13 Reasons Java programmers learn about Flex and BlazeDS

When it comes to explaining 13 reasons why Java programmers should learn blazeds, I use a hypothetical Sue scoring system to show how to turn existing Java programs into RIA applications. With this example, I will also explain the many different uses of blazeds in existing Java applications or new Java applications.

Reason one: Open source

The core of the Flex Software Development Toolbox (SDK) is an open source framework designed to develop and maintain RIA applications that are the same in different browsers and lower-bound surfaces of different operating systems. Flex is being released using the Mozilla Public License (Mozilla publicly License). The compiled Flex application runs under the Adobe Flash platform.

BlazeDS is a cable bridge connecting Flex and Java, and is an open source technology for remote invocation and message delivery. On the Java application Server, it exists as a servlet, so it can be used in any standard Java network application. BlazeDS is published in LGPL (Lesser GNU public License). While publishing blazeds, Adobe also publishes the AMF (ActionScript message Format) specification, which enables communication between BlazeDS, Java, and flex clients in this concise binary format.

Reason two: the perfect community support

The flex community is very active and the community contributes a large number of projects. flex.org, an Adobe site with community News, has a new community contribution almost every day, and more than 11000 members of the Flex user group on Yahoo!.

The Flexlib project on Google Code, for example, has already submitted a large number of Open-source UI components. The SWiZ and mate projects contribute to the framework for optimizing event handling, as well as the Flex Monkeym project that gorilla Logic contributed to automated UI testing.

Reason three: Bring a broad employment prospects

According to Adobe's Flex "Preacher"--james Ward, the market demand for flex senior developers is very high, and learning flex allows you to have highly competitive development skills.

Reason four: higher return on business benefits

Overall, the development of enterprise Web applications is not an easy job, which is basically a well-known fact. Flex and BlazeDS provide more than just powerful development tools, and the development technology itself is relatively simple. Development efficiency can be greatly improved, so that products can be quickly marketed. The user experience of Flex and Flash is also relatively attractive, which is helpful for increasing traffic and improving user conversion (conversion rate).

A classic example is the Borders chain bookstore. They recently released a new Web site with a "magic bookshelf" that uses a flash interface to simulate the process of book lending. Borders found that this simulation borrowed very clearly refers to the user conversion rate: "With this flash-driven interface, users can browse books, DVDs and CD cover, the user conversion rate than other sites do not have this feature 62% higher."

Reason five: Flex is the first language specifically designed to create a UI

Most languages are not designed to support the UI at the first time. The implementation of swing packages in Java is just a good proof. That's why a lot of simple moves like bundled data are very painful to implement in swing. The biggest problem with swing is that you have to be aware of its APIs if you want to improve development efficiency.

Flex, in contrast, is designed specifically to create a Web UI. As Bruce Eckel said, Flex is the first domain-specific language (DSL) for UI development. Using Flex to build the UI is much simpler than other technologies such as JSP, JSF, swing, and so on. The language itself blends data binding, event handling, layout of controls, and other common UI development techniques, even without a deep understanding of the language and does not affect development efficiency.

Reason six: Programming style is similar to Java

You can continue to use the existing Java development tools to develop flex applications. Of course, you can also use the free command-line tools that are carried in the SDK, Adobe Flex Builder (an Eclipse plug-in), or the most recent IntelliJ idea 8.

Flex provides a stateful environment in which data is loaded from the client. This programming pattern is more like developing desktop clients than HTML programming, which should be quite familiar to developers who have used Java swing programming.

Flex is a combination of MXML (XML-like UI Markup language) and Adobe ActionScript (object-oriented parsing language). Because of this combination, flex programming is very similar to Java, because both of them are well-known object-oriented concepts.

The ideal development environment is to create a flex application under a Web Deployment folder. As a result, you don't need to redeploy every time you update your application, just refresh it in the browser. With Flex and blazeds development, the efficiency of development is definitely higher than before.