Flex has gotten popular lately because of its rich GUI capabilities. It also
comes in handy with HTTPService and Web Service components connecting to
back-end servers to fetch and update data. But using this mechanism to talk
to the back-end server requires formulating a unique service object from the
Flex side, making a request, and getting back data from the back-end either
in XML or plain text format. The response data then has to be parsed and fed
to the Flex objects to update the UI. For small to medium-size Flex projects
it's a viable solution, but for enterprise projects with thousands of
external service calls it will get quite repetitive and could result in a lot
of unmanageable, buggy code.
The approach discussed here provides a more intuitive solution to generate
ActionScript classes on the Flex side that are direct counterparts of the
enterprise object ... (more)
Historically, the progress of Web-based applications and the diverse nature
of information from different Web applications ushered in the need to unify
content to a single point of access: the Web portals.
There are several Web portal frameworks being developed in both the J2EE and
.NET camp to unify Web content and provide end users with a more efficient
environment to interact with the Web.
The portal technology is based on the notion of a portal container that
provides the basic infrastructure to host a load of disparate applications
wrapped up as portlets.
To facilitate cros... (more)
Historically we have seen the success of plug-in based products like Mozilla
Firefox and Eclipse IDE where new content can be plugged-in at runtime to
augment software functionality. In plug-in based architecture there is
always a base container implementation where other components are added as
plug-ins to extend its functionality; however, in these solutions there are
no extension points exposed in added plug-in components to interact or bind
them together. In this article I discuss the details of a pattern that is a
hybrid of plug-in and event-driven architecture to integrate... (more)
Alex Nhu works as a manager, UI Development at Packeteer Inc. He has more than 11 years of work experience designing and architecting complex server-side J2EE and XML applications. He loves developing Web applications with Flex now after getting a taste of developing UI using other RIA platforms.
Scott Sellers
Anthony Franco
Daniel Morris
Wayne Walls
Niki Acosta
Jereme Hancock
Oren Michels
Marvin Wheeler
Douglas Kim
Ken Guiberson
