many programmer headaches, the component model offers powerful library reuse, and the result produces a very comfortable and appealing interface for the client to use. Because this book teaches you how to use Flex along with the dominant server-side development tool (Java), it?s an ideal introduction if you want to learn how to leverage these technologies."

- Bruce Eckel, author, Thinking in Java

 
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Q. How did this project started?
A.  Each of us spent years and years and years designing and developing business applications and software tools. As a matter of fact, three of us have more than 70 years of combined software development experience, and we’ve had a chance to work with many different technologies, languages, and platforms.  We believe that rich internet applications (RIA) have great future, and most importantly, we have similar understanding of what good client software should look like. So we decided to share our views in this book.

Q. What makes you think that Adobe Flex is good choice for developing RIA?
A.  The short answer is that Flex is  simple, and it supports easy integration with most of other technologies used for developing   Web applications. Web clients created with  Flex are compiled, they run in  Flash player, which is a robust virtual machine available in most platforms.

Q. Flex software is not new, why did you decide to write about it now?
Even though Adobe Flex (formerly Macromedia) was available for years, the latest release of Flex 2 is a serious step to make this software more appealing to masses, mainly because of the following reasons:

  1. Changes in Flex  2 pricing policy allow you to use any plain text editor and free compilers and Flex Framework to create nice looking and distributed applications. That should open up the world of RIA to millions of programmers around the world
  2. The new Eclipse-based Flex Builder environment is an excellent IDE which makes development of Flex applications a breeze. Even though Flex Builder is not free, it will be reasonably priced on the same scale as other Adobe authoring tools.
  3. Flex 2 runs as add-on with your Java, PHP, Cold Fusion or other server making integration a very simple task.

Q.  Who this book is for?
A.   Any software developer interested in development of RIA with Flex can read this book. Also, we’d like to introduce RIA with Flex to a huge Java community. Java has its own ways to develop rich Web clients using Swing components, but we’d like to show how non-Java front end can be used with Java Enterprise applications.

Q. Will your book cover Flex basics or advanced topics?
A.  To bring every reader on the same page our book will consist of about 25% of basic materials, and the rest are more advanced topics. Adobe offers a great deal of good online tutorials explaining how to create basic applications with Flex, but we’d like to go one step further and show some cool tricks/techniques available in Flex.

Q. It seems that many people are considering  AJAX to be  the right way of developing RIA.  What do you think of this technology?
A. AJAX is an interesting set of techniques, and it certainly will find its place in applications like global internet retail stores,  news and search engines, and some others. But for the majority of business systems AJAX applications present challenges in robustness and performance as the  browsers were not targeted as application development platform Also, lack of standards in Web browsers presents additional coding  and testing issues. Between 1999 and 2005 authors developed number of applications and frameworks using AJAX and believe that Flash/Flex platform offers much better capabilities.

Q. Was this book project blessed by Adobe?
A.  This book is an independent project, the authors came out with this idea themselves, and we’d like to thank Sys-Con Publications for accepting our book proposal. But we’d be happy to use any help and support from Adobe.

Q. When the book will become available?
A. We are planning to finish writing this book by the end of August, 2006. The publisher will need another month for printing, so this book should hit the stores in October

 
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Book Authors

Yakov Fain is a Principal Consultant of Farata Systems. He's responsible for the Enterprise Architecture and emerging technologies. Yakov authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles, and his blog is hugely popular. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. Yakov holds BS and MS in Applied Math. You can reach him at yfain@faratasystems.com. He is Adobe Certified Flex Instructor.


Dr. Victor Rasputnis is a Managing Principal of Farata Systems. He's responsible for providing architectural design, implementation management and mentoring to companies migrating to XML Internet technologies. He holds a PhD in computer science from the Moscow Institute of Robotics. You can reach him at vrasputnis@faratasystems.com


Anatole Tartakovsky is a Managing Principal of Farata Systems. He's responsible for creation of frameworks and reusable components. Anatole authored number of books and articles on AJAX, XML, Internet and client-server technologies. He holds an MS in mathematics. You can reach him at atartakovsky@faratasystems.com


From the Blogosphere
"Let me tell you why this book is worth the money. At 700+ pages, this book is no lightweight. As you can see, this book covers a lot of Flex development scenarios. As the man on T.V. says "But wait! There is more! In addition to the book, you also get a DVD with all the sample code on it as well as 10 video sessions on Real World Flex.

P.S. - I was not compensated in any way to write this article. I paid $69.99 all by myself." read more...



"Yesterday, I received my copy of RIA with Adobe and Flex from SYS-CON editorial, and I admit that for first sentence the book gave me a good idea on how to work better with FDS and Java for serialization and Ascyncmenssage , other topics I took a little while and got extra work and points on how to extend default components.

The book's also send you the sessions at the Last Flex Seminars in NY where people like ( David Mendels, Jesse Warden and the guys at Farata System are in)." read more...



"Before I start talking about this book which inspired me to blog about it, let me bring up the topic of books for advanced level programmers in general..

It may be best to begin with a bunch of questions. We know of a lot of real good books that introduce various programming and software development topics but are there many books that deal with advanced topics? Is it that real experienced developers rather try it out and learn, or read up the manual, or talk to friends and strangers (on the discussion groups) and get their insight or read articles that discuss the advanced topics? Is it that the market for such books is limited and hence it’s not worth a good business idea? Is it that the thrill of gleaning from the heaps of data (good, bad and junk) on the internet is far more exciting? I certainly don’t know the answers but I do know that books on advanced topics are not that many." read more...

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