These books that explain how to develop enterprise-class software using Adobe Flex and AIR for enterprise architects.
This series is intended for experienced architects and programmers who are accustomed to using best practices with other programming environments. There are other books which describe how to program MXML and ActionScript in order to create simple Flex and AIR applications. This series traverses into the entire software stack, from client to server. As you can see in the image on the right, Flex has two different runtimes, a framework and client applications that might behave differently on each runtime. Most applications need to work with a server-side database, and to connect to other remote resources. The server-side stack uses very different technology from the client-side stack, yet a common set of tools can be used throughout, based on Eclipse.
This series provides an architectural overview of entire applications, drills into the architecture of each subsystem, and delves deep into working code. Because each of the members of the software stack is complex only the most common use cases are explored. This technology stack has evolved rapidly over the last several years, and the pace of change is not slowing. Older approaches that are no longer up-to-date are not mentioned.
You should be able to make a “Hello, World!” Flex application before reading Adobe Flex with Frameworks. If you have never built a non-trivial Flex application, used a Flex framework, or would like to learn how to use a better framework than the one you currently use, then Adobe Flex with Frameworks is for you.
If you need to use BlazeDS or LiveCycle to access remote resources from a Flex or AIR application, and efficiently handle a database using Hibernate, then Flex Data Services, Hibernate and Eclipse is for you. Although you should know Java, have a passing knowledge of Java Annotations (introduced in JDK 1.5) and understand Java servlet engines, no prior experience with BlazeDS, LiveCyle or Hibernate is assumed. This book has a mixture of Java code, XML, SQL and ActionScript code. JUnit 4 and FlexUnit are used to demonstrate concepts.