Should I use FLEX + JAVA

Question

My group is about to start a major web project / application. Application. By itself, it will not be used by many people, and it is mainly only for use within the network for managers and application developers. Our boss wants our programmers to use the following technologies. stack: FLEX → Cairngorm → BLAZEDS → JAVA (EJB3 + POJO) → ORACLE DB Some developers say that using FLEX is difficult (because they need to learn FLEX and Action Script), but others say that FLEX is the only best solution (just because that they like how flex works and they saw a lot of examples).

Do you think it's worth using flex, or should we use some frameworks (like JSF).

Answer 1

Flex is a pretty powerful user interface presentation technology. What you think of this issue is that you will have a lot of data presented in the user interface layer, where Flex seems to be the perfect choice (unless you want to handle all the efforts done with JSP and so on. .d.).

Caringorm helps you apply the MVC pattern for the Flex UI layer - similar to what Struts / Spring MVC does for the JSP layer.

For JAVA, I would recommend using Spring -enabled and POJO services instead of EJB3 to achieve the effect. Using Spring services and / or web services will help you scale better and lower the cost of maintenance because your business logic is in POJO.

Again, this is a personal opinion based on my own experience.

Answer 2

Flex has a markup part (MXML) and a programming language part (ActionScript). For the MXML part, there is no large learning curve. It is completely simple. ActionScript is a completely different story, but it seems to me that it’s hard for me to seriously think that Java developers (myself) will find Flex in general or ActionScript, in particular, “hard”. I and a team of about five or six other Java developers created the basic interfaces on the very first day, and after a week we did some pretty functional things.

A completely subjective opinion that I know, but it is well worth a try. Flex is just very funny.

Answer 3

I would not go into a completely new technology based on some examples. This sounds like an important risk factor for your project, at least based on your (certainly unbiased) description.

There is, however, a generally accepted course of action. Your group should at least start with the Proof Of Concept microproject and draw its own conclusions based on what you learn, your skills and the project.

(I can do this if the boss says I should, although this in itself is a bad smell.)

Answer 4

Check out the Tour de Flex for examples of what Flex can do and how to do it. It has some examples of Java integration.

Answer 5

It's not hard to learn MXML and ActionScript. But data binding and all the various classes and components can sometimes be obscure. In addition, learning to customize components and make more advanced material may have a learning curve.

Training Flex and Cairngorm at the same time is not recommended, even for the Cairngorm people themselves. This is certainly a very quick and easy way to deploy applications, but learning the best way to use Flex is quite complicated and throws Cairngorm into the mix when you don’t know how flex works, it may be disappointing, but very useful. I use Cairngorm in my last project and I wish I had used it in some of my previous applications.

Here are some resources:

Good article to help decide whether to use Cairngorm

Introducing Cairngorm by Adobe Customer Training

Adobe 6 series introducing Cairngorm with an example, going through

Answer 6

I would recommend the SEAM Framework with Granite-DS and Flex.

The only problem with this is the steep learning curve, but technically, from my point of view, the best combination.

Answer 7

remember that there is a very large community of Flex users to rely on and if you are thinking about Flex, you can also take a look at Air, which you will provide outside of your browser deployment

Answer 8

You should check out Exadel Flamingo . This makes it easy to connect Flex to a Java server (e.g. Spring, Seam, etc.)

I would recommend Jboss Seam for EJB3 + POJO.

Answer 9

You can also look at Grails as an integration point. There has been a lot of recent work being done here, it can save you a lot of time. Take a special look at the graniteDS plugin for Grails and the Flex Scaffold plugin.

http://www.grails.org/plugin/flex-scaffold http://www.grails.org/GraniteDS+Flex+Plugin

Answer 10

I think you will find more support for using the Java applet in the user interface instead of Flex. By support, I mean libraries, forums, and tutorials. I've been looking at Flex for quite some time, and the search results that I find are less focused on developers and more on non-developers trying to do beautiful things. I believe that there is nothing wrong with Java applets as an interface, and I think more people will come when Java reduces VM startup time (current priority for the next version).

If Java applets are in dispute, then there is the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). It provides full development, testing, and debugging in the Java development environment, but is then automatically deployed to HTML / JavaScript. Absolutely fantastic. Their third-party components have indeed come a long way, and their user support makes the choice easy.

Fewer languages ​​= fewer mind swaps.