Build Total Confidence in Adobe Flex with Secrets of the Masters

Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex & Java

A Personal Book Review:

Before purchasing this awesome book I evaluated more than 50 online resources, articles, blogs, technotes, and Adobe's development web sites, as well as purchased and read two other Flex and Actionscript books (Flex 2 with Actionscript and Actionscript 3.0 Cookbook). But none of the aforementioned gave me the complete understanding and confidence in being able to integrate Flex applications with enterprise databases in a J2EE or XML-based environment.

This remarkably in depth book begins by taking you on a short but important journey through recent history of Java, Ajax and Flex to consolidate your approach to Rich Internet Application development. You quickly become familiar with the Flex development environment and build reusable components grasping development techniques by example. Each chapter is well explained and easily understood as you work your way to developing your sophisticated programming skills within a matter of days.

The book unambiguously covers the most important techniques for binding Flex applications to data sources whether by XML data transfer, JAVA Beans, Enterprise (binary) Database Integration, Web Services and or to external applications. You also learn advanced techniques in extending Flex components, extending Flex Charts, and building data and destination aware controls you can quickly reuse in other applications.

Over seven hundred pages of example driven code and instructions will solidify your knowledge in creating large Flex applications.

Day 1: You begin this book by first gaining an understanding of Flex architecture and development environment. You then get a serious look under the hood and take Flex for a spin learning the basics of approach to design and usage of Flex controls.

Day 2: The day is spent building a complete multi-tier RPC communications application with transparent access to POJO/EJBs. The result is a complete Stock Portfolio Application that displays a feed containing security prices and the latest financial news, integrated with on-line resources and back end JSP.

Day 3: At the completion of day three you will be able to build end-to-end applications based on Flex Data Management Services using Flex Remoting. The book also includes DAOflex, a rapid code generator that automatically produces data assembler DTOs.

Day 4: You’ll learn how to create your own remoting and batch-update service. Some powerful techniques for implementing a single server update request to enter/update/delete multiple data tables, is learned. These techniques are crucial to implanting fast and streamlined binary data applications.

Day 5: The day is spent learning to extend flex controls; such as making the standard Flex ComboBox, Tree, and Data Grid controls "destination aware". Once you create this code you will never need to rewrite data-aware code again. Simple copy your control into a new application and change the destination and method to populate it with a different data source.

Day 6: On the last day you build a real-world slide show application, learn to extend Flex charts and integrate Flex with external applications such as MS Excel.

By the end of the book you will truly be able to program anything in Flex. It's a magnificent piece of work by smart guys who have truly grasped and then conveyed the magic of Rich Internet Application Development.

Morevover, Farata Systems have a great website and Blog and also host www.myflex.org – where you can download Clear Data Builder (formerly DAOflex). This software is well worth the price and will literally save you thousands of hours of code over the coming years.

Anyone who can program basic DHTML can learn Flex from this book. Seasoned Java and PHP programmers will easily grasp advanced concepts and gain new and important insights into working with Flex.

Thank you for this noteworthy achievement.

You can grab your copy of the book at Amazon. I received an email copy in PDF right away and the hard copy arrived within 3 days.
Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex & Java (Secrets of the Masters)