Articles by Alex Nhu

A Runtime Integration Approach to Application Development

Fri, 23 May 2008 14:30:00 EDT

This pattern is a hybrid of plug-in and event-driven architecture to integrate individual plug-ins together to come up with the Plug-in Integrator Pattern. This pattern leverages the benefits of both these well-known architectures to provide an optimal solution to build an enterprise-ready rapid application development infrastructure, preferably in Flex, but it might also be implemented in other programming languages such as Java and C#.

Data Services Made Easy for Adobe Flex Applications

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:30:00 EDT

Flex has gotten popular lately because of its rich GUI capabilities. It also comes in handy with HTTPService and Web Service components connecting to back-end servers to fetch and update data. But using this mechanism to talk to the back-end server requires formulating a unique service object from the Flex side, making a request, and getting back data from the back-end either in XML or plain text format. The response data then has to be parsed and fed to the Flex objects to update the UI. For small to medium-size Flex projects it's a viable solution, but for enterprise projects with thousands of external service calls it will get quite repetitive and could result in a lot of unmanageable, buggy code.

A New Way to Look at Portals

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 05:45:00 EDT

This article looks at an easy portal infrastructure that's based on a Flex-based portal container and portlets (individual Web applications) deployed as Flex modules. This portal framework provides full support for AJAX-type message processing with a very efficient deployment of portlets and manages the portlets so that they can logically connect to any Web application, freeing developers from routing to J2EE/.NET portal frameworks.