Creating Flex UIs in Java – A Short Tutorial
You probably know two or three different ways to create Adobe Flash UIs. The most straightforward and expensive one is using Adobe’s Flex Builder. This IDE offers a quick, flexible and reliable way to program a UI in MXML – Adobe’s XML-based UI description language – and ActionScript – the corresponding scripting language to give life to the MXML UI components. For students, Lehman stock owners and other less pecunious people, there is the Flex 3 SDK and a bunch of tutorials on the web on how to teach Eclipse MXML and ActionScript. But did you ever think about using Java to write a Flash UI? You could integrate a fancy Flash UI with your Java application more smoothly, or you could write a Flex code generator in Java (maybe even provide other developers with a DSL that your Java-based generator can translate into Flex applications?). Using only free software, it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes to create such a Java library for Flex Applications – this tutorial shows you how to do it.