Mind The Gap

Adobe has finally released Flex 3 and AIR 1.0. This is a major milestone in the evolution of RIA and business applications as we know them.  I'll be the first one to admit that I did not jump on the AIR bandwagon from the start. Obviously, my focus on enterprise level applications has blurred my vision. As time passed and I actually tried building a couple LiveCycle ES applications using AIR as the client, I quickly realized that my initial "poo poo" opinion of AIR was dramatically incorrect. AIR is going to revolutionize the way enterprise applications are built and distributed.

Take the time to check it out. The buzz is all around consumer type applications for now, but as more and more enterprise developers discover the power and flexibility or AIR; it will spread like wild-fire.

Posted by Marcel Boucher at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you have not done so, start with the first part of this tutorial. This is part 2 of the Employee Manager application that I created a month ago. I think this is good timing since Milan added a comment asking about how we would add new employees to the database, not just edit and delete. So here we go, in this post, we will start where we left off in my initial tutorial.

Continue reading "My First Hibernate Enabled Flex App - Part Deux!" »

Posted by Marcel Boucher at 09:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

Similar to my previous ColdFusion sample that uses LiveCycle Forms, this is part 1 of a Flex and LiveCycle Forms sample.

The goal of this sample is to demonstrate how you can create a Flex application that can use LiveCycle Forms to render PDF and HTML forms from XML form templates (XDP) created in Adobe Designer. The Flex application will display a list of pre-designed forms, sample xml data files (that can be used to pre-populate the forms) and available transformations. Once a form and optional XML data file have been selected, click on the Render Form button. This will make a call to LiveCycle Forms which will render the form on the server and return the result to the Flex application. Since Flash cannot embed PDF or HTML, I have lifted Christophe's IFrame sample. Basically, the PDF and HTML content returned from LiveCycle Forms is displayed in an IFrame on top of Flash. There are still some issues I have to work out regarding re-sizing etc. I'll post an update as soon as I have time to look into it.

An optional part of this sample is to display performance numbers. When LiveCycle Forms is rendering the form template into PDF or HTML, I collect the number of milliseconds that it took to render the form. That performance data can be pushed to the flex application using JMS. This option is turned off by default, please read the README.HTML file to see what needs to be done to turn this option on.

This sample will showcase several Flex Data Services 2 capabilities. The first one being RPC Services. This sample uses a Java Object named FileUtils that I created that implements several file I/O functions. One of these function is listFilesFromURL(url). This function will return a string array of files available at the provided URL. That is the function that is used to display the list of available forms and XMl data files. This function was tested with JRun as well as WebLogic directory listings. If there any issues with the code, let me know. The other Flex Data Services 2 capability showcased in this sample is real-time messaging. If you choose to enable the JMS capabilities of this sample, everytime a form is rendered, the performance data is sent to a JMS topic and Flex will detect that message and grab the value which will be displayed in the graph. The really cool thing about this feature is that every person running this application will see all of the performance data, not just their own.

You will need LiveCycle Forms as well as Flex Data Services. Check out these links to get access to the software.

Get the LiveCycle Developer Toolbox 

Get Flex Data Services 2 Trial

I'm working on getting the application hosted somewhere accessible to you can try it... Stay tuned.

Sample Installation Instructions

Download the Sample Files

Posted by Marcel Boucher at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Are you a Java developer interested to know what's all the fuss about Flex? Then I highly recommend that you take 30 minutes from your busy schedule and try Christophe's 30 minute Flex Test-Drive for Java Developers. This comprehensive test-drive will walk you through connecting java backends to Flex. This will give you a glimpse on how you can break out of the limitations of the browser and pimp up the interface to your applications.

Posted by Marcel Boucher at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In this tutorial, we are going to create an employee management console using Flex Data Services 2 which uses Hibernate 3 to communicate with a MySQL database. In this console, we will be able to add, delete and edit employees found in the database.

This tutorial is intended for new users of Flex Data Services 2 as well as Hibernate. However, it is assumed that you have working knowledge of Java, MySQL  and J2EE based web application creation and deployment.

Continue reading "My First Hibernate Enabled Flex Application" »

Posted by Marcel Boucher at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (86)

Ben Forta, the great one himself will be the keynote speaker for this free seminar series.  Topics will focus on the combination of ColdFusion and Flex as THE quickest and simplest approach to "pimp up" your web applications.

Locations are: Chicago (Sept 18), Boston (Sept 21), New York (Sept 26) and San Francisco (Sept 27).

For those that feel so inclined, pay tribute to Ben by wearing your very own WWBD shirt.

You can find all the information you need here.

Posted by Marcel Boucher at 02:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)