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Reality J2EE: Architecting for Macromedia Flash MX

Written by Java developers, for Java developers, about Flash; this is an important book that makes a strong case for using Flash as an alternative presentation tier for Java applications.

TITLE: Reality J2EE: Architecting for Macromedia Flash MX
PUBLISHER: Macromedia Press
ISBN: 0-321-15884-9
PAGES: 745
CD: No
AUTHORS: Steven Webster
RRP: $39.99 US , $62.99 Canada, £29.99 UK

Flash books have traditionally fallen into two camps. There is the old school: 'Here's Flash and how you use it' camp. And the new school, pioneered by the late 'Friends of Ed': 'Here's some cool stuff these guys are doing' camp. All of these books though, were written by Flash developers, for Flash developers.

As Flash moves further towards application development, we're seeing a new breed of books. These are written from the perspective of another community, introducing them to Flash. This book is one of those. It has been written by Enterprise Java developers, for other Java developers, about Flash. This is a subtle distinction but an important one.

In the Java community the expected level and areas of knowledge are different. For example Flash timelines are explained in detail but a familiarity of object oriented design patterns is assumed. This makes it a quirky read but doesn't mean there is nothing a Flash developer can learn here; indeed it is quite the contrary. Watching the Java boys apply their brand of Agile development to Actionscript is nothing short of a revelation.

The book is part of Macromedia Press' 'Reality' series. Conceived by Ben Forta, each book follows a development team through a project, all the way from pitch to delivery. In this case the team is Edinburgh based software consultancy, iteration::two, and the project is a rich client J2EE application for the fictional Bank of Edinburgh.

The book covers five online banking projects and each project iteration is split into five phases: product requirements, initial thoughts, development, the solution, and delivery. This makes for quite a hefty book that weighs in at over 700 pages. There's a lot to take in here, but it's well worth the ride.

We follow each idea as it is discussed and formalized, and the story is related through email and transcripts of client and development meetings. Consequently the feel is quite chatty and it's very easy to read. Most of the time this style works - the banter between the coders and designer is spot on. It did seem to fall down occasionally though as Robin Debreuil kept magically appearing in development meetings?!

Throughout the book we integrate a wealth of technologies including Flash MX, Flash MX Remoting, Flash Communication Server MX, JRun 4.0, JBoss 3.0, MySQL, JUnit, ASUnit, ASTranslator, CVS, Ant, JavaDoc, XDoclet, Jakarta Struts and of course EJBs. From a Flash developers perspective it is the adherence to best-practices during the development process that is of particular interest.

The team employs an Agile development methodology known as 'Extreme programming' (XP). This advocates a number of important disciplines including risk assessment, working in teams, unit testing, and refactoring towards proven design patterns. If you haven't already come across these concepts you'll find the fly-on-the-wall style really gives you a flavour of what it's like to work within that environment.

If you are a Java developer then this book will give you a good introduction to the Flash suite of technologies. It will also show you how to apply unit testing to Actionscript and how to integrate Flash MX with a J2EE architecture that incorporates Enterprise Java Beans. Overall it makes a very good case for using Flash as an alternative to AWT or Swing as the presentation tier of a Java application.

If you are a Flash developer then this book will teach you a great deal about web application development best practice. At first read it may seem to raise more questions than it answers but if the Flash community wants to be taken seriously as application developers then we have a lot still to learn from our Java colleagues.
visit the iteration::two site