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But this chain of thoughts is completely outdated. In 2006 Adobe launched their Flex platform (Flex 2) which enables developers to create applications without the Flash typical time line. Suddenly there were real components (the so called mxml components since the extesnions is .mxml) as well as a powerful programming language (which is called Flex) - and user interface engineers were able to create pretty interactive GUIs running in the Flash Player. Maybe the possibilities in Flex 2 were pretty limited campared to Flex 3, but the basic track was given...

BTW maybe it is not only this „Flex - Flash chain“ which causes people to think about Flex apps as „animation stuff“, the runtime environment (the Flash Player) sounds as well pretty much like movie and fancy GUI stuff. But people should consider this Player much more as a runtime such as JRE rather than an animation player, because that's what it really is.

Now, having said Flex is a powerful programming language and the Flash Player should be considered as a simple plugin, let's talk about wiring a Flex frontend to some sort of backend. Flex GUIs can be wired to several technologies, and the first search results Google fires up usually have something to do with Life Cycle Data Services or ColdFusion. Another reason people keep thinking "uh oh, this sounds proprietary I should better chose another technology...

Being honestly, in the past that was exactly the business case behind Flex, the UI technology and the development environment were available free (or limitedt to a single CPU), but as soon as servers and backend stuff came in the whole thing got pretty expensive...

Fortunately this has changed, and scrolling down your Google search results to the bottom will result in several entries which contain: „BlazeDS“

BlazeDS is a technology which enables you to link Flex frontends easily to Java Backend Objects and Services. We will not talk in detail here about how to configure blazeDS and what it is exactly about, but basically you can think about BlazeDS as a blackbox between your Flex frontend and your server side Java, all synchronization stuff and communication between client and server will be handled by blazeDS. blazeDS is open source, so the only thing you have to pay when creating a professional Flex application with a server side Java counter part is the Java developer.

Since the arise of BlazeDS development of Flex applications became much more professional: a user interface engineer can do the UI development decoupled from the server side counter part. On the server side (=Java) an engineer can provide services which do the "real work", the business logic. BlazeDS can be used in order to link these parts and your Flex/Java app is ready to run.

Please refer to our demo section, within there you will find several examples which have been created based on Java, blazeDS and Flex. You will find out that these applications interact the same way solid Rich Internet Applications (RIA) would do - simply have a try and you will „feel“ that Flex is much more than fabcy GUI stuff!

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Java & Flex for beginners: a good starting point!