Introduction

Are you getting tired of Javascript cross browser testing? Are you having headache of evaluating so many of UI frameworks that claims to do the work but not? Are you interested in AJAX? Yes, AJAX is a great step forward in the RIA world. However, it has many issues stemmed from the stateless HTTP request and response model and browser capability. In fact, AJAX is more a get around than true RIA solution as it simulates the rich client interactivity via background server calls. I am looking for a solution that I can write once, deploy everywhere and work. Here I found Flex that is promising solution in the RIA world.

1. Bruce Eckel - Thinking in Flex (video)
2. Jon Rose - Top 10 misconceptions on Flex, Flex is clear way to go
3. Christopher Coenraet  - http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/architecture_print.html
4. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=193593 (Bruce Eckel - hybridizing flex)
5. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flexjava.html (good video to get a taste of Flex)
6. Flex vs AJAX  (Use case in Yahoo from Kelvin Cheng - Yahoo Map)
7. Why I like Flex more than AJAX - http://www.solutionhacker.com/2007/08/26/why-flex-for-ria/ 

This is a nice video that shows you the power of Flex and Apollo. The demo was done in Google around 2 months ago. After that, lets wait and see how Google will move this new baby to next level like what it did on AJAX.      

Flex Frameworks

Choose the following frameworks to develop your enterprise Flex application.

1. Cairngorm (article about MVCS) or Mate (dependency of injection)
2. PureMVC - This video gives you an idea favoring PureMVC. I definitely will take a look.
3. BlazeDS dev guide

Blogs

Below are some of the good blogs related to Flex

1. Ely Greenfield - http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/ (Guru in Flex animation and skinning)
2. Ted Patrick - http://onflex.org/
3. Christopher Coenraet - http://coenraets.org/
4. Ryan Steward - http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/
5. Alex Harui - http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui/
6. Eric Feminella - http://www.ericfeminella.com/blog/
7. Frantisek Kormanak - http://www.franto.com/
8. Doug Mccune - http://dougmccune.com/blog/ (Author of Flex for Dummies)
9. Peter deHaan - http://blog.flexexamples.com/ (Tester)
10. James Ward - http://www.jamesward.com/wordpress/ (Compare various way of Flex Remoting)
11. Christoph Room - http://christophrooms.com/
12. Mike Downey - http://madowney.com/blog/
13. Charlton Barreto - http://charltonb.typepad.com/weblog/
14. Parleys.com - http://www.parleys.com/display/PARLEYS/Home#page=Home
15. Philter Blog - http://www.philterdesign.com/blog/ - This is a blog written by Phil Chung. His blog is dedicated for Flash/Flex development. One of his masterpiece that caught my attention was the one he built for well-known photographers “Dave & Quin”. I wish I can learn from his flex work.
16. Grant Skinner Blog - http://www.gskinner.com/blog/ - Grant is a guru in this field. From his gBlog, I have found out a list of great slides from 360Flex conference that cover some advanced topics in Flex.
17. Alex Harui Blog - http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui/
18. Flex Authority Magazine
19. Kuwamoto’s Flex Blog - http://kuwamoto.org/about-2/

Showcase or Examples

Read more codes!! Below are some examples and showcases that demonstrate you the power of Flex:

1. Flex Showcase - http://flex.org/showcase/
2. Adobe Showcase - http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/showcase/index.cfm?event=finder&productid=26724&loc=en_us
3. Adobe Lab - http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Showcase:Flex_Developer_Derby
4. ScaleNine - http://www.scalenine.com/showcase/ 
5. Charting demos, Widget demos, Flex 1.5 Charting Demo
6. Flex Web Analytics
7. CMX Community
8. Flex demos, Amazing examples
9. http://preview.comcast.net/fan4/
10. Brightwork examples
11. RRD Graphing

Great Topics

Threading Model

1. Flex is currently single-threaded. However, you can use setTimeout(closure, delay, args…) or asyncrhonous I/O w/ closure to simulate multi-threading. Check out this article related to building a JPEGEncoder with this approach.

Graphics

1. Style Explorer - http://www.maclema.com/content/sek/
2. Filter Explorer - http://www.merhl.com/flex2_samples/filterExplorer/
3. Primitive Explorer - http://www.flexibleexperiments.com/Flex/PrimitiveExplorer/Flex2PrimitiveExplorer.html

AMF & BlazeDS

1. Can we use BlazeDS for push messaging? The term “push messaging” is vague and usually misused but in general, it is the type of messaging where the client does not have to ask to the server for updates in regular intervals (i.e. polling) but rather server sends the updates to the client when available without client asking for them. If we take this definition, then BlazeDS certainly supports “push messaging” via long-polling and streaming channels. It’s true that RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) is still better than long-polling and streaming in terms of latency and client notifications because RTMP provides a duplex socket connection between the client and the server. Long-polling and streaming are also limited by the number of threads the app server can provide. So far, only LCDS provides RTMP.
2. BlazeDS lives in a Servlet container and hence constrained by one-thread-per-connection limit whereas LCDS has NIO-based channels that can scale up to 1000s of requests.
3. Get started with BlazeDS
4. Set up BlazeDS in EC2
5. http://www.amfphp.org/
6. http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/amf/amf3_spec_121207.pdf
7. http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/blazeds/BlazeDS (BlazeDS is open-sourced)

Deep Linking

1. Advanced Flex Deep Linking in UrlKit (sample)

Testing

1. Unit test –FlexUnit
2. Functional Test – RIATest, Selenium Bridge, FlexMonkey

Decompiler - Sothink  SWF Decompiler

Exception Handling - This article shows you how to capture Throwable object from Java to display it in Flex

Logging - log it to console in FireBug and this

Security

1. FlashSec presentation

Collaborative (lets work together to achieve one task - Leverage BlazeDS messaging)

1. Example1: Data Entry (form filling)
2. Example2: Yahoo Map
3. Example3: Call Center 

Reference

This section provides you programming references

1. Metadata reference - http://www.solutionhacker.com/2007/06/03/flex-looking-into-metatag/
2. Adobe has done a good job of documenting the framework (reference).
3. Offline application with naive drag-and-drop to MS Office
4. Flex interactivity - add voice to your app via Rabbit
5. Data Synchronization
6. Performance and High Availability
7. Deep linking
8. Session Management
9. Air your application
10. File bugs to Adobe JIRA