The world has changed dramatically for organizations that use web-enabled business applications in enterprise environments. The complexities of modern applications, which include multi-tiered, globally distributed architectures, SOA and a host of other new technologies, have forced maj...

Adobe had an interesting afternoon Thursday. That’s when the New York Times came out and blogged that it knew from employees and consultants who were involved or simply knew that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Flash-wielding, Apple-banned Adobe, met re...

If you have a few minutes I would really appreciate you checking out an application I wrote. The application automates some actions common to US Military staff planning by building a dynamic, interactive decision-matrix. I’ll discuss the use case for the application and then end with l...

There are about 250,000 developers working with Flex and AIR. If you add an army of ActionScript developers, this number will grow substantially. Where do you go if you have a technical issue while developing RIA? As of today, there no one place to ask questions and get answers. A res...

TechCrunch is reporting that 9% of Adobe's workforce is to be axed, according to an 8-K filed by Adobe with the SEC today. "Adobe is restructuring its business to align costs with its fiscal 2010 operating plan and budget, the company’s three-year strategic priorities and the realities...

I try to go easy on frameworks in the classroom, because there could be lots of non-technical reasons for adopting this or that framework. I also know that people who created frameworks are seasoned developers with their vision of how things should be done. No disrespect here. But if t...

In ten days I’ll be sitting at the general session at Adobe MAX 09 in LA. People from Adobe will come up on stage one after another delivering the latest news on the products we all use daily. Here’s my short wish list of the news I’d like to hear. I’m sure people who are using Creati...

First, yes, screen readers can read Flex applications. And yes, its fairly easy. But, I’ll discuss how in a future post. But, if you’d rather send people to your old HTML version of your site when using a read, there is good news. Flash Player has the ability to detect if a screen r...

Desktop management is a constant challenge for most IT or call center managers. A new update, service pack or totally new version of operating system can cause headaches for even the most experienced IT professional. The challenges with provisioning new versions of operating systems fo...

First of all, to add a little more credibility to what I’m about to write, let me just say that I’m running Princeton Java Users Group (JUG) for years and have a pretty good idea of how organization of the meetings and sponsorship work in such gatherings. Java community is huge, wel...

When a couple of months back I told a fellow Flex developer that I’ll be speaking at CFUnited, conference he shrugged, “Why ColdFusion?” Little did he know that CFUnited is branded as a ColdFusion, Flex and AIR conference. And this was true – there were lots of quality presentations o...

Flex framework includes a pretty useful object that deserves more attention: mx.util.ObjectProxy. You can wrap your object (i.e. Person) into this proxy which will obediently report on all changes that are happening to this instance of a person. If you subclass ObjectProxy, you can ev...

Each real-world software developer knows at least one design pattern – Singleton. Flex has some specifics in implementing Singletons due to lack of private constructors in ActionScript, but the goal of this little writeup is not to show you how to implement Singleton, but rather to dis...

It includes an ActionScript component OfflineDataCollection that allows you to program local/remote data synchronization. Open source Clear Toolkit framework is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit/ The source code of the OfflineDataCollection is here: http://tinyurl.com/...

Starting Monday May 18, 2009 fun begins at Indianapolis. No, not the car race; its 360 Flex! 360 Flex is a unique and special event for many reasons, namely: Its the one and only event dedicated completely to Flex (and AIR). Its an informal event that is run for te community, by the c...

Spring is one of my favourite frameworks. It's an open source framework that helps a lot the developers' life to make it easier. Thanks to the Inversion of Control (IoC) pattern that Spring uses, it will save a lot of time in developing. Luckily SpringSource and Adobe started a partne...

The AIR runtime allows you to manage and interact with the system tray and dock bar icons of your application. You can define context menus for them. On Microsoft Windows systems, the icons in the system tray don’t have any default context menus, so unless you have a specially prepared...

In this session Thomas will share his experience in migrating from AJAX to Flex, the advantages/disadvantages that Flex has as the primary client for a consumer web-based SaaS product, and his vision of how Flex + AIR via any desktop + Mobile (in one or more technical forms) takes us a...

We are entering an era of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and enhancing the user experience of consumers of the services becomes an important part in designing and implementing SOA. But if you decide to develop rich clients, you'll be facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with...

Vectors supporting types are the part of next release - and are billed more of performance/coding help then language enhancement. Most of the Java 5 constructs are not really applicable to ActionScript 3 - for fair comparison you need to use Java 7/8 with dynamic scripting language sup...

Creating reporting applications in AJAX is often more challenging than developing data entry CRUD applications. Reporters usually need to process lots of data, preferably on the client side to minimize the amount of information that goes through the wire. Reporters need to know how to ...