We proudly present: Professional Rich Client solutions with Flex & Java!

A long road has come to an end...! Today we finally managed to release the book „Professionelle Rich Client Lösungen mit Flex & Java“ (currently available only in German language - English will follow soon...);

the book is kind of allround guide giving beginners a good Flex/Java ramp up, advanced Flex/Java engineers can benefit from the book as well, since couple of advanced topics (Flex - Java - JPA, Spring, Multilanguage Management, Messaging etc.) are treated as well.

The book contains a fully blown ready to rund Eclipse/Flex environment and ships with a lot of examples enabling the reader rather to learn Flex than reading about Flex only. The book covers the following topics:

• Flex - Java - BlazeDS background knowledge
• Flex Java Setup
• Basic Flex examples
• Connecting Flex and Java
• Accessing a MySQL database from Felx via Java/JPA (Hibernate)
• Validations
• Messaging
• Spring Integration
• Web Service access
• AIR
• Testing
• 30 frequent Flex/Java questions - and corresponding answers!

Publishing house is Addison Wesley, the book can be ordered via Amazon: Link

I would like to thank everybody involved into this project - and of course I’m looking forward to feedback from our first readers!

Have fun reading the book, Florian!

Tags: Flex, Flex & Java

Well, today we finally received the message we were waiting so long for: Flash Builder 4 Beta released (Link)!

First of all to everybody who is wondering about „FLASH“-Builder 4, it’s not a typo, Adobe decided to use the Flash naming instead of continuing with Flex. Currently there are thousands of discussions in the web debating about Flash/Flex naming pros and cons - we simply think this was a stupid decission as the Flex seed just started to grow in the space of Java (enterprise) development, now there is a new seed which again needs to prove in this space and this, again, will take some time.

Flash Builder 4 focuses on three major topics:

• Design in Mind: providing a framework that supports a new degree of expressiveness, easily enabled with tools.
• Developer Productivity: improving compiler performance and adding productivity enhancements to language features like data binding.
• Framework Evolution: taking advantage of new Flash Player capabilities and adding features required by common use-cases.

Read full post...

Tags: Flex, Flex & Java

We are happy to announce the first RIA forum, 18th of September located in Basel. There is a simple idea the RIA forum is based on: experts exchange! There will be three excellent speakers dealing with „hot“ RIA topics, duration of the forum will be Friday afternoon - we thought that’s a pretty good time frame as three compressed high quality sessions are much better than full scheduled day where people looking forward rather for lunch than for session contents!

Please visit www.riaforum.com

We are looking forward to your registration, contact us (info@richability.com) in case of questions. Btw., anybody interested in sponsorship?

Looking forward seeing you in September,
your richability team!

Often people keep asking which path to follow regarding UI technologies. On the one hand, there are standards, such as JSF - and usually standards are something „long-lasting“, so if you decide to use a JSF implementation for your app you can be pretty sure that your application and the technology behind will survive the next few years. But „next few years...“ is a little bit weak, isn’t it? Basically we are talking about STANDARDS, so we should be able to expect survival of the technology for more than „few years...“. Just think about car manufacturing: certain screws are used in order to mount the wheels - and there are wrenches with standard sizes, exactly these standard sizes ensure that people still will be able to mount new tires to their Dodge Nitro or whatever twenty years later...

But regarding Software development we are far away from unmounting tires in twenty years. Of course Software development is a pretty fast changing environment, but even during short periods standards are adapted only very poorly. The problem: often these standards keep growing somewhere far away from real software development, in consequence the standard is far away from closing gaps between software development and industry. You still remember EJB?? EJB is as well one of these standards causing rather headache than adressing productive software development...and suddenly there was Spring, not a standard, but adopted in nearly any Java project!

The same refers to the UI layer and JSF. There are thousands of projects using JSF, but there are as well billions of developers complaining about JSF coding - especially in case JSF is used „from the scratch“ without any framework above implementing JSF. So if you are thinking about usage of JSF for a small project without any JSF implementation such as MyFaces or ICEFaces, forget about it, project cost will explode and after two weeks developers will start suggesting usage of plain HTML/JavaScript as they are so slow using JSF...

But even if you refer to a framework implementing JSF standard the question remains whether the framework is really best choice, just for the reason of adopting JSF. ICEFaces is one of the most spreaded JSF frameworks, on the other hand there is zk which is currently one of the most spreaded „Ajax-Non-JSF“ frameworks. If you compare these to frameworks regarding development speed and ramp up time, the question „ICEFaces or zk...?“ results in the question „Standard or Comfort...?“. The ICEFaces WYSIWIG editor is very poorly so usually developers end up in plain JSF tag coding. But aspects such as development speed and ramp up time are only minor aspects when deciding about UI technologies. It’s much more important to have a clue regarding scalability of technologies: will the ICEFaces application still perform when the app is deployed to a server? What about x concurrent users accessing the app? Recently we came across a nice paper comparing exactly these aspects, on the one hand ICEFaces, on the other zk;

we thought this is a pretty interesting comparison, reason enough to share within the richability info space.

Have fun reading this comparison (simply click the report below), maybe this report is a little help for your next UI technology choice in a project.

Tags: ICEFaces, zk, Ajax, JSF

Recently zk 3.6.0 has been released - there are couple of new features, for a detailed feature description refer to the feature list.

By the way, zk now provides a WYSIWIG editor, which can be easily installed as Eclipse plugin. So you can drag and drop your GUI without switching to your browser and hitting continously F5.



One more point we would like to mention: zk framework is growing rapidly! Some time has passed since we downloaded the last release, but as we took a quick look into the zk explorer we were really surprised about the number of new components. Check out the zk explorer it will give you a clue on what we are talking about...! We will keep focused closely on zk, as from our impression zk is (becoming) one of the leading enterprise Ajax frameworks. If you did not evaluate zk for now, you should give it a try in order to move away from clumsy JavaScript coding with simple Ajax frameworks...

Tags: Ajax, zk, UI choice

Just a quick update: we have added a Flex/JSF tutorial for beginners into our tutorial section. So anybody looking for a Flex/JSF ramp up, this is a good starting point...

Tags: Flex, JSF

Some weeks ago Exadel announced an extension called Fiji to JavaServer Faces to fully encapsulate Flex. As we like evaluating technologies by using them we created a little demo which uses a JSF „backend“ and a Flex user interface. Currently we are in progress of creating a nice little tutorial which enables you to create your own JSF/Flex application within minutes, the tutorial will be released next week.

Ok, let’s get back to our evaluation. First of all there are two major „tracks“ you can follow using Fiji, one is to head for Flex charting solutions which simply can be placed into your application with some lines lines of jsp Code. The following Fiji tag for example will generate the chart displayed below, the chart on the right is just another example.

    <fiji:stackedColumnChart id="stackedColumnChart" value="#{SCBeanSimple.data}"
                             title="Simple Stacked Column Chart" subtitle="Display Resolution Statistics"                            captionX="Years" captionY="Percent" legendCaption="Resolution" 
                             barColors="#{SCBeanSimple.colors}" width="400" height="400"
                             rulersValuesHighlight="none">
        <fiji:chartData type="name" value="#{SCBeanSimple.names}" />
    fiji:stackedColumnChart>

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Tags: Flex & Java, JSF

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We were positively surprised to find a session about zk being offered in the conference schedule of the Ajax in Action this year. As there was a slight touch to "JS-only" frameworks within the conference, people were really happy to listen to Daniel Seiler from processwide who offered a nice session about zk. He demonstrated that Ajax frameworks can cover much more than the client part of an application, unfortunately there is no video cut for this session. But we decided to put his slides here, so anyone interested in giving a quick summary to his boss about when and why to use zk can refer to the slides...


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Tags: zk, Ajax

This week Florian was attending the Ajax in Action conference in Mainz, Germany. He had several sessions & workshops in his "bag" and presented on hot topics within the space of UI development. Florian was one of the "not-only-Ajax-speakers", he was rather presenting on Ajax/Rich Client comparisons and when to use which technology approach. There is an interview with Florian which recently has been released on the conference page, the interview is available here for online reading.

Florian's comment about the conference:

"There is a slight movement in the Ajax UI space. New UI technologies are emerging and it is a tricky task to captivate the audience with 'JavaScript-only' frameworks. Of course the guys behind the frameworks still try to seed the message 'our JS-framework is the best in the world, you can use it for anything...', but usually this does not reflect reality and you can really feel that the audience knows about this. Rich Clients will not be the answer to all questions, the same way Ajax is not the answer to all questions. Both match for different kind of requirments, non of the two approaches is the holy gral for UI development..."

You can download Florian's session slides below. Of course the slides will give more sense in combination with "Live-examples", but maybe you can catch up the message as well based on slides-only...

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Tags: Ajax in Action, Ajax, richability

Currently stock trading is pretty hard, there is no day without painful losses and it is really unpredictable where the stocks might go the next few weeks. But there is a high interest in stock trading at the moment as everybody wants to know what is going on with his stocks and whether he sould sell or keep them. In order to know when best selling point has come it is important to be ahead - ahead of other traders who sell their stocks based on 20 minute delayed values. Currently 20 minutes might include a total stock rise or a total stock fall - if the trader does not know he has no chance in the current shark pool...we created a nice application for you to be ahead of all the other sharks! And of course we did so based on a Rich Client technology...
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Tags: Google Finance, Flex & Java, showcase, BlazeDS

Recently an article has been published by Florian Müller in the German JavaMagazin about the current state of Ajax. In this article Florian summarizes some general thoughts about Ajax and chalks out where Ajax should be used and where not. Unfortunately the article is written in German language but as soon as we have some time "left" we will translate - again, we apologize to all our "Non-German-Readers" (who btw. fortunately have increased a lot!). The article can be viewed as PDF below (simply click the article image) or viewed online at Create or Die.

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Tags: JavaMagazin, Ajax, richability

The importance of user interface technologies and frameworks often is underestimated completely . This may result in a successfully delivered applications with a top backend but one large problem: lack of acceptance from the users. And lack of acceptance usually results in finger pointing between customer and vendor since the customer blames the development team for having build an application which does not meet their expectations and the development team insists on having implemented all requirements. And quite often this is the end of a relationship between customer and vendor.... There are many things which can be done wrong when deciding for a UI technology and these wrong decisions might cause situations like the situation described above. This article chalks out typical drivers for wrong UI decisions and points out solutions how to sail around these frontend traps...
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Tags: UI choice, Rich Client

Recently we came across an Ajax framework called „zk“; the most interesting point about this framework is the promise that developers would not have to deal with JavaScript when using zk. So we started a little evaluation and we were really impressed about this framework, that's the reason we decided to share the results of our development here in the infospace. Below you will find our Drag & Shop application, a web shop demo based on zk and some simple Java services. Source is avaliable below as well...Read full post...

Tags: zk, showcase

We created some Java backend services and thought it would be pretty cool to put different frontend technologies on top of these services. On the one hand we did so in order to gather experience with the CaptainCasa framework, on the other hand we were curious to see an applet based frontend in direct comparison with a Flex frontend. This article is not "Applet versus Flex" it is much more about having one application with two different frontends - in order to discover the advantages of both frontend technologies...Read full post...

Tags: Applet or Flex, showcase

When chosing a technology in order to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA's), Flash is still in a prominent position. But as tools and technologies change periodically there are always alternatives you should consider as well when taking a technology decision. The “old“ Flash Builder IDE is still a nice application to create any kind of fancy RIA's but hands down: where designers get a very usable toolkit for creating nice User Interfaces, the “real“ developers want more and cry for technologies like FLEX or OpenLaszlo...this article gives you an OpenLaszlo "kick-start" and has been provided by Timo Ernst, one of Germanys OpenLaszlo evangelists!Read full post...

Tags: OpenLaszlo

Great news for Flex developers (and Flex consumers!) - not just from a technical point of view, as this anouncement contains a symbolic character, as well:

Google and Yahoo! anounced SWF searchability!

This means that a search executed in Google now should be able to include contents of Flex RIAs, even dynamic content!

We prepared a little experiment...let’s see whether searching for Flex Button labels works!Read full post...

Tags: Rich Client, showcase

Recently Google launched a Flex API which now enables Flex developers to benefit from the great advantages of using geo data. Previously, this has been privileged to JavaScript developers only.

We checked out the API...see what we found out!
Read full post...

Tags: Google Maps, Flex & Java, showcase, BlazeDS

Did you ever hear about Pivot? Well, we did not - but what we read sounded good:

„Pivot is an open-source framework for building high-quality, cross-platform applications that are easily deployable both via the web and to the desktop. It began as an R&D effort at VMware and is now being made available to the community as an option for developers who want to build rich client applications in Java...“Read full post...

Tags: Applet

„Swing and JSF...?“ that's usually the first thing people keep asking when reading about the CaptainCasa Enterprise Client Technology. But the idea behind makes sense: JSF is the server server side standard framework for serving client side user interfaces. Typically used for creating HTML pages, it is now used to control a generic, Java Swing based client. CaptainCasa does not introduce a new proprietary server side processing, but bases on the same one (JSF) that you build web applications on.

And Swing? Well first of all, the application developer is not in direct contact with Swing at all when using CaptainCasa. The client is a generic one, i.e. it receives an XML layout specification from the server and sends back events. All is done through http protocol, imagine the client to be a browser on its own. Swing is a candidate which has been around for a while - much longer than "new technologies" such as Ajax & Co; I know several companies running mission critical applications using Swing User Interfaces since couple of years. Main problems typically are: (1) Swing development is not too simple and (2) Swing UIs look a bit old fashionned. Both seem to be overcome with CaptainCasa: as already said, the layout is specified in XML, there is no direct contact with Swing (exception: you want to add a new component on your own) - and: the rendering result is looking very nice! Have a look into the component demos: http://www.captaincasa.com/demozone.html. ...is this really Swing? - Yes, it is!Read full post...

Tags: Applet, showcase

Unfortunately one of the first things people keep thinking about when hearing about Flex is Flash; and when thinking about Flash, people usually have these fancy animation stuff in their mind which is used as intro for gaming pages and other freaky web content...
But this chain of thoughts is completely outdated...Read full post...

Tags: Flex & Java, showcase

Do you remeber this technology called "Ajax"? Yes, the thing which enabled developers to create these beautiful user interfaces with drag&drop, auto sorting tables and rich client like frontends! But is this the end of the road regarding user interface technologies? Or is there rising something new, something you should know about...?Read full post...

Tags: richability