It’s Here!  For about a year I worked with a team of smart guys (Andrew Trice, Joseph Balderson, Peter Ent, Jun Heider, Tom Sugden, David Hassoun, Joe Berkovitz) to create what we think is one of the best books out there on Adobe Flex.  It’s around 1400 pages, nearly 5 pounds, of comprehensive knowledge.  It’s available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.Com, and probably your local bookstore or wherever Wrox books are sold.

I’m proud of this book.  It was hard to write and took way more time than I thought it would.  But the end product is outstanding.  It’s one killer book that covers a lot of the internals of Flex, including the extras like Cairngorm, unit testing, AIR, Flash Media services, FXG, Flex Builder, Subclipse, custom components and the component lifecycle, skiing, Flash integration, etc…  It’s all covered.

I was responsible for writing about Adobe AIR and a lot of the server side data stuff, especially in regards to open source, Java, and .NET.  I did a lot of work to show the flexibility (no pun intended) of working with Flex and a variety of back-end technologies.  Specifically I have demos in there working with server-side data using:

• PHP and the Zend framework over a RESTful-based framework
• Java WebServies created using Grails and Groovy.
• .NET with WebServices

I have some follow ups that I want to write about.  Specifically, I want to port the Zend framework samples to use the new AMF support.  And while I’m at it, I’d like to port the Grails example to use AMF, too.  BTW, I believe GRAILS is the Holy Grail (dang, another bad pun) for Java Developers wanting some syntactical-love in their lives, yet at the same time harnessing all those enterprise APIs and existing operational infrastructure that seem to chain them down.

To get you started, Andrew Trice, one of the co-authors, has posted a nice excerpt from the book: Chapter 67: Application Performance Strategies.

While Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 are on the horizon for being released, they both still rely on the fundamental technology presented in this book.  This book will be a great addition to your team library, especially for getting your new developers up to speed, or your existing developers to learn some advanced techniques.

Go forth, read, and build great applications.