James Ward (www.jamesward.com) is a Principal Platform Evangelist at Salesforce.com. James frequently presents at conferences around the world such as JavaOne, Devoxx, and many other Java get-togethers. Along with Bruce Eckel, James co-authored First Steps in Flex. He has also published numerous screencasts, blogs, and technical articles. Starting with Pascal and Assembly in the 80’s, James found his passion for writing code. Beginning in the 90’s he began doing web development with HTML, Perl/CGI, then Java. After building a Flex and Java based customer service portal in 2004 for Pillar Data Systems he became a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. In 2011 James became a Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce.com where he taught developers how to deploy apps on the cloud with Heroku. From Fall 2012 to Spring 2014 James was a Developer Advocate at Typesafe where he created Typesafe Activator and led the Reactive Software vision. James tweets as @_JamesWard and posts code at github.com/jamesward.
Building highly interactive software that users love to use is usually a challenging endeavor. However, the open source Flex SDK and Java are a perfect combination of technologies for building very rich and highly interactive software for the Web and the desktop. The communication between the Java back-end and Flex front-end can utilize a number of different communication protocols, but the easiest and best performing is the open source BlazeDS library. This session covers the fundamentals of using Flex, Java, Spring, EJB, Hibernate, and BlazeDS to build rich and highly interactive software for the Web and the desktop.
RIAs are certainly changing the way we build software. User experience is now central to building great software. How does this impact our Agile methodologies? How do we implement Agile when working with designers? What testing and development tools exist to aid us in implementing Agile in RIAs? This session will use live coding and demos to show how Agile is being used to build Flex RIAs.
