Farata Systems      

Our new book “Enterprise Application Development with Flex” has been approved by the editorial board and Adobe Flex team. The co-authors of this book work for Farata Systems: Victor Rasputnis, Anatole Tartakovsky and myself. Here’s the brief book outline

Ch1. Comparison of Flex Frameworks
The goal of any framework is to make the process of  software development and maintenance easier. There are different ways of achieving this goal. Some people prefer working with frameworks  that are based on the Model-View-Controller pattern, while other like dealing with class libraries of components. Each approach has its pros and cons. In this chapter we’ll build the same  of how to build the same application using the frameworks listed below.

Ch2. Selected Design Patterns
Design patterns suggest solutions to a common problems that arise during software development. Flex is  domain-specific tool that’s aimed for creating rich UI for the Web ,and in this chapter we’ll discuss specifics of selected  design patterns when applied to creation of UI with Flex .

Ch 3.Building Enterprise Framework
Business Annotations;  Extending DataGrid and Advanced DataGrid

Ch 4.Life Cycle of Enterprise RIA Projects
Typical Enterprise RIA projects are developed by mixed teams of the client and server-side  developers.  This chapter covers a variety of topics that development managers and team leaders are facing: what skill sets are required for the project ,how to  set up a version control  repository, is there a way to  automate creation of build and deployment script. We’ll also cover the best practices for dealing with  technical issues like memory and CPU utilization, logging errors across the tiers to make production support of the  users more  efficient.

Ch 5.Live Cycle Data Services. Best practices
LCDS under the hood; Server  push with Real-Time Messaging Protocol

Ch 6.Open Source Networking  Solutions for Flex Applications
Open sourcing of Flex framework in general and its communication protocols and server-side components in particular play an important role in adoption of Flex by enterprises. While large scale applications most likely will be empowered by LCDS, the smaller ones will find open source server-side components very useful.  BlazeDS is an open source implementation of the highly-compressed AMF communication  protocol by Adobe, and  this chapter will unleash its power  illustrating both polling and server-side push techniques with this cost effective and efficient solution for RIA. Third-parties offer their versions of AMF implementation and we’ll provide a brief review of such software.
We’ll also cover AMF, data polling with BlazeDS, server side push with BlazeDS, and third party AMF implementations

Ch 7.Enterprise Portals and Workflows with Adobe LiveCycle

Ch 8. Performance considerations
While RIA with Flex are more engaging and user friendly than their DHTML peers , they have to be architected not as monolithic slow-loaded monsters, but rather as modularized applications that initially load only the minimal amount of code with lazy loading of the rest of the modules on as-needed basis. In this chapter we’ll talk about actual vs. perceived performance improvements  and  various techniques of splitting the project into a set of loosely coupled modules and libraries, which besides minimizing the size of the code helps in splitting the work between different developers working on the project .

Ch 9. Workforce Automation with AIR
Data Synchronization  (connected/disconnected modes),Google Maps integration

Ch 10. Enterprise Reporting with Flex
Reporting  is often one of the most time consuming tasks in developing  of many enterprise application. Just using Flex printing API would require allocation of substantial budget and human resources.  In this chapter we’ll cover the basic printing techniques as well as introduce ClearBI, a freely available Web reporter for Flex applications.

Since OReilly encourages blogging about the book, we’ll be publishing bits and pieces during the next six-eight months required to write these 600 pages. The chapters will be available online on Safari as rough cuts as they are ready.

Stay tuned,
Yakov Fain