We’ve created a first community site www.myflex.org to serve as a repository for commercial Flex components and Eclipse plugins developed by independent vendors. The web site is in still in Alpha, but will go to Beta next week. We are starting with four components developed by us (Farata Systems), and we invite independent vendors of components for Adobe Flex or Flex Builder plugins to offer their products for sale (or for free) at MyFlex.org.
Currently our web page (http://www.faratasystems.com) is visited by more than 11 thousand unique visitors a month, this number is growing steadily, and we’ll promote myflex.org on our site. Hopefully Adobe will give us a hand in promoting Flex component development by independent vendors. Some of these visitors may become customers of your components as well.
Our message is clear – let’s turn Flex into a Rapid Application Development tool.
The following four Eclipse plugins will be available for sale in April (pricing will be announced shortly):
Flex2Ant – this Eclipse plugin instantly translates the settings of your existing Flex Projects into ANT build scripts, so that you can build your modules, libraries and applications outside of Eclipse and create larger builds integrated with J2EE projects. What takes weeks on the middle-size project, now can be done in seconds. Additional size-optimizing builds prepared by Flex2Ant may also substantially cut down the download time of your large applications.
Flex2Doc –this plugin allows you to build the documentation for your project with a “point and click” . Then you can also upload your documentation to the corporate or the community server, so that it becomes shared by other developers.
Flex2Log – this component provides a number of configurable implementations of log targets and an interactive control panel. You can target you log information to IDE(Eclipse),local or remote server and other destinations.
DaoFlex – this is a commercial version (Eclipse plugin) of our popular open-source code generator. It takes away complexity of writing Java code for communication with databases via Flex Data Services. You do not have to know Java to create end-to-end Flex-Java-Database CRUD application in minutes.
After speaking, blogging, and writing about Flex being a good tool for Web sites development, we decided to put the money were our mouth was and have developed www.myflex.org in Flex, so Flash Player 9 is required. Please spend some time with this site and send us your feedback regarding its usability. Note the buttons Hide Header and Desktop Mode on the Products screen. The latter allows our Web site to “break free” from the Web browser’s web. This mode should remind the users that RIA are technically desktop applications that just happened to be delivered over the Web. That’s all. We’d really appreciate your suggestions regarding the Web site design, usability and improvements.
Please have mercy on us as this is just the Alpha version of the site – let us know if something is broken.
Let’s start making some money on developing and selling Flex components. It’s good for us, it’s good for Flex.
Yakov Fain
Yakov Fain said,
March 22, 2007 @ 12:22 pm
First people started downloading trial licenses already, but the doc for the plugins will be ready next week, please bear with us. Meanwhile, those of you who want to try DaoFlex plugin can use the first steps below…
3.1. Installing DaoFlex for the first time
1. Select Eclipse menus Help > Software Updates > Find and Install.
2. Select Search for new features to install and press Next..
3. You’ll see a popup window with a list of available sites with Eclipse-related software. Press the button New Remote Site… Enter the name of the site (for example, “Farata Systems”) and the following URL: http://distribution.myflex.org/downloads/update-dev/site.xml. Press Ok, and then Finish.
4. Select DaoFlex Plugin and press the button Select Required for adding required plugin. After that press the button Next.
5. Read the License agreement, and if you want to proceed with the installation select “I accept the terms in the license agreements” followed by Next.
6. Press the Finish button on the wizard’s confirmation page.
7. Press the Install All button on the verification page.
After the installation is complete, reload Eclipse workspace – DaoFlex is ready for use!
3.2. Installing DaoFlex license file
1. Download a free trial or purchase the license at http://www.myflex.org.
2. Select the menu Windows > Preferences.
3. Select License Management from the list on the left. On the popup window press Install License and select the downloaded license file.
4. The selected license becomes your default license. If you did not read the license agreement, please do so by selecting com.farata.daoflex in the Products under license section. After that, press the button OK and restart Eclipse.
4. Using DaoFlex
You can create your DaoFlex application using one of the following two methods:
1. Create a DaoFlex project first, and then create a Flex Project. In this case, during creation of the new DaoFlex project, it’ll automatically create a Web Application for your Java EE Application server. You’ll point your Flex project (select FDS as an access method) at the already created Web application your server.
2. If you already have a Flex project, create a DaoFlex project specifying location of an existing Web application. The files required by DaoFlex will be added to this Web application automatically.
Let’s go over these methods in greater details.
4.1. Create a DaoFlex project
1. Open Java perspective, and if you did not create a Java project yet, do it now. While creating the project, it is recommended to use the keep the source code and output files in separate directories.
2. Right-click on your Java Project and select Farata tools > DaoFlex > Configure build… from the popup menu.
Select your options for DaoFlex project.
Source DaoFlex project
Specify the name of your Java project to be used with your DaoFlex project. The value for this option will be set automatically, but you can change it.
Tariq Ahmed said,
March 22, 2007 @ 2:27 pm
Praise the lord!
I’ve been bugging so many hard core Flash friends of mine that here’’s a huge void that needs to be filled in the area of commercial flex components. It’s way cheaper to just buy something that does what you want then to build it yourself.
It’s about getting the job done!
Tom Gonzalez said,
March 22, 2007 @ 6:28 pm
Great Job Guys! That is an amazing volume of products in such a short period of time, can’t wait to start using them. Will you guys also be releasing FlexBI and your famed superGrid?
- Tom
anatole tartakovsky said,
March 22, 2007 @ 9:19 pm
Tom,
We are preparing subrelease of FlexBI as plugin – should be out within a week or two – basically the same as db based versdion, but targeting developers instead of business users – with two-way editing and testing in visual/mxml mode direcly in Eclipse. Actually I was showing it @flex360 and EclipseCon, and Yakov/Victor presented it @ AjaxWorld this week.
It might make sense to revisit the topic of integrating our formula engine with your dashboard solution to see if we can cooperate on the combining these two technologies in “myflex” marketplace
Regards,
Anatole
anatole tartakovsky said,
March 23, 2007 @ 1:11 pm
Small comment on Yakovs comment
Before you start installation you should get at least trial licenses by requesting them via product pages. Once requested, they should appear in your emails within few minutes. After loading the plugins, take a moment to go to Windows->Preferences->License management and install your licenses – that will enable plugins and popup menus.
Good luck,
Anatole
Christian Reinke said,
May 10, 2007 @ 7:03 am
Very impressive!
At the moment i’m using an oracle database with my fds projects. The database is configured as a JNDI Datasource which i set up in jrun-resources.xml. Is it possible to configure DaoFlex to use a JNDI datasource instead of a direct JDBC connection?
- Chris
Victor Rasputnis said,
May 10, 2007 @ 4:01 pm
Christian,
JNDI datasource is precisely how we connect. The “pool” paremeter in the Java annotations (doclets) points to nothing else but JNDI datasource. So, in case of JRun, when we say @daoflex:sql ……. pool=”jdbc/theriabook” we do mean that c:\fds2\jrun4\servers\default\SERVER-INF\jrun-resources contains jdbc/theriabook as jndi-name subnode of data-source. You may find extra help in documentation and tutorials at http://www.myflex.org
Victor