Victor Rasputnis

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 NetBeans for free. Why even consider Flex for developing Rich Internet Applications (RIA)? First, we'll give the short answer. Just look at the code in Listing 1. This code compiles and runs in the Flash player and produces the output shown in Figure 1. Yes, it's a tree control with several no... (more)

Working with Large Applications

In this excerpt from our book, Rich Internet Applications, we'll cover how to set up large applications intended for Web or, more broadly speaking, distributed deployment. As an example let's consider an enterprise application that consists of hundreds of screens, reports, forms, and dashboards. Accordingly, about a dozen engineers specializing in GUIs, frameworks, data layers, and business domains are working on this application in parallel. Every application "run" in Flex Builder as well as the invocation of the application's MXML file processed by the Web-tier Flex compiler r... (more)

Adobe Flex 2: Advanced DataGrid

In any GUI tool, one of the most popular components is the one that shows data in a table format like JTable in Java or Datawindow in PowerBuilder. The Adobe Flex 2 version of such a component is called DataGrid. In any UI framework, the robustness of such a component depends on formatting and validating utilities as well as a whole suite of data input controls: CheckBoxes, ComboBoxes, RadioButtons, all sorts of Inputs, Masks, and so on. Using theatrical terminology, the role of the king is played by his entourage. Practically speaking, touching up the DataGrid is touching up a ... (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)

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)