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>

The Fiji charting modules look pretty cool and simply can be tied into your application. The charts provide interactive behavior, the drawing process is executed fancy and smoothly, moving the mouse over the chart results in immediate value display - in a nutshelle, pretty cool stuff to pimp up your JSF UI!

But as already mentioned Fiji is more than charting: the charts add Flex capabilities to JSF applications, but what if you have to add JSF capapbilities to a Flex application? Fiji includes a JSF wrapper which enables you to integrate a Flex GUI into a JSF page easily. And Fiji goes step beyond this as Fiji provides the possibility to pass JSF parameters to the integrated Flex GUI (swf). Using this SWF wrapping in combination with parmeter passing enables developers to link the Flex properties entirely to a managed Bean, for example!

But anyway, Fiji should not be used instead of BlazeDS (the Adobe Framework connect Flex and Java), BlazeDS is still the weapon of choice if you want to link Java backends with a Flex user interface. BlazeDS and Fiji shouldn’t be compared anyway, as it is not the goal of the Fiji framework to somehow replace BlazeDS. Fiji should be rather seen as an opportunity if you have an existing JSF application and for some reasons want to add a Flex UI on top of this application, for power users for example who might prefer a highly performant Rich Client instead of a Web GUI.

To cut long storries short, Fiji is a pretty smart solution in order to combine Flex and JSF, and it is good to know that there exists a framework to do so! Simply keep the name Fiji in your head a solution based on JSF combined with a Flex UI is always ace up your’s sleeve especially when discussing Flex and Standards!

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