 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
Slowly but surely our book Enterprise Application Development with Flex is moving along. By the end of the month we are submitting three more chapters. So far O'Reilly got just the chapter on comparing Flex frameworks. I'd like to give you a brief overview on what and how we writing about this month.
Our writing process goes like this – each of us, Anatole, Victor and myself writes his chapter and then the other two review it and explain why it’s a no go. After a while, each of us approves the chapter and we submit it to O'Reilly. Then, publisher’s technical editors review it and will send us their feedback. We’ll address the comments and the reviewed chapters will be published as Rough Cuts online in safaribooksonline.com. I expect to see the first chapters online in November.
These are some of the things that we are writing about:
The chapter Selected Design Patterns is a discussion of some of the design patterns and their specifics in Flex environment. This is not a tutorial –we expect you to be familiar with design pattern before starting reading this chapter.
We’ll show you how instead of creating your own singletons, you can use the one that already exists in every Flex application, namely the Application object.
Then, you’ll read about the Proxy pattern that allows you to change the behavior of the ActionScript objects on the fly without touching a single line of their code.
Discussion of the Mediator pattern will help you with building loosely-coupled components that communicate with each other via custom events.
Do you think that there’s nothing special about writing DTO’s? Trust me, there is and you’ll see how we create them.
And finally, we’ll immerse into an exciting world of Class Factories. Flex framework includes mx.core.ClassFactory, but it’s pretty limited in functionality. You’ll see a heavy-duty version of the ActionScript factory that can be used for dynamically creating UI components.
The chapter on LiveCycle (not to be confused with LCDS) will give you an idea of what’s our recommended way of using Flex with such a powerful BPM tool as LiveCycle 8.2. In our version of putting Flex and LiveCycle in the same bed we are pulling the blanket toward Flex.
In the chapter on using open source solutions for communicating between Flex and server side we’ll unleash the power of AMF protocol and provide illustrations of how you can turn open source BlazeDS into a powerful platform for modern applications. We will concentrate on both polling and server‐side push techniques with BlazeDS.
This brief overview of the status of the book is over - we hope you’ll enjoy the reading.
1. Will your new Flex book be published on safaribooksonline.com also when
it is complete and finally done?
The first chapters should be published on safari in November, I guess.
The book should be avail in print in April.
