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I have worked on a few large Flex applications, and almost everything about the platform delights me — it is quick to prototype, powerful in creating rich UIs. But it often frustrates me how difficult it is to handle run-time errors. There are posts, discussions and threads around tackling this issue. I have put together some of those ideas into a solution that I like, and wanted to share it.

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Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are increasingly being seen as successful models for creating lightweight front-ends for SOAs. They not only allow developers to overcome the static natured HTML’s limitation of refreshing the entire page to load new information but also allow flashy graphics, and immersive user experiences. Adobe’s Flex is a free open source framework for building and maintaining RIAs that allows consistent deployment on all major browsers. Adobe provides a commercially available development environment (Flex builder) with free trial version for 60 days that is highly recommended for ease of development.

Besides the rich interface library, Flex provides SOA based data access components that allows server side interaction for the flex applications. This article will look at the different ways for bringing server side data into a Flex application, primarily focusing on Remote Services using BlazeDS.

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The “Selecting the Right Flex Application Framework” post provided a summary comparison of the Flex application frameworks out there, highlighting the ones I thought were the “heavyweights” a Flex developer should focus on. The purpose was primarily to help you make a quick, easy, but well-informed decision, without looking at the code.

But many of us wish to look under the covers and see a detailed comparison of the frameworks. So I took Adobe’s Flex Builder 3 Getting Started tutorial example of a simple Flickr photo search and re-implemented it in Cairngorm, PureMVC and Mate.

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In my opinion, binding is one of the trickiest concepts for a Java developer to really understand when first learning Flex. It’s not because it is overly complex, but because binding is similar enough to other concepts in JSP, Swing, etc. that we begin to form mental models without fully understanding the differences. But those subtle differences are important for the last 20% of correctness in a lot of code.

To illustrate, I cooked up a Java Puzzler-esque Binding puzzle. The application in this post contains a panel with a button on it. It has 2 states. Clicking the button switches to the ‘large’ state, at which point the panel widens and the button’s label changes to “Contract…” instead of “Expand….”

So go ahead and click the button, then see if you can answer this question: Why doesn’t the text change?

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I would just like to take a second to introduce myself. My name is Jeff Stonebrook and I am a Senior Software Consultant with Summa. I just recently led a successful project that implemented an advanced web user interface in Flex and boy - it changed my perspective of what a web application has to be forever more.

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So you’ve decided to use Flex for your web application development. It’s easy to follow the online tutorials and prototype an application, but deciding on an application framework for your major production Flex application is more difficult. The Flex community is divided between Adobe’s Cairngorm and Cliff Hall’s PureMVC, with strong arguments from both sides. However, your answer may just lie in the “it depends” space.

This post aims to help you make that decision. It includes analysis of Cairngorm, PureMVC, and the new kid on the block, asfusion’s Mate. Other Flex application framework players are also discussed.

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