I speak on Flex and Java Integration, Flex and Hibernate and Collaborative real-time RIA this Sunday (November 22, 2009) at the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) Rocky Mountain Software Symposium in Denver, CO. If you are in Denver and coming to the show, I hope to see you there.
My friends at Farata (Yakov, Victor and Anatole), who are a very accomplished set of authors, developers, mentors, architects and community leaders in the RIA and Java communities, have set up a venue for you to ask all your questions that pertain to the Flash platform. So go to http://built4flash.stackexchange.com/ and ask away everything about Flex, Flash, AIR, Flex and LAMP, Flex and Java, the Flash development community, open source projects in the space and more. Going by their past and current track record, I am sure you will not be disappointed with their great replies and excellent management. Do bear in mind though that the venue is very new. Help grow the community and help yourself by getting your questions answered!
http://built4flash.stackexchange.com/ is a site build on the engine created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky of the StackOverflow fame.
Watch me speak on BlazeDS, Flex and Java integration. (Original Post on DZone: Meet the Author – Shashank Tiwari on BlazeDS, Flex & Java Integration).
The second edition of the hugely successful Flex (Flash) Camp Wall Street is less than 2 weeks away. This time the event is bigger (over 2 days — November 16-17, 2009), better (more speakers and more topics) and cheaper ($49 only!). Alike last year, its at the conveniently located New York Seminar and Conference Center — 71 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10010.
There are a bunch of very talented Flex, AIR, Flash, LCDS and BlazeDS experts (experienced developers, celebrated authors, speakers and ideators) speaking at the event. As it stands, the speaker list includes James Ward, Yakov Fain, Jeff Tapper, Jeffry Houser, Wade Arnold, Christian Saylor, Brian O’Connor, Daniel Holth, Elad Elrom and Adam Flater, besides yours truly 
You can lookup the details about the event and register online at http://www.flexcampwallstreet.com
Information on the schedule and sessions is available at http://www.flexcampwallstreet.com/sessions.html. You can read more about the speakers at http://flexcampwallstreet.com/speakers.html.
An idea of a party at the end of day 2 is actively brewing as well!
If you are interested, please go and register right away. The tickets are selling out fast and going by last year’s experience its highly likely that they will all be sold out soon!
Getting Started with BlazeDS, a DZone RefCard on Adobe BlazeDS that I authored is available online. Go ahead and download it now.
The great thing about the DZone RefCards is that they are terse and useful presentations of technical topics and are available completely free of charge. The RefCard on BlazeDS is a quick 6 page practical introduction to some of the key aspects of using BlazeDS. For more details, consider reading my book on Adobe BlazeDS — Professional BlazeDS (Wiley/Wrox, 2009).
Please let me know if you find the RefCard useful. Also, please point out to me any errors that may have slipped through the cracks.
Creating Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Java
My new book on “BlazeDS” was released earlier this week. I got my first set of author copies last night in the mail. It was a great feeling holding a copy in my hand. This book was written over the last many months as I toiled with a number of other things, including working on client projects, at the same time. Most of the writing was done in the nights and weekends. I must at this point mention that my family (wife and kids) was extremely supportive else this book would have never been possible.
The book covers a lot of ground at the sweet intersection spot where Flex based RIA and Java meet. It covers the fundamentals of the wiring, protocols, formats and the API that relate to the integration of Flex/AIR and Java in the first few chapters and then rapidly graduates to explaining advanced topics. Advanced topics include Spring and Hibernate integration, custom adapters and real-time data push. As the topic clearly suggests all integration discussion is in the context of the open source data services product from Adobe: BlazeDS.
If the subject of integrating Flex/AIR and Java interests you, then go grab a copy of this book from your local technical book retailer or order online at Amazon – http://www.amazon.com/Professional-BlazeDS-Creating-Internet-Applications/dp/0470464895/. As you read the book, please let me know of any errors. If you like the book, please rate it well on Amazon and/or leave a comment behind.
Hope the book helps the folks who are actively combining Flex (or AIR) and Java to create the next set of rich and robust productivity enhancing enterprise grade applications.
If you are someone who is interested in coupling Flex and Spring based messaging (especially JMS) systems, you may want to whet your appetite by reading my article on the subject at DZone. Here is the link: Integrating Flex and Spring based JMS applications. Please let me know if the article was helpful or want to learn more about the subject.
In this article I illustrate how you could install and setup BlazeDS in a JBoss AS 5 application server instance. A number of new developers have difficulty installing and setting up BlazeDS in JBoss. I hope this article will provide answers to their questions and also help all those others who are seeking similar help.
First lets download and install JBoss AS 5. If you already have an instance installed then you can skip this step. If you have a prior version of JBoss (a 4.x version) installed then you could possibly avoid upgrading the installation, unless you need one of the newer features in version 5. You can read “What’s new in JBoss AS 5” to understand the new features in JBoss AS 5.
To download JBoss AS 5.1.0.GA (which is the latest stable release at the time of this writing), go to http://jboss.org/jbossas/downloads/. Once you have downloaded the distribution expand the archive file to a folder in your file system. JBoss AS is distributed in .zip and .tar.gz archive formats. If you are on windows, use the .zip distribution. Whereas, if you are on Mac OS X or Linux then get the .tar.gz version.
JBoss AS 5.1.0.GA needs JDK 6. If you don’t have JDK 6 on your machine please download and install it from http://java.sun.com/javase/6/.
Once you expand the JBoss distribution and you have the correct version of Java running on your machine, you are ready to start using JBoss. One of the thoughest things for a JBoss newbie is to understand the following:
Therefore, in this write-up I will atttempt to explain the very basics of each of the topics in the list above and see how it applies to BlazeDS.
The JBoss AS 5.x directory structure
First look at the Figure 1 below.
Figure 1: JBoss main directory structure
The “bin” and “server” folders are what you will need most. The “bin” folder has all the executables, including those to start and stop a server. The “server” is the core of the appplication server. This is where all the application server modules are and this where you deploy your application. The BlazeDS application, that you will download shortly will be deployed in a sub-folder of this folder.
The “lib”, “client” and “common” folders have all the jar files that JBoss server and client applications may need. The “docs” folder has the documentation.
Within the “server” folder you will find the following sub-folders:
Each of these are built-in server profiles that you could use to deploy your application to. In most likelihood going with “default” will suffice. If none of these available server profiles are sufficient or suitable, you can also create your own custom server profile. For example I created a custom server profile called “sandbox” and started out by copying over all the contents of the “default” folder into it.
I will stick to the “default” server profile for the rest of this post and will not talk about custom server profiles for now. Within the “default” folder is a folder called “deploy”. The “deploy” folder is where you deploy an application within JBoss AS. This is a good time to download and deploy BlazeDS to show what deployment of a application in JBoss involves.
Downloading and deploying BlazeDS
Go to http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/blazeds/Downloads and download the latest BlazeDS release build (which as of now is a 3.x version). BlazeDS can be downloaded either in source or binary formats. In addition, you have the option to download a BlazeDS turnkey distribution, which includes an Apache Tomcat instance and a set of sample applications that leverage BlazeDS, as a part of the distribution. I would recommend downloading the turnkey distribution to get hold of the sample applications. At the time of this writing the latest BlazeDS tunrkey release is “blazeds-turnkey-3.2.0.3978″.
Once downloaded, unzip the zipped up distribution. Once you expand the archive you will find the following “war” files in the root of the distribution:
Next, copy over all the three “war” files to the server/default/deploy folder. Now, you are ready to start the JBoss application server.
Starting and stopping JBoss AS
The JBoss AS “bin” folder has start and stop scripts. Scripts are available for multiple platforms, sepcially windows and the linux/unix/mac os x platforms. To start and stop a JBoss instance use “run.bat” and “shutdown.bat” on windows and “run.sh” and “shutdown.sh” on the linux/unix/mac os x platform. When using “run.bat” on Vista you may encouter problems with the script’s ability to locate findstr. Read more about this problem: Findstr Command Not Found.
Once the server starts, open up a browser instance and go to http://localhost:8080/samples to access the sample applications that come with the BlazeDS turnkey distribution. In addition, you could point your browser to http://localhost:8080/ds-console and access the administration console that helps monitor the state of your BlazeDS instance.
At this stage if you peek into your JBoss server logs you are likely to see a trace that says its unable to connect to the sampledb. The error output on the command line is as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 : JBoss server log snippet
To correct this problem, go to the place where you unzipped your blazeds turnkey distribution and run the “startdb” script within the “sampledb” folder.
BlazeDS is now installed and ready for use with a JBoss AS instance. More accurately you have taken the first few steps to start with more configuration and serious development. In later posts I will explain numerous configuration options around JMS, clustering, remoting and more. For now, I hope the write-up helps those who have had trouble with getting started with BlazeDS on JBoss.
Speaking on integrating Java and RIA at the Princeton Java Users Group tomorrow (March 25, 2009). The session talks about the pull and push based models for communication between a Java server and a rich web application. The remoting and messaging infrastructure within BlazeDS and both Flex and JavaScript based front-ends are considered in the discussion. This session focuses on the view through the pipes, especially through those that connect the two layers. The session is a mix of theory, code and the current practice.
Integrating Java and RIA -- a view through the pipes
If you are interested in the topic and are in New Jersey or Pennsylvania (in the areas close enough to New Jersey), then come join us at the meetup.
The Princeton JUG is a pretty vibrant community of Java developers. It is lead and managed by a famous voice of the Java and the RIA communities — Yakov Fain.
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