About this Book
There are many books available that are purposed for teaching technology topics inside and out. These books are necessary for understanding how to use a technology correctly but many times are not meant to teach you what a normal day of a development would look like using that technology. This book was written to demonstrate practical development with two powerhouse technologies, Flex on Java. It will guide you in building your own applications that scale for real-world business needs, leaving you feeling equipped with the fundamentals that are pertinent to the software feature or task at hand.
Throughout the book, the fundamentals of building testable and rich UIs that communicate with a powerful server side are brought together in bite-sized chunks. The topic of building a robust Flex client that sits on top of a Java server-side application will be discussed throughout as it pertains to the integration of the two and passing data back and forth.
Along with the main topic of integrating Flex with Java, topics such as Maven, Spring integration, adding security and personalization, charting, messaging, AIR desktop applications, logging, continuous integration, AppFuse, and even Flex on Grails will be demonstrated.
Who should read this book
This book is geared toward developers with a need for creating rich applications, on a budget, with Flex 4 and Java. All the tools we use for our examples are open source or free and very proven.
This book assumes familiarity with software development in general, specifically Flex and Java. Though it was written with the intent to teach integration techniques for Flex and Java, not language fundamentals, it was done so to make it easy for even Flex or Java beginners to get rolling quickly with both.
How the book is organized
Flex on Java is made up of three parts:
We start off by introducing the two technologies and building a sample Java application you can play with. We go on to build a Flex client for the Java application that ties into some Java web services. Part 1 covers the first four chapters.
In chapters 5 and 6 we dive deeper into backend integration with Java on the server side. Part 2 introduces topics that allow Flex to connect to Java through object remoting, logging, and messaging. Using the Spring Framework for Flex integration is very powerful and we demonstrate how that can be done.
Part 3, chapters 7-11, covers topics that are off the beaten path, such as security and personalization, building graphs, desktop development with AIR, unit testing, and building a Flex and Grails application.
Code conventions
All source code in listings or in text is in a fixed-width font like this to separate it from ordinary text. Code annotations accompany many of the listings, highlighting important concepts. In some cases, numbered bullets link to explanations that follow the listing. At times, only the important segments of a code listing are displayed on the page. The source code for all of the examples in full can be downloaded from the publisher’s website at www.manning.com/FlexonJava.