Anatole Tartakovsky

The publicity that AJAX grabbed over the last half a year is based on closing the gap between the Web applications and the desktop applications, combining the "reach" and "rich." At the same time, the gap between the technological level of AJAX and what corporate developers expect in their modern arsenal is really astonishing. After all, AJAX is neither a tool nor a platform. There is no AJAX standards committee or community process in place. While software vendors are crafting proprietary development platforms on top of AJAX (which pretty much means "from scratch"), early adopters of AJAX are left on their own. In Part 1 (JDJ, Vol. 10, issue 9) we touched on the foundation of AJAX - the ability to establish script-to-server communication. This is what makes HTML pages... (more)

Adobe Flex 2: Advanced DataGrid

In Part 1 (CFDJ, Vol. 8, issue 10) we introduced the destination-aware grid, formatters, and renderers. In this article we are continuing our discussion about datagrid renderers and... RadioButtonGroupBox as Drop-In Renderer We can apply similar techniques to RadioButton controls. The following code snippet suggests how the group of RadioButton controls can be used as a drop-in item rende... (more)

Meet AJAX: Intelligent Web Applications with AJAX

Browser-based applications are widely used and we like the fact that we can access them from anywhere. But from the users' perspective, the productivity level of Web applications still doesn't approximate the productivity of desktop programs. The good news is the gap is closing: the accumulated potential of multiple technologies has boosted a whole new breed of HTML-based apps that are a... (more)

Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex 2 and Java

A typical Java developer knows that when you need to develop a GUI for a Java application, Swing is the tool. Eclipse SWT also has a number of followers, but the majority of people use Java Swing. For the past 10 years, it was a given that Swing development wouldn't be easy; you have to master working with the event-dispatch thread, GridBaglayout, and the like. Recently, the NetBeans tea... (more)

Adobe Flex 2: Advanced DataGrid

In any GUI tool, one of the most popular components is the one that shows data in a table format like JTable in Java or Datawindow in PowerBuilder. The Adobe Flex 2 version of such a component is called DataGrid. In any UI framework, the robustness of such a component depends on formatting and validating utilities as well as a whole suite of data input controls: CheckBoxes, ComboBoxes, R... (more)