Flex is a set of tools designed to make it easier for developers to build SWFs without having to use the Adobe Flash tool. This article explores Flex from a Java guy’s perspective, then shows how to set up the environment and examines topics like how to integrate Flex code with existing Java applications, as well as its applicability for use as a mobile device client technology.
Office file manipulation used to be difficult, but since Office 2007, Word, Excel and Powerpoint files can be read and written without anything more complicated than the native JDK itself because Office 2007 documents are now nothing more than ZIP files of XML documents. Ted Neward demonstrates this in action.
There is a client platform that's already present on nearly every user's desktop, one which provides an amazing amount of power and flexibility in its user interface options, and provides a familiar user-interactive style that undergoes intensive study with every release. Ted Neward introduces the Microsoft Office platform as a rich client technology with examples of Excel - Java integration.
The two most popular managed environments (the JVM and the CLR) are in fact, nothing more than a set of shared libraries, each providing services to executing code such as memory management, thread management, code compilation (JIT), etc. Using both the JVM and the CLR inside the same operating system process is easy, since any process is capable of loading just about any shared library.
We learn how Java and .NET can interoperate with one another. We'll talk about how to leverage the strengths of each, such as using Microsoft Office to act as a rich client to a Java middle-tier service, or building a Windows Presentation Foundation GUI on top of Java POJOs, or even how to execute Java Enterprise/J2EE functionality from within a Windows Workflow host.
In this interview filmed during QCon London 2008, Ted Neward, author of "Effective Enterprise Java", talks about languages, statical, dynamical, objectual or functional. He dives into Java, C#, C++, Haskell, Scala, VB, and Lisp, to name some of them, comparing the benefits and disadvantages of using one or another.
Ted Neward talks about various ways Java and .NET can be used together focusing on examples of MS Office automation, and explains how various interop approaches (in-proc, messaging, web services) work and when to use them.
