Ice's blog

As usual, last Wednesday, JUGMK had another technical session on the latest trends and popular subjects in the interest of the Java community in Macedonia. The presentations were given in the premises of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies.

This session, we've had a special guest Mr. Cornel Creanga, Technical Lead and evangelist from Adobe, Romania. He was here to give us a thorough introduction into Flex, Air and the integration with a Java backend.

Two presentations were part of this session:

In the first presentation, given by myself, we had a look into the one of my pet projects, which is to discover the pattern of a usual business process, using the machinery behind the Intalio Tempo Framework (http://tempo.intalio.org). By combining the guys behind the Intalio Framework (Apache DS, Apache ODE, Apache Axis, Orbeon's XForms and Intalio's BPEL Designer) and complementing it with the tools I build SmartUI (frontend and backend management office tool) built in SmartGWT (http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase) and using XForms to the maximum, I depicted my idea of the system that can fit into most businesses with a role and action based way, in a workflow-like context.

Basically, the goal is to have all the tools and environment to describe your business processes in a visual way and deploy them into the system and manage them by using the SmartUI frontend and backend features.

The slides of the presentation:

The second presentation, given by Mr. Creanga, covered the Flex & Air technology in pretty informative way, by balancing between the features of the technologies and by looking under the hood of those technologies.

For the ones, unfamiliar with Flex/Air, Flex is an Open Source RIA development toolkit based on the Adobe Flash Player, working both in browser and desktop environment (through Adobe AIR platform). You can check out their showcase application Tour de Flex (http://flex.org/tour) for the best look-and-feel of the nature of the technology.

After we got ourselves familiar with Flex and Air, we started looking about the many ways of how we can connect the Flex fronend with a Java backend system. Starting from Remoting and Web Services we learned about the way of connecting these two technologies. The features like offline-synchonization, push-pull request and security we're also covered.

All on all, the members of the Java community got a good overview of the Adobe RIA open-source technologies.

See you next time.