Flex

Refactoring Flex application from existing Adobe AIR codebase

ShriKant Vashishtha · March 2, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Adobe AIR is a great technology to provide platform-independent desktop RIA applications. Gone are the days when Windows operating system used to be ubiquitous in desktop market. That’s the reason why Adobe AIR is considered as the future of desktop applications. Desktop applications are here to stay as they come with the power of providing rich features in efficient/optimal way compared to browser mode.

Getting through Popup Blockers with window.open() in Flex

ShriKant Vashishtha · January 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

It was a few years back when I last worked with Javascript. Things have changed significantly in between and one of the things which we people always like is the introduction of popup-blockers in browser world. I hope you remember those old days when it was a nuisance to close all those uninvited windows. Now we are living in a relatively peaceful world. But sometimes we also want to open new windows for legitimate reasons. So when I had a task to open a new browser window on button-click, I discovered the problems posed by popup-blockers. The interesting part is – window.open() behavior can be different for different browsers and popup-blockers.

Productive Tools on top of Flex Builder 3

ShriKant Vashishtha · November 16, 2008 · Leave a Comment

As I got introduced to Flex world some times back, I started using Flex Builder as an IDE, a product from Adobe on top of Eclipse platform. I assumed that it’ll provide all the basic features available in Eclipse for Java, but I was wrong. Flex Builder is in nascent phase from tooling point of view. Just to refresh your memories, Flex Builder lacks some of the following Eclipse features.

Current Architectural Frameworks Developments in Flex

ShriKant Vashishtha · November 8, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Flex provides means to create RIA applications in declarative fashion using MXML. Unlike Swing where you need to do the entire coding in Java, Flex hides a lot of complexity behind MXML tags like JSTL/taglibs do for JSPs. In JSP world, view level scripting is done in JavaScript and presentation layer server side code is written in Java which kind of provides a separation between client side code and server side code. If you really want to do some dynamic stuff on JSPs, either you write some Java code inside JSP (not recommended though) or you use/create taglibs to achieve the same effect. In Flex world, it’s all about ActionScript (AS). Irrespective of whether you are writing some scripting or server side code, it’s all AS code which kind of creates a confusing situation in front of a developer. It becomes very difficult to separate the scripting code from server side code. That’s one of the reasons people complain about Flex as it looks like it doesn’t provide a clear separation between scripting code and server side code.