Dustin Marx

Raytheon Company

Applying Flash to Java: Flex and OpenLaszlo

Flash has become a dominant technology for deploying rich features in the web browser. Flash not only provides web users with a highly interactive and fluid web experience, but at the same time provides web developers with many benefits. These benefits include the hiding of browser idiosyncrasies and the prevalence of Flash player installations.

Flex 3 and OpenLaszlo 4 are web frameworks that bring Flash to the Java developer. Both Flex and OpenLaszlo provide Java developers with an easy method for building rich web clients that communicate with Java EE back-ends.

This presentation will highlight the benefits of Flash and outline why it is often the preferred approach for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). The presentation will then delve into the basics of Flex and OpenLaszlo and how to use each of these web frameworks in conjunction with Java EE to leverage the strengths of each. The ability to compile OpenLaszlo source code into DHTML instead of Flash will also be discussed and demonstrated. The presentation will focus on the freely available and open source portions of both Flex and OpenLaszlo.

Java Management Extensions (JMX) Circa 2008

JMX has come a long way since its inception with JSR-3. This presentation focuses on recent developments of JMX that make it easier to apply, and also make it more useful for software developers to monitor and manage their Java-based applications. Recent developments that enable easier and more useful JMX development include the following:

• Reference implementation of JSR-262 (“Web Services Connector for JMX Agents”) provides an alternative to RMI (currently the only required JMX Connector) and allows non-Java clients to monitor and manage Java applications
• MXBean – MBean type introduced for end user use in Java SE 6
• Incorporation of MBean servers with the J2SE 5 and Java SE 6 platforms
• Improved and more extensible JConsole in Java SE 6
• Alternative JMX visualization tools such as VisualVM and jManage
• Enhanced Spring 2.0 and 2.5 JMX support
• JSR 255 (“JMX 2.0”) and other anticipated Java SE 7 JMX improvements

Each of these advancements in JMX will be discussed in relation to JMX basics to show how the advancements make JMX easier to use and open to a wider audience.