If your business has invested in Adobe Flex or Adobe AIR, a powerful software development kit for web, mobile, and desktop, chances are you’ve also invested in the training and you have IT professionals that are familiar with the basics.

Here is the challenge: Every business is unique and requires unique solutions for the web and internally. Sometimes, it may be necessary to call in specialists to partner with your IT staff to help determine just how to apply the proper toolset to a specific project or situation. This is a situation that AppFoundation’s Adobe Flex mentoring can be of real value.

How Does It Work?

Adobe Flex staff augmentation or project consulting can be done on a temporary contract basis, which will deliver high yield results while showing a cost savings for your business. In addition, such a consultant can either come to your place of business or work offsite. In either case however, it is important to engage early in the development stage of whatever project your business in undertaking so the mentoring process can happen right away. By involving the consultant during the initial phase, your business will save even more and improve time-to-market. During this period, the consultant will have the opportunity to evaluate your present development framework, including:

•  Code Base
•  Development framework and processes
•  Architecture configuration (hardware and software)
•  Security configuration
•  Ux usability

Keep in mind that the primary purpose of Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR is the creation of web, mobile, and desktop applications for the use of your customers and clients. As such, having AppFoundation working on your behalf will help your IT staff to get the most out of the Adobe toolset and ensure that your rich Internet applications are user-friendly and intuitive.

How Long Does It Take?

The length of time your IT department may require Adobe Flex consulting can vary based on project needs. AppFoundation is prepared to partner with your business to address short, medium, and long term needs for project work. AppFoundation has extensive experience in developing extremely large scale Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR applications integrated with the following technologies:

• JAX-WS2.0 based web services hosted on Weblogic
•  EJBs hosted on Weblogic
•  Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, Netezza. MySQL
• Acupia based file storage
• JSPs, Spring, JAVA EE, .NET, PHP
• SAP SRM and SAP MDM
• SAP BSPs
• Much much more

AppFoudation also brings its own series of Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR tools to the table in the form of FxConnect.

FxConnect is an Enterprise development framework for Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR.

With many years of experience using Adobe Flex, we have seen many issues with current options for development frameworks. From organizations who don’t allow open-source solutions to mostly issues with application consistency and size; AppFoundation has created its own development framework built for developers.

FxConnect cuts down on as much as 25% of development required to deliver Flex and AIR applications. The goal of FxConnect is to simplify development of large scale rich Internet applications (RIAs). The result is a framework that allows your company to start developing features out-of-the-box instead of worrying about core architecture issues that FxConnect addresses.

• Application Context
• Module Management
• Application Navigation
• Style Management
• Resource Management
• Data Transport
• Error Management
• State Management

As you might have experienced, you can see that Flex can be built out-of-the-box to obtain data from external data sources. This works fine with small Flex applications that only have one or few view states. However, when it comes to building enterprise scale applications in Flex the basics just won’t cut it. To avoid a ‘big ball of yarn’ (many point-to-point connections between Flex components) infrastructure for your application we need to define a standard and consistent architecture for building our Flex applications.

When determining what architecture to implement your Flex user interface with you need to consider what fits your organization and developers skills best as each solution is different and generally based on different design patterns, or slight modifications of those patterns. There are a few Flex application development frameworks that present solutions to Flex development through design patterns that can be applied to Flex such as Cairngorm, PureMVC, MVCS, and Mate. However, from our experience, each of these frameworks creates various problems when developing enterprise applications such as:

• Applications that are difficult to maintain due to the over-use of events.
• Difficulty to track application flows when data is not persisted on data models and passed through events exclusively.
• Application SWF sizes becoming larger than 1mb in size. This is not good for browser based RIAs.

An Investment That Pays

Costs for Adobe Flex mentoring and consultation will depend upon the scope and size of your project. However, regardless of cost, temporary Adobe Flex staffing augmentation provided by AppFoundation’s veteran consultants is an investment that will give you security in knowing that your web, mobile, and desktop applications have been configured and developed by experts.

If you want to get a quote for AppFoundation’s consulting services, please visit www.appfoundation.com and fill out the contact form or email us directly at info@appfoundation.com.

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.

http://adobe.flex.appfoundation.com

AppFoundation built this application using our Enterprise Flex Development Framework FxConnect. FxConnect cuts down on as much as 35% of development required to deliver Flex and AIR applications. The goal of FxConnect is to simplify development of large scale rich Internet applications (RIAs). The result is a framework that allows your company to start developing features out-of-the-box instead of worrying about core architecture issues that FxConnect addresses.

• Application Context
• Module Management
• Application Navigation
• Style Management
• Resource Management
• Data Transport
• Error Management
• State Management

We were able to turn this application around quickly by having the core architecture already in template form using FxConnect. This allowed us to focus directly on the features of this forecasting application.

For this project we started with the wireframe and design comps and then moved directly into development from here. This application is built on Adobe Flex, FxConnect, JSPs, and SQL Server as the database.

This application was broken down into three major functional areas; Workload, Client, and Timekeeper.

Workload allows the user to select a period in time to view total budgeted fees by month as you can see in the screenshot below.

Workload View

Client View

Timekeeper View

http://adobe.flex.appfoundation.com

October 14th, 2009 – 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Christopher A. Parr Library, Program Conference Room
6200 Windhaven Parkway, Plano, TX 75093

Data Visualization with Adobe Flex

ABSTRACT:

In this discussion, Chris Giametta will present an overview discussing the challenges of large data sets, complex data arrangements, and effective UI implementations using Adobe Flex.

This presentation is about building rich Internet applications that combine the interactive user experiences of Adobe Flex with the delivery of complex data from large data warehouses and databases. The goal for this discussion is to give you a better understanding of how RIAs can solve client needs in the business intelligence space.

BIO:

Chris Giametta is founder and President of AppFoundation Technology Group, a leading RIA company in Dallas/Fort Worth focused on data visualization and web based application development. AppFoundation employs advanced methodologies and tools to help decision makers build the situational awareness of their competitive terrain.

Chris is an Adobe Certified Expert in Adobe Flex. He was been working with Flex since 2004. Before learning Flex and Spring (Java based framework), he cut his teeth with EDS developing customer relationship management (CRM) systems built with Java on the front end, and a C++ implementation on the server side. He has extensive experience in delivering Business Intelligence systems, e-commerce, and ERP applications in a rich format.

As the author of Pro Flex on Spring, Chris focused on how to develop large scale applications using patterned based development to implement RIA technology.

You can contact Chris by visiting:

www.appfoundation.com