Preface

If you’d asked me a few years ago if I’d ever write a book, I would have laughed at the thought. All through high school and college I loathed writing anything more than a short answer, and when it came to writing papers, I was usually one of the people asking about the minimum length required for a passing grade. Now here we are, thousands of words and hundreds of pages later, and BJ and I have survived writing our first book, twice.

So how did I go from absolutely loathing writing to being willing to dedicate so many nights and weekends to writing this book? Since the first 1.0 release of the Flex framework, I’ve been a fan. I discovered Flex while I was distaining HTML/JavaScript and browser compatibility issues. I was trying to prototype a form-heavy application with complex business rules and validation, struggling with goofy layout issues and JavaScript errors, and was looking for a better solution. Although it’s possible to make rich web applications using HTML and JavaScript, it’s easy to make ugly ones. Most of the nice AJAX frameworks we take for granted today didn’t exist at the time, and many developers had absolutely no idea what AJAX was.

One night, while searching for an alternative, I ran across this excellent framework that allowed you to write Flash-based applications using a declarative syntax and a prototyping scripting language similar to JavaScript, without the cross browser issues because it all ran in the Flash Player. So I picked up a copy of Developing Rich Clients with Macromedia Flex by Steven Webster and Alistair McLeod and immediately fell in love with the Flex framework. There was only one problem: it was expensive. It was going to be a hard sell for any but the largest projects.

Flex effectively dropped off my radar as billable projects took precedence, and I didn’t have the time or desire to work on any side projects. Then in 2007 Adobe announced that it would open source the Flex framework and portions of the Live-Cycle Data Services server components as an open source project of its own called BlazeDS. When I heard this announcement I figured it was time to start learning Flex again. I had discovered a self-published book called Flexible Rails, about integrating Flex with Ruby on Rails, and because I was already learning Ruby on Rails, this book was a good choice. So I purchased the PDF and a few short weeks later the author, Peter Armstrong, announced that Manning Publications was going to publish the book.

Being a Java developer for most of my professional career, I began to think about the lack of good books on integrating Flex with a server-side backend. There was a plethora of Flex books available on the market; however most were written from the perspective of a Flash developer and used techniques that would make any seasoned Java developer cringe. Few discussed connecting to either LiveCycleDS or BlazeDS. So I proposed the idea of writing a book on Flex from a web developer perspective to Michael Stephens at Manning.

The book took many shapes. At one time, we contemplated writing a book on both Java and .NET with Flex; we finally settled on an early version of what you now hold in your hands. The main premise of the book is that you can add a Flex frontend to an existing application. The first version of this book attempted to use an existing open source Java web application as its sample application. When we were about two-thirds of the way through the book, we realized that the sample application wasn’t working as intended. We’d planned to have a sample application that would be more than just a throwaway. We wanted the readers to develop an application that would incorporate techniques they could apply to their everyday work, but not something so complex that it would distract readers from what we were trying to accomplish—demonstrating Flex and Java.

After much reflection and discussion on the sample application, we decided to scrap it and use AppFuse, an open source platform for quickly building Java web applications, as the basis for our application. This allowed us to construct a sample application in just one short chapter. AppFuse provided many functions out of the box that we would have otherwise had to spend time discussing and setting up. Unfortunately this also meant that much of what we had already written had to be changed, but I feel this was a necessary change for the better.

Here we are, two years later, with a final product that I can proudly say I helped to write. I hope that you enjoy this book and that it helps you in your journey of integrating Flex into your everyday work.

JEREMY ANDERSON