AppFoundation’s Adobe Flex consulting
 
To find out more about AppFoundation and our Adobe Flex consulting go here.

If your business has invested in Adobe Flex or Adobe AIR, a powerful software development kit for web, mobile, and desktop, chances are you’ve also invested in the training and you have IT professionals that are familiar with the basics.

Here is the challenge: Every business is unique and requires unique solutions for the web and internally. Sometimes, it may be necessary to call in specialists to partner with your IT staff to help determine just how to apply the proper toolset to a specific project or situation. This is a situation that AppFoundation’s Adobe Flex mentoring can be of real value.

How Does It Work?

Adobe Flex staff augmentation or project consulting can be done on a temporary contract basis, which will deliver high yield results while showing a cost savings for your business. In addition, such a consultant can either come to your place of business or work offsite. In either case however, it is important to engage early in the development stage of whatever project your business in undertaking so the mentoring process can happen right away. By involving the consultant during the initial phase, your business will save even more and improve time-to-market. During this period, the consultant will have the opportunity to evaluate your present development framework, including:

  •  Code Base
  •  Development framework and processes
  •  Architecture configuration (hardware and software)
  •  Security configuration
  •  Ux usability

Keep in mind that the primary purpose of Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR is the creation of web, mobile, and desktop applications for the use of your customers and clients. As such, having AppFoundation working on your behalf will help your IT staff to get the most out of the Adobe toolset and ensure that your rich Internet applications are user-friendly and intuitive.

How Long Does It Take?

The length of time your IT department may require Adobe Flex consulting can vary based on project needs. AppFoundation is prepared to partner with your business to address short, medium, and long term needs for project work. AppFoundation has extensive experience in developing extremely large scale Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR applications integrated with the following technologies:

  • JAX-WS2.0 based web services hosted on Weblogic
  •  EJBs hosted on Weblogic
  •  Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, Netezza. MySQL
  • Acupia based file storage
  • JSPs, Spring, JAVA EE, .NET, PHP
  • SAP SRM and SAP MDM
  • SAP BSPs
  • Much much more

AppFoudation also brings its own series of Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR tools to the table in the form of FxConnect.

FxConnect is an Enterprise development framework for Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR.

With many years of experience using Adobe Flex, we have seen many issues with current options for development frameworks. From organizations who don’t allow open-source solutions to mostly issues with application consistency and size; AppFoundation has created its own development framework built for developers.

FxConnect cuts down on as much as 25% of development required to deliver Flex and AIR applications. The goal of FxConnect is to simplify development of large scale rich Internet applications (RIAs). The result is a framework that allows your company to start developing features out-of-the-box instead of worrying about core architecture issues that FxConnect addresses.

  • Application Context
  • Module Management
  • Application Navigation
  • Style Management
  • Resource Management
  • Data Transport
  • Error Management
  • State Management

As you might have experienced, you can see that Flex can be built out-of-the-box to obtain data from external data sources. This works fine with small Flex applications that only have one or few view states. However, when it comes to building enterprise scale applications in Flex the basics just won’t cut it. To avoid a ‘big ball of yarn’ (many point-to-point connections between Flex components) infrastructure for your application we need to define a standard and consistent architecture for building our Flex applications.

When determining what architecture to implement your Flex user interface with you need to consider what fits your organization and developers skills best as each solution is different and generally based on different design patterns, or slight modifications of those patterns. There are a few Flex application development frameworks that present solutions to Flex development through design patterns that can be applied to Flex such as Cairngorm, PureMVC, MVCS, and Mate. However, from our experience, each of these frameworks creates various problems when developing enterprise applications such as:

  • Applications that are difficult to maintain due to the over-use of events.
  • Difficulty to track application flows when data is not persisted on data models and passed through events exclusively.
  • Application SWF sizes becoming larger than 1mb in size. This is not good for browser based RIAs.

An Investment That Pays

Costs for Adobe Flex mentoring and consultation will depend upon the scope and size of your project. However, regardless of cost, temporary Adobe Flex staffing augmentation provided by AppFoundation’s veteran consultants is an investment that will give you security in knowing that your web, mobile, and desktop applications have been configured and developed by experts.

If you want to get a quote for AppFoundation’s consulting services, please visit www.appfoundation.com and fill out the contact form or email us directly at info@appfoundation.com.