There’s not much improvement since my first look at free Flex IDEs. The use of a full-blown visual designer is still a challenge. So, Flex Builder for Windows is still your first choice – and worth every penny.
Nevertheless, if you are not one of those full time Flex developers and only wanna have a look at what already exists, e.g. for code reviews, these free alternatives can help:
MoreWow. I only had a look at a third of the video everybody has a look at these days and I was already flashed. Although, mainly based on AJAX they indeed push the Web browser to the next limit.
Well, not really. Because, they talked about Google Gears and HTML5 to get all this. It is clear we won’t get this with the browsers we have today. So, we have to wait. ...
Projects that use Spring’s Dependency Injection for years and start to think about using Flex in their frontends naturally ask for something similar for the Flex/AIR development. SpringSource has a new incubator project delivering such an Actionscript framework.
The first step in integrating Spring and Flex is BlazeDS. Meanwhile there are two ways to establish a communication:
Christophe’s implementation is used in a lot of projects already. But, it is pretty clear that ...
MoreAdobe has created an AIR application that demonstrates what can be done with Flex. There’s even an Eclipse integration that allows to search for components and their source code.
Tour de Flex is a showcase of Flex’s user interface components. It also shows third party stuff, like ILOG Elixir, that we’re using in our project for some time. It is worth to have a look at all components.
The presentation is a bit like the component showcase of ICEfaces. You get additional ...
MoreWhen I had my first look at the online release of Photoshop some months ago, well Photoshop Elements I should say, I thought, this part of the “new online Office suite world”, based on Flex, is done by the inventors themselves. But, today I found SUMO Paint and I’ve to rething this.
So, I had another look at Photoshop Express for a comparison. SUMO Paint seems a real paint program, whereas Photoshop Express is more like a ...
MoreLast January I wrote about Flex implementations on their way to replace current office applications. Today I had a deeper look at what Adobe has done at the wordprocessor front: Buzzword.
One of the most important design principles is reduction (apply Occam’s razor). If you’ve a look at the current office implementations you get 80% functionality even a power user will never use. Adobe has done a good job here. They chose the essential functions of todays wordprocessing.
Ergonomics ...
MoreWe’ve a lot of experiences now with Web 2.0 technologies based on AJAX and JSF. Although, we hold pretty modern, almost standards-based stuff in our hands the maintenance hell for the markup-based presentation layer is pretty lively. The costs are still tremendous in comparison to similar desktop developments.
To be a successful successor for AJAX/JSF development the Web 3.0 frameworks have to be
I read Schalk’s “Adobe announces Open Screen Project” at DZone today. Quite amazing what Adobe is doing here. They skip the licensing of the most important protocols and file formats. These are free to use now, independent from the platform, context, whatever you like.
Additionally, they promise, with the help of the big players in the wireless business, to deliver a runtime with the next Flash player release, that allows to design and deploy applications that behave the same ...
MoreToday I’ll start with the AIRgonaut series. It will give you AIR tips to desktop-like programing questions you may already answered, with Delphi, Visual Basic, and the like in the past. But, today you may recognize that all your know-how is less important and needs an update, because of such obscure ideas the Flex architects had in mind in the past 
.
Well, this is what my feeling was when I started with Flex/AIR this year ...
MoreLast week our project structure changed a bit and I had to think about training new members in the JSF field. I remembered that there’s still a draft article, I started in 2006, in my blog management. Rick from DZone told me that there’s still a need for giving some tips in JSF programming. So, I polished my article .
Hint: If you still think about changing from your current Web presentation framework to something new, ...
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Rainer Eschen is an agile coach with a focus on Scrum Project Management.
He is a Certified Professional Scrum Master I, a Certified Project
Management Associate (IPMA Level D) and co-founder of openPM.
Since the mid-1990s Rainer worked as a consultant, developer, architect, team leader, systems engineer, project manager, scrum master and scrum coach – since 2000 with a strong focus on JEE. He was also part of “the source” for 3 years working at Sun Microsystems, Germany.
Rainer is author of the book ICEfaces 1.8: Next Generation Enterprise Web Development, Packt Publishing, 2009.
Rainer at Google+ | Twitter
