I will be delivering a two-hour Flex presentation called “Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Ajax” at the New England Java Users Group tomorrow Thursday November 16th at 6:00pm. The meeting is open to everybody, so feel free to stop by if you are in the Boston area.

I will in Europe next week presenting an in depth Flex session at three developer seminars in Paris, Brussels, and Noordwijk. These events are organized by the local Adobe offices. You can still register! Here is the information: Paris (Monday, November 20th) http://pull.xmr3.com/cgi-bin/pull/DocPull/169-79394-5434/30565544/redir.htm Brussels/Genval (Tuesday November 21st) http://www.adobe.com/be/special/connect/index_landing.htm http://mmug.be/meetings/211106/ Noordwijk (Thursday, November 23rd) .

One question that developers often ask when they see Flex for the first time is: how do I write a database application? The answer to this question is typically: You use an HTTPService, WebService, or RemoteObject to connect to a server-side component that provides an API to manipulate your data. This approach provides infinite possibilities, but [...

I presented a session called Building Collaborative Applications with Flex Data Services and Flash Media Server at MAX (the Adobe developer conference) last week. Beyond the basics of the Flex pub/sub messaging infrastructure, the session provided techniques to build real life collaborative applications. I started with a simple chatroom, and then incrementally added features to end up with an IM client supporting presence and videoconferencing. Many people have asked me to make my code available.

Many people in the Java community have recently been asking how to use Flex with the Spring framework, and more specifically, how to remotely invoke Spring beans methods from Flex applications. Spring is one of the most popular Java frameworks. It is based on a lightweight component container that implements the Inversion of Control (IoC) [...

A few weeks ago, Sys-Con held the first “Real World Flex Seminar” in New York City. Yakov Fain, editor at the Java Developer’s Journal, Java Champion, and Flex enthusiast presented an interesting session on Flex and Java. The video of Yakov’s session is now available here. Enjoy!

Flex is being adopted by many Java shops, ISVs and OEMs to build applications inside and outside the firewall. However, I also realize that there are still many Java developers who are unfamiliar with Flex, and sometimes have misconceptions about the product. Flex integrates particularly well with Java back-ends, and the feedback from Java developers [...

My latest post How Flex can transform the user experience on the web has been picked up by InfoQ, the new enterprise software development portal created by Floyd Marinescu. Floyd was the original creator of theserverside.com, and his new portal looks very promising. http://www.infoq.

Now that the industry has turned its attention to the client-side and the user experience, the quality of web user interfaces can be expected to improve at a very fast pace after ten years of virtual hibernation. In that context, Flex offers a series of unique features that can profoundly transform the way people [...

Google Maps Collaboration is another sample I wrote during the Flex 2 beta. Since it triggered some interest at the time, I updated the code for the GA build of Flex 2. The Flex application is essentially a collaboration panel that I added on top of Google Maps, but that you could add on top of [...