Last week I've shown you how to connect a Flex application to a java Spring application using BlazeDS. As you might have read everywhere changing your Flex web application to an Air client side application is very easy. So let's take our Flex application that is connecting to our Spring application using BlazeDS and change it to an AIR application working exactly the same. I'm using the sources here that were created in the posts BlazeDS and Spring First what we need to do is create a new AIR project in Flex, so let's start with creating a new Flex project and on the first page of the wizard there change the setting to Desktop Application.

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I've been asked by a publisher to write a book about Flex and Java integration, at this point I'm working on the different subjects that should be covered in the book, so if any of you have any suggestions or requests please let me know and I'll see if I can use them in the book, any requests on Flex, Java that have to do with one of the two are welcome.

A few times in the past few months I've been asked how to talk to local hardware on the client directly from the flex interface, like a printer or bar code scanner. Since the flash player is working inside a browser it is bound to the security sandbox of the browser and for that reason has no access to the local client machine at all.

However with the use of other software or drivers it is still possible to contact this hardware and retrieve information from it.

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Let's do the last part of our demo, this is the Flex part on the client that we want connected. First we finish the application with our logon, we logged on, and sent our username to the server, so now all we need to do is subscribe to receive tasks from the other Flex client. To do this we add a consumer tag to our code and subscribe to messages on the server.

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Let's continue with our application setup. Now this part of the Java application is done, we can continue with the rest of the application. First let's continue with adding our settings to Blaze DS so we can make our communication work, after that we'll start with the Flex part and get the entire application working. Our Spring and Hibernate part is done already so as soon as we have the rest connected this should be working.

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Ok let's continue, now let's see what we want to send over the line, for our application, first when a user fills in it's username we'll send a string to the server containing this username. Since we don't want to use with strings, the next thing we are going to do is find a user object on the server and send this back to the client to tell the client that this user is connected. Last thing in the demo we want to send over the line now is a task object as soon as that is created so it can be shown at the task list of the user.

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As promised yesterday during my J-Spring session I would post the code of the demo application online. Since it was a long day yesterday and I've been training all day today I couldn't find the time to do it before now, so sorry for the delay. Let's start first with what you need to get started. First let's start with getting Blaze Ds from the Adobe site. After that it might help to have FlexBuilder or just the Flex SDK to compile the application at the end.

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As I did say last week I was working on a small project to see how log4j could fit in ColdFusion. What I did was create one CFC to talk to log4j and do all the logging. This CFC is finished now and I have it implemented in some small ColdFusion application to see how it works.

The idea about using log4j is that I do want to be more flexible with logging when I create applications. With using it I can define myself what kind of logging I want in application, so for instance on a development machine I do want debug, info, warning, error and fatal to log, when I'm in a production environment I only want to see error and fatal messages in my logfile. And the very good thing is that log4j is already part of the ColdFusion install, so everyone using ColdFusion can just start using it.

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After spending the evening on a demo application for the J-Spring next week where I'm going to give a presentation about Blaze DS, Spring, Hibernate and Flex it's done for the biggest part. The most projects I've worked on so far used LCDS (LiveCycle Data Services) so again it was some getting used to, but we have the most important part working now. Biggest difference again is that the RTMP is not available in Blaze. This is the Real Time Messaging Protocol that is available in LCDS.

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In about 2 weeks I'm speaking at the Dutch Java Community conference J-Spring. There I'll do a story about connecting Java with Flex using Blaze DS, this mostly to stay in the open source world and give Java developers information about how to connect to FLEX and work with FLEX. The presentation slides will be posted here after the presentation

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