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.

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Tags: Flex, Flex & Java

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