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.

To find out more please visit:

http://www.adobe.flex.appfoundation.com/

This framework addresses Enterprise issues such as:

- Application State Management
- Module Management
- Application Navigation
- Style Management
- State Engine
- Resource Management
- Transport of Data
- Error Management

We strive at keeping our development process and output simple. Our goal is to deliver maintainable software products to our client base that meet high quality standards. The primary value in using our Flex Development Framework is to cut down on as much as 40% of RIA product development time by bring to the table a solid set of framework tools to work with. This allows us and you to start developing work product features faster; thus improving time-to-market for your applications.

This is not an open-source framework in its current form. Please contact AppFoundation for a quote and assistance with your RIA development.

By using the Agile project management framework SCRUM we have seen many benefits when running large scale projects. The goals achieved are:

- Increased team communication regarding project processes
- Creation of working software quicker in the project development process
- Motivated individuals who take ownership of their tasks
- Better communication to business of issues, tasks, and deliverables
- More responsiveness to change in project requirements
- Improved project knowledge through functional sheppards

The SCRUM process is organized in iterations using the following techniques:

Daily SCRUMMeetings – Daily 15 minute stand up meetings are held so that team members can quickly communicate what they completed since the last meeting, their next tasks to be completed and what roadblocks they may have.

Sprint Planning Meeting – This kick-off meeting occurs at the beginning of each Sprint. We usually are running 2-3 week Sprint cycles. We select work to be done for the Sprint, prepare the Backlog, and decide how much work will be completed for the Sprint.

Project Deliverables – At the end of each Sprint, we demo the working products of the Sprint. This is in the form of live application demonstrations. The goal is to show the business that we have working software up front and through the entire project delivery.

Sprint Retrospective – We use retrospectives to communicate what went well and what needs improvement for the project. This if completely about continuous process improvement.

AppFoundation uses this project management methodology to better deliver on our commitments. We have found this process to be highly effective and beneficial to our clients. Lets talk more, get in touch at www.appfoundation.com to see how we can help you deliver on your commitments.

AppFoundation has been working hard to deliver innovative solutions that transcend business channels. Our GIS mapping solutions can integrate with many common mapping providers such as Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and Bing Maps from Microsoft. If your organization is like most, you have a need for such services. Contact AppFoundation to see how we can help you meet your goals.

Geographic Information System by AppFoundaion

To experience this GIS application built by AppFoundation please click the following link:

http://www.demos.appfoundation.com/gis

You will need Flash Player 9 or greater to run the GIS demo.

Af is a professional services firm that provides custom Web, mobile, and desktop application development. Af leverages innovative technologies to deliver premium user experiences that engage customers to drive satisfaction, brand awareness, and deliver measurable results.

Afs’ services include Enterprise scale application development with Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, as well as Systems Integration and Business Intelligence services. We also specialize in building robust server side systems that deliver services to our exceptional user interfaces.

Af is committed to delivering an exceptionally high-end user experience coupled with the advantages of leveraging legacy systems and pumping critical data to the fingertips of system consumers. We are driven by creating cutting-edge applications through collaborative design sessions to address the most complex business needs.

Af offers many solutions leveraging the benefits of Rich Internet Applications including the following RIA development:

     •  Touch interfaces
     •  Mobile device applications
     •  Application modernization
     •  Enterprise applications
     •  Mashup applications
     •  Enhanced Business Intelligence solutions
     •  Dashboards
     •  Process improvement applications
     •  SAP

Af wants to hear from you. Please visit our site and submit an inquiry.

www.appfoundation.com

Business Contacts:
Use our Contact Form or call (866) 972-3170