I recently conducted an eSeminar on building enterprise applications with Flex Builder and Flex Data Services. You can view the recording of that presentation at: http://seminars.breezecentral.com/p24622178/

In my session I promised that I would formally document the process for debugging Flex & Java together in Flex Builder. So finally, here is that documentation.

I finally had time to finish my upgrade to WordPress. So hopefully I will be doing more blogging now. In case anyone else needs to migrate from plog to WordPress, you can download the really hacky php script I used. Oh if you received a comment approved email from me for a comment you posted long ago, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize WordPress was going to do that.

-James

I just finished the first beta release of WeBudget based on Flex 1.5, Cairngorm 0.99, and EJB 3. My wife and I use WeBudget to manage our personal budget. This version was an attempt to learn Cairngorm and EJB 3. Cairngorm really helped to organize the Flex code like a typical J2EE project which makes the code easier to debug and maintain. EJB 3 makes writing backend Java code brainless. The combination of Flex, Cairngorm, and EJB 3 is a very compelling platform for RIAs. The code is much simpler and more maintainable than the Struts applications I have built in the past. I hope that those learning Flex will find this code helpful. And

Last night I created a simple WYSIWYG tool based on Flex, inspired in part by the Zamples idea of Live Code Examples. The goal is to do on-the-fly conversion of simple markup to Flash objects. This code is particularly useful for environments where content management is seperate from the web application. This is pretty basic and there may be better ways to do this, but I hadn’t seen this done before so I took a stab at it. Feel free to suggest improvements!

Ever since I got into Macromedia Flex I have not been able to view .mxml applications in any Mozilla based browser on Linux. Mozilla for some reason cuts off the Flash at around 240 pixels in width. I have searched the web and Mozilla’s Bugzilla trying to find others who have also experienced this problem. I haven’t found much. A few Mozilla bugs seem to indicate others had this same problem. But not enough for anyone at Mozilla or even Macromedia to care. There has only been 1 post about this issue on the flexcoders Yahoo list. So not really a big deal, except to those of us on Linux!

For the past six months I have been building one of the first ever Rich Internet Application (RIA) portals. The project has been incredibly fun and wrought with many challenges. Since the inception of our crazy idea to build a RIA portal I have learned a great deal about where the web is going. My RIA adventure started when I first encountered Macromedia ‘s Flex Explorer. I saw the very elegant components, and I was awed. Then I saw examples of the code I would soon be writing, and I was hooked. I couldn’t believe that a terrible UI developer like me could so easily create a beautiful RIA. I dove right in and quickly built a prototype of our soon-to-be portal complete with DataGrids and RemoteObjects, which were written in Java and exposed via AMF to the Flash-based front end. After a short time developing in Flex I realized I could never again enjoy building a Struts / JSP / HTML web application. They are too cumbersome and tedious for me after seeing how easy it is to build web applications in Flex.

The second version of the TreeGrid component is done. It is working much better thanks to comments from Matt and Jose. I was able to resolve all of the issues I was aware of except the hard coded reference to “product”. I was even able to get recursion working. I think I may have to eventually extend DataGrid so that I can add column sorting. Here are the changes I would still like to make to it:

For a while I have been wanting to create a TreeGrid component for Flex. The

basic idea is to allow a user to navigate a Tree like object within a

DataGrid. Well, I just finished a very hacky version 1:

Here are some problems with the current implementation:

• I get strange flicker when mousing over the cells. Don’t know why.
• If I resize the right column to cover part of the Title, the title doesn’t get clipped. Don’t know why.
• The code looks only for children named “product”. I don’t know of a way to make this generic / configurable.
• Only supports 3 levels because I can’t figure out how to do recursion in the disclosurePress function. When I tried to call another function to do recursion the recursive method never got called. Don’t know why.

Other than all that, it works decently. :) Any ActionScript experts out there, please help me out. :)

Yesterday Mozilla released Firefox 0.9 rc1 and I just couldn’t wait any longer for the ebuild, so I figured out how to get it built from the cvs source. The instructions are posted on the Gentoo Forums. Not a big deal, but I thought this was blog worthy since it was fun and exciting. I guess that makes me a nerd. :)

PHP is no doubt a great web programming platform. It is simple and fairly robust. About 90% of the time I want to find an open source web app for something, there are at least 5 written in php. It seems to have become the de-facto standard for simple web apps.

Currently I spend most of my time writing php because the contract I am currently on started with php as their web platform. I have written some pretty cool apps in php. With my most recent app I built a simple persistence framework in php. My background is Java and there are many great frameworks in Java for doing just about everything; from persistence to ui layout. Java definitely seems to have more frameworks that actual apps. That’s interesting and a topic for another day.