I wanted to take some time to show one of AppFoundation’s internal applications we use to manage a variety of information such as clients, projects, and communication between the two. AppFoundation’s social business solution, Af Connect, applies the full potential of Web 2.0 models like communities, collaboration and user generated content in a secure, managed environment.
The application is built using the Adobe Flex and AIR platform, and utilizes a series of Spring services for persisting its data. The combination of Spring and AIR offers a powerful deployment model with due to the ease of configuration required. The simple, yet robust, deployment is possible because the AIR runtime runs on the client machine.
The AF Connect AIR application enables valid users to view projects they are tied to, messages for those projects, media, and client contact information if that are granted rights to those views. The list below shows what the application feature set is composed of:
- Social Media connection suite via FxConnect
- Account and Project creation
- Ability to assign members viewing privledges to selected accounts and projects
- Account and Project level messages, connections, and media
- Project management of project milestones, details, issues, and tasks
- User profile management
- Client details, notes, location, contacts, and URL links
Af Connect Task View
Solution Overview
With the power of the AIR and Spring platforms, it only took about 4 months to take the application from concept to a working production implementation. A team of designers, Flex developers, and Java developers worked on the application at different points throughout the implementation, working on both the backend data connectors and the user interface.
The client desktop application was built using Adobe Flex and runs in the AIR runtime. Adobe Flex is an application development framework that is used by developers to build applications that run in the Flash Player. Adobe AIR allows developers to create applications for the desktop using Web technologies such as HTML/CSS, Ajax, Flash, and Flex. In addition, AIR provides offline support and a simple deployment paradigm for delivering the client applications.
The mid-tier of this applications is a balance of Spring and Java Servlets to handle the heavy lifting for data processing. This allows for a deployment mechanism where the AIR application runs on the user’s computer and data is managed by Spring.
The pairing of AIR and Spring makes it possible to retrieve and visualize the data quickly for the users. With Flex and Spring, we can stand up applications at a very fast pace.
One of the features important to the application users was the ability to map the location of our client site. You can see how we integrated with Yahoo Maps in the image below.
Af Connect Client Location View
This made it easy to add print functions that use the content in the Flex component to send the map to the printer.
To learn how AppFoundation can help your organization develop Business Intelligence tools like this one, please visit www.appfoundation.com and contact us now.
