Customer Reviews

Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex & Java (Secrets of the Masters)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

It's a magnificent piece of work by smart guys who have truly grasped and then conveyed the magic of Rich Internet Application Development. Thank you for this noteworthy achievement. It's worth more than 5 stars!

First I have to say, that it was pretty awesome that within a couple hours of ordering the book I had a link to download the e-version to use while I waited for the print version to arrive-- excellent customer service.

I was already sold on Flex, and was pretty experienced with it and was looking for an advanced book. So I didn't find the first 200 or so pages that helpful. Chapters 1-4 (Introduction to other RIAs, Getting Familiar with Flex, Flex Builder environment, and a simple Flex app) really weren't appropriate for a book purported to be for professionals, in my opinion.

The treatment on Java integration wasn't what I expected, although most of it was still interesting and helpful.

The second half of the book really shines, and more than makes up for any of its shortcomings (and more than justifies the price as well). The treatment of creating advanced custom Flex components is excellent. The authors walk you through the creation of several advanced components that are in and of themselves very useful, as are the concepts covered.

Their coverage of several other advanced topics (debugging, charts, integrating with external applications) was not only helpful, but not really covered anywhere I've been able to find online (although that may have changed in the past 4 months since I purchased the book).

I'd definitely recommend this book to others.

I dont know if this book is good or not because psycon books or whatever, cheated me out of 6 of them. Totaling over 450.00 dollars. So buy the book but NOT from psyconbooks.

This is a summary if the chapter content:
01) Architecture of RIAs : A comparison of the RIA landscape : WPF, Ajax, Open Lazlo, GWT, Canoo, Nexaweb, Backbase, Apollo (probably precursor to AIR) - book was written in Flex 2 era.
02) Getting Familiar with Flex : MXML, Namespaces, Frame Rates, Actionscript to Java comparions (two thumbs up for this summary), application loading, DisplayObjects, Ant/compiler options (5 stars)
03) Flex Builder Development Environment : Flex Eclipse IDE overview
04) Learning Flex through Applications : Things like E4x, binding, exchanging data with JSP page, Collections, Filtering, Master-Details, Events (flow/propagation/bubbling), custom events (5 stars)
05) A complete application with RPC Communications and JMS : Great chapter Talks about JMS pub/sub, RSS readers, a stock portfolio feed.
06) End to End RAD with Flex Data Management Services : I guess I'm not totally sold on Yakov's DAOFlex XSLT transformation solution using XDoclet like metadata comments . I prefer Hibernate based solutions, and would have preferred a GraniteDS solution. But there's some interesting ideas to extract. Similar content in the new Enterprise Development with Flex book
07) How to write your own Data Management Services - Bulilds on last chapter. Some interesting design patterns with changeobjects and batching for more efficient updates. Builds collections that react to changes. Good for building real time systems.
08) Enhancing and Extending Flex Controls : Nice chapter - easy to follow.
09) Trees with Dynamic Data Population - Great chapter again.
10) Working with large Applications : Talks about RSLs/Module loaders etc. Again this is covered in Enterprise Development with Flex.
11) Advanced Datagrid - Great chapter again. Building custom renderers. - But again because of metadata approach, rather than GraniteDS, something I would personally look to extract ideas from rather than use.
12) Logging and Debugging Flex and Java Applications : Room for improvement. fxspy could have got a mention. Maybe it wasn't out at time book was written
13) Building a Slideshow application : Best chapter in book for me. Example driven Showcases using E4X to store timelines for photos and synchronising photos with a MP3 audio track via the XML.
14) Developing Custom Charts : Nice chapter. Shows how chart two stocks over a timeline and add a skin/tooltip showing the data points at a given point in time. The skin acts like a slider with a tooltip attached, so you don't have to click on the points in each graph.
15) Integration with External Applications: (one star) I can't say I enjoyed this chapter at all. Too much at breakneck pace. It really was mind bogglingly complex and is the primary reason for the overall loss of a star. I've programmed in .NET and done some VBA before and know JavaScript well, and in the dark and distant path did some XSLT transformations. But this didn't help much. The chapter showcases how to get Flex (the Flashplayer) and Excel (via OWC : Microsoft Office Web components) to communicate with each other.
This is done in two ways, via an ActiveX in an HTML page and embedding the FlashPlayer in an Excel Spreadsheet. At the time of writing there were some glitches with the latter approach - something about Flash Player throwing some low level COM+ errors.
For me the chapter was a turn off because it was so Microsoft focused. You could only get this working if you used (yuck) Internet Explorer on a Microsoft OS. The complexity was compounded by the fact the solution attempted to cover all the bases with the different versions of OWC too.
The solution attempted to setup meta data again to provide a generic solution to communicate between Flex and Excel. Why JExcel or POI weren't used, or even a .NET solution I don't know. I've seen far easier ways to access Excel from a web page elsewhere (admittedly not throwing FlashPlayer into the mix though).

In summary it's got some advanced content.
Some of chapters could have done with a better explanation, with something akin to the cueballs in code with Manning. You are often left to your own devices to read through the code, that isn't overly well commented.
Overall I understood 90% of chapters 1-14 at a glance. The remaining 10% I sometimes got by reading the code in a bit more detail. But Chapter 15, was the opposite 10% comprehension!
Finally there a lot of typos and a funny reference to specter instead of spectrum, but this doesn't detract from the overall quality of content.
As other readers have mentioned the code font is lousy and a some of the double quotes have appeared to have been converted to guillemets (they look like double chevrons), and the indentation at times sucks (same goes for Enterprise Development with Flex - see my review on UK Amazon)

what can i say ? i am a java developer and i read lot of tutorials and books on flex but was not satisfied, but after reading this book i could say this is the best book on flex for java developers. You can stop "google" for sometime and finish the book to get most of your answers. The book will directly take you to the ActionScript's world and explains everything you need to know as a developer.
This book does not focus much on designing rather explains all about integration with Java\J2EE. I believe you will also start liking ActionScript as much as Java after reading the book.
There are some printing mistake is there in the code sample, so dont blindly copy and paste the code. Hope those will be fixed in the next version.

Thanks,
Abhisek Jana

This is an excellent with all kinds of details on Flex and Java integration. However, the book uses such a light font for printing for all the code, that is it very difficult to read any of it.

The example on communicating from flex to excel and back is impossibly complicated. Why would anyone dream of doing it this way? You need to be an expert in flex, java as well as microsoft technology to implement this. There are plenty of open source java libraries and read/write excel and getting flex to talk to java is relatively easy.