Oracle, Flex and MOS - a sign for Java FX?

Ok, while we are still waiting for the Oracla/Sun purchase to go through, there is also lots of speculating about what might happen with Sun's technology portfolio moving forward.

Since the world is moving towards richer UI interfaces for the browser, I am always in the struggle to assess which technology stacks are most appropriate to learn (GWT, Flex, plain HTML + your choice of JavaScript library such as JQuery, YUI etc.). Thus, particularly as a Java developer I am of course interested in the outlook of JavaFX - I certainly "wish" it be successful, but it still seems to be lacking in various areas (Component libraries, JVM modularization, 'community'). Furthermore, there has not been any Oracles/Sun statements about the future of JavaFX as far as I know (Please comment if I am wrong)

There was a higher-level article in InfoWorld yesterday discussing the future of Sun's technologies:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/java-what-does-its-future-hold-978

Oracles involvmen into Flex

This brings me to the main trigger point that caused me to this blog entry. A few days back, I read a news article at Heise Online, a large German IT news portal, stating that Oracle has some major issues while switching over to their new support system 'My Oracle Support' (MOS):  


http://www.heise.de/ix/meldung/Oracles-neues-Support-Portal-aergert-Kunden-856450.html

You can read more the issues here:

• http://blogs.oracle.com/Support/
• http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=984482&tstart=0
  
• http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140708/Oracle_support_portal_woes_could_erode_users_trust
• http://modalinc.com/blog/2009/10/flash-for-flash-sake/
• http://www.rhinocerus.net/forum/databases-oracle-server/600734-metalink-still-unuseable-2nd-day.html

The more interesting fact, though, is that their entire new support system is implemented in Adobe Flex. Unfortunately, I was unable to find more technical details via Google, but that is a fairly substantial deployment.

I found another interesting little piece of information on stackoverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1601444/flex-oracle-open-world-2009

According to James Ward (Flex evangelist at Adobe), Oracle showed more Flex-based applications this year at Oracle OpenWorld 2009 including: My Oracle Support, Social CRM, Siebel Gadgets and Enterprise Manager.

Can you draw any conclusions out of this regarding the future of JavaFX? Probably (hopefully) not, but it shows that Oracle has already made a significant investment into Adobe Flex. 


Adobe Flex and JavaFX in Atlanta

To give you some idea of how the market looks like here in Atlanta, Ga:

At the last meeting of the Atlanta Java Users Group (November 2009), Burr Sutter our group's president asked the group (80+ attendees) whether they use Adobe Flex and a considerable amount of hands went up (I guess at least 1/3).  Nobody in the rooms did anything with JavaFX...

* * * *

PS: On a more frustrating side-note: While writing this blog post I visited http://www.javafx.com/ and my browsers froze (FF on Mac), causing me to re-type a good portion of my blog entry (Sigh). 

Geeking out with Adobe Flex

Just some quick notes...I had some extra time this weekend and watched several excellent online presentations mostly about Adobe Flex. Adobe is doing a really good job of making their conference presentations freely available.

I worked my way through the following Adobe Max 2009 presentations:

• MAX 2009: Model-Driven Development Using Flash Builder 4 and LiveCycle Data Services ES
  
• MAX 2009: Photoshop CS4: The Essentials of Image Enhancement for Web and Flash Designers 
• MAX 2009: What's New in Flex 4 
• MAX 2009: Flash Builder 4 Advanced Tips and Tricks 
• MAX 2009: Professional Flex Data Visualization: Going One Step Further
  

Also, in the past I must have seriously overlooked Adobe TV. Seems to be a pretty neat educational resource. There I watched: Using the Flex Charting Components

Lastly, I ended the weekend by watching Data Visualization and Dashboards by Thomas Gonzales (from 360|Flex Conference). By the way you should also seriously check out his blog: http://www.twgonzalez.com/blog/. There is some good stuff there.

In his presentation, Thomas showed some need examples. This one causes some serious drooling: http://www.brightpointinc.com/flexdemos/googlefinance.html

And just in case you need a gauge on your dashboards: http://www.twgonzalez.com/blog/?p=34 Oh, yeah.

Rich Charting Options for your RIA/Webapps

I started revisiting my charting solution in jRecruiter. For this fairly basic Java web application, I have been using JFreeChart to provide basic charts (E.g. to illustrate the number of posted jobs over time).

While JFreeChart works great, and it pretty much provides all the charting features you may ever want, it has one disadvantage: It is static. Compared to all the interactive goodness that is possible with RIAs such as Flex, JFreeChart lacks the sugary icing on the top (Mouse overs, AJAX interaction, dynamic drill-down etc.). Therefore, I was investigating my options to add some richness.

Additionally, at work, I am using Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and thus wanted to get an overview about the charting capabilities I have using GWT. One of the options there is gchart. It looks okay, alas not great. What's worse, the project owner abandoned his project; see: http://code.google.com/p/gchart/.

Another option is flot which comes along as a jQuery plugin and uses the HTML canvas tag to do charting.  There is a also a GWT wrapper for flot available called gflot.

The most interesting alternative for GWT, I came across is ofcgwt. It uses Open Flash Chart 2 under the hood and looks pretty good. You could argue that if you use Flash-based charting for your GWT app, why not just implement the entire app in Flex ;-).

On the pure Flash/Flex side, there are first of all the charting components that come with Flexbuilder. In contrast to the open-sourced Flex SDK, the charting components are not free, though. 

While, I was googling for some other options, I saw Axiis - Simply beautiful! Yet, another option is IBM ILOG Elixir, which is free for free sites. They have a very nice compilation of examples: http://www.ilog.com/products/ilogelixir/demos/.

On a low level, you also may want to look at Degrafa (Even if it is just for the gorgeous examples). You can find one interesting charting example at this blog: Nike+ graph using Degrafa/Flex 3.

Lastly, if you don't mind spending some money, you may also look at FusionCharts. At one of my prior engagements we used used in very successfully in a Struts2-based web application. Fusion Charts also comes along in a flavor for Flex - see the samples. There is also a Google Code hosted GWT wrapper available.

This, concludes my little 30k-feet overview/list of 'Rich' charting options. If I missed a good one, please leave a comment!

Book Review: Learning Flex 3

Learning Flex 3 by Alaric Cole is a great introductory book for Adobe Flex 3. If you have some basic experience with HTML, JavaScript and CSS, then you will learn the basics of Flex rapidly using this book as a guide. Some of the areas that are taught are:

• How to use Flexbuilder
• Using MXML
• ActionScript 3
• Styling your application using CSS

However, if your professional background is in web-application development using Java or other OO languages, then you are probably more likely to skip or cross-read sections of the book. This is because the book starts out with practically no initial pre-requirements, and thus you might be familiar with some of the discussed areas.

The book gave me an excellent overview of Flex's capabilities, and they are all explained thoroughly and are easily understandable. Also, this may sound silly, but I particularly liked the refreshing fact that the book is in color, unlike most other IT books.

Furthermore, the book explained Data Binding (Chapter 7) very well. This is something I was not familiar with coming from the Java world. The chapter illustrates the concepts of one-way binding, two-way binding and making your own variables “bindable” using a metadata declaration, which is basically an annotation in Java parlance.

Another feature I liked a lot was View States (Chapter 12), which allows you to rearrange, group and reuse components within your application.

I wish the book provided more information for further reading. I understand that certain concepts are beyond the scope of this book, but it would have been nice if those had been mentioned and links or recommendations for further reading were provided.

For example, while AMF is mentioned on page 8 and on page 157 the book briefly talks about the Webservice and RemoteObject component, the book should have also mentioned BlazeDS as one of Flex's core technologies for communicating with back-end servers.

And for more complex applications, the book could have at least pointed out some of the available MVC frameworks for Flex and some pointers of where to read more about them (E.g. Cairngorm and PureMVC). Well, and then there is Degrafa, the declarative graphics framework…

While the author explains the aspects of using CSS in Flex applications very well, he could have further stressed that Flex uses a subset of CSS, which in certain areas behaves differently compared to CSS you more typically use in HTML pages. He should have enumerated some of those pitfalls.

Having said all this, these issues mentioned above are minor in nature. Overall, the book was a fun read! And particularly to Java web-developers, Flex may very well be THE contender for application user interfaces moving forward. One of the great things about Flex is that even the standard components look very good (and should be good enough to please your boss), and your application looks and behaves consistently across various browsers. Oh, and yes you can run the same application on the desktop as well (Chapter 15).

This book will definitely help you learn and master Flex, and you should be able to produce functional user interfaces quickly. In order to learn more about integrating Flex with your Spring powered back-end you may want to also consider looking at “Pro Flex on Spring”.

RIA, Flex and Excitement

I cannot believe that already two weeks passed by since the Atlanta DevNexus conference. Since then I have been quite busy learning Flex. My desire to explore Flex started back when James Ward talked at one of our AJUG meetings several months ago. Unfortunately, beyond some initial explorations, I never found the time to make the next leap forward.

The presentations at the DevNexus conference, though, finally pushed me beyond that initial hump. At the conference I attended the talks for GWT, JavaFX and Flex. Here is what I took away from it:

No doubt, GWT looks great and I think it is in the process of capturing a good share of the pie among Java developers. Since you write the GUI using Java (Compiled into JavaScript), it is a really nice component-based Framework (forget JSF). The ability to unit test your GUI code with just jUnit is cool, too. Something I was not aware of prior to attending DevNexus is the ability to also embed GWT into existing applications (e.g. a DIV on a page). However, at the end of the day you're still creating HTML with its limitations in terms of richness.

In terms of that, JavaFX has potential in my opinion. While it comes with its own scripting language you are still able to use the the full breath of exisitng Java libraries. Unfortunately, JavaFX does not seem to be there, yet. While some of the example application look nice, it still lacks some important pieces, e.g. lots of standard components. At the end of the day, most developers are building business apps and thus need standard components for datagrids, charting etc.

This was also one of the key complaints Yakov Fain (See picture) made at his DevNexus presentation which gave the audience an overview of various RIA technologies. (Another perspective on the JavaFX was posted by Javalobby: Where in the world is JavaFX?)

And therefore, by the end of the conference I was mostly convinced that Adobe Flex is the best technology at the moment for delivering rich internet applications. Don't get me wrong, I still hope that JavaFX can make it and maybe IBM fancies with the idea of becoming a player in that area and provides some more resources once BlueSun is born.

Nevertheless, once the conference was over, I made the decision to take the Flex deep dive. I mostly finished reading Learning Flex 3 and I just started reading Pro Flex on Spring. For both books I am planning on publishing book reviews soon.

As an example I am in the process of creating a simple Flex-based front-end (highly experimental) for jRecruiter my open source project. So far I have setup the Spring BlazeDS 1.0M2 integration and I am pulling back job postings from the server using AMF and showing them in a data-grid component. Furthermore, I added Google Maps to the Flex application which works pretty neat. It gives you the ability to show job postings on a map (and thus helping you estimate possible morning commutes). I hope to have a deployed version available soon. In the meantime, here is an early screen-shot:

First Visit to the Atlanta Flash and Flex User Group

I finally made it to a meeting of the Atlanta Flash and Flex User Group. Ryan Swanson gave a great presentation on the Flex Data Services Framework, which was quite interesting. He also also showed us his project Regular Expression Explorer. Written in Flex, it looks like a really slick application.

Below are a few mostly Flex related links that might be of interest:

Not Flex specific, but if you need to satisfy your Mashup needs: http://www.programmableweb.com/

Several interesting Flex blogs:

http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/
http://dougmccune.com/blog/

A ton of presentations:

http://www.carehart.org/ugtv/

Flex Libraries:

http://code.google.com/p/as3corelib/
http://code.google.com/p/flexlib/
SuperImage

Flex and Maven First Steps

I finally decided to take the plunge and started learning Flex last night. First I wanted to setup my environment. As I don't have a Flex Builder License (My Evaluation License Expired before I had a chance to actually use it...arrgh...) I started creating a simple build environment that works with a plain Eclipse setup.

As far as I see there are 2 options out there:

http://www.israfil.net/projects/mojo/maven-flex2-plugin/
http://code.google.com/p/flex-mojos/

After some Googling the there seemed to be a preference for flex-mojos. So I decided to go with it.

Getting my first hello-world compile using flex-mojos was a bit tricky. The issue is that flex-mojos is under heavy development and seems to change a bit. E.g. the location of their Subversion repository and Maven repository changed which however is not necessarily reflected in their examples. Nevertheless there is a very helpful blog and a useful wiki available.

In order to keep up with the project, I decided to also check-out the latest flex-mojo trunk from Subversion and build it locally. Well, it turns out that my local Maven version on my MacBook Pro was not up-to-date but finally I got everything running.

Thus, after some fiddling around I got my first Maven-based Flex-Hello-World running.

In my next post I blog about some further progress and also some of the configuration that was necessary.

As it got really late last night I came across good read about building Flex applications using Maven and Flex-mojos:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/fullstack_pt1.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/fullstack_pt2.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/fullstack_pt3.html

Adobe Flex in Atlanta

Our yesterday's AJUG meeting has been awesome. James Ward delivered a great presentation on Adobe Flex and the room was packed (100+ attendees). I just hope Sun can still pull off Java FX and make it truly rock solid because Adobe Flex looks cool and very polished to say the least. Also the integration with Java backends also looked very nice (Adobe's BlazeDS or Granite Data Services). One of the demo's James showed can be found here.

Additionally, here in Atlanta there are more and more Flex projects going on...I wonder if it starts reaching a tipping point.

Finally, I think I need to check out the Atlanta Flash and Flex User Group, especially since it is just around the corner from where I live :-)