Book Image

Flex 3 with Java

Book Image

Flex 3 with Java

Overview of this book

Flex 3 is a great technology for developing Rich Internet Applications for the Web as well as for the desktop. If you are a developer looking to design great-looking and sophisticated user interfaces that resemble desktop-based applications, and want to utilize an existing server technology such as Java to develop RIAs, this book is for you. Targeting developers who want to get started with Adobe Flex 3 programming, this simple and clear handbook introduces Flex technology quickly and straightforwardly. Utilizing your existing knowledge of Java, it gives you the insight and hands-on experience to program with Flex 3. This book provides comprehensive information on various aspects of Flex 3 and ActionScript 3.0. These include developing simple applications, handling events, creating custom components and events, using RPC services, integration with Java and BlazeDS, styling and formatting, and how to package and deploy Flex applications. You will start with downloading, installing and configuring Flex 3 SDK and Flex Builder 3 and learn basic concepts such as what MXML and ActionScript are, understanding UI components, controls, compilers, and more. Further you will develop simple applications and slowly advance into more depth where you will learn advanced concepts such as creating custom components, debugging, integrating with Java, using RPC services, styling, internationalizing, and deploying Flex applications, and more. One of the things you're really going to love about this book is that you will develop a full-blown e-commerce application using a combination of Flex 3, ActionScript 3.0, BlazeDS 3.2, and Java. At the end of the book you will have the knowledge and experience needed to develop Rich Internet Applications.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Flex 3 with Java
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
8
Communicating with Server-side Java

Chapter 5. Working with XML

In today's world, many server-side applications make use of XML to structure data because XML is a standard way of representing structured information. It is easy to work with, and people can easily read, write, and understand XML without the need of any specialized skills. The XML standard is widely accepted and used in server communications such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) based web services. XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. The XML standard specification is available at http://www.w3.org/XML/.

Adobe Flex provides a standardized ECMAScript-based set of API classes and functionality for working with XML data. This collection of classes and functionality provided by Flex are known as E4X. You can use these classes provided by Flex to build sophisticated Rich Internet applications using XML data.

This chapter covers the E4X approach to process XML data with a comprehensive example application using these techniques to process XML data.

XML basics...