Victor Rasputnis

This article is a transcript from a recorded conversation Yakov Fain had with Anatole Tartakovsky and Victor Rasputnis – his business partners at Farata Systems. This conversation took place on the mountain after the day of skiing. Yakov. There are many ways of creating Web applications and creating them for the enterprises is not the same as developing a Web site for a pizzeria in your neighborhood. During the last five years we’ve been using mainly Adobe Flex for development of the front end of Web applications. Flex applications work in a well known and predictable run-time environment called Flash Player. The code is compiled and you have convenient tools for development. Flex is undergoing “Under New Management” transformations these days. Even though Flex remains the best framework for development of Web applications, you can feel the pressure of HTML5. But us... (more)

How to Prevent Flex Numeric Nulls From Turning to Zeros in BlazeDS

I’d like to use this opportunity and invite Flex developers living in Europe to attend our Advanced Flex Master Class in Brussels, Belgium on March 1 and 2, 2010. This question we get on almost every new client project: “We’re struggling with handling of null values for numeric data types in Flex/Java projects. Every time there’s an update, we end up replacing the original nulls with zeros when the user didn’t actually change that value.  Have you guys come up with a silver bullet for handling numeric nulls?” Consider a Java method with a Double parameter. You pass uninitialized ... (more)

Adobe Flex 2: Advanced DataGrid

In Part 1 (CFDJ, Vol. 8, issue 10) we introduced the destination-aware grid, formatters, and renderers. In this article we are continuing our discussion about datagrid renderers and... RadioButtonGroupBox as Drop-In Renderer We can apply similar techniques to RadioButton controls. The following code snippet suggests how the group of RadioButton controls can be used as a drop-in item renderer (and editor). Instead of an onValue/offValue pair, we are introducing an array of options (we could have gone further and upgraded to , which is similar to the Bu... (more)

Developing Intelligent Web Applications With AJAX (Part 2)

The publicity that AJAX grabbed over the last half a year is based on closing the gap between the Web applications and the desktop applications, combining the "reach" and "rich." At the same time, the gap between the technological level of AJAX and what corporate developers expect in their modern arsenal is really astonishing. After all, AJAX is neither a tool nor a platform. There is no AJAX standards committee or community process in place. While software vendors are crafting proprietary development platforms on top of AJAX (which pretty much means "from scratch"), early adopte... (more)

Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex 2 and Java

A typical Java developer knows that when you need to develop a GUI for a Java application, Swing is the tool. Eclipse SWT also has a number of followers, but the majority of people use Java Swing. For the past 10 years, it was a given that Swing development wouldn't be easy; you have to master working with the event-dispatch thread, GridBaglayout, and the like. Recently, the NetBeans team created a nice GUI designer called Matisse, which was also ported to MyEclipse. Prior to Matisse, JBuilder had the best Swing designer, but it was too expensive. Now a good designer comes with N... (more)