Alain Hufkens {Rich Interactive Applications Developer}

Flex and the Spring Framework

This week I stumbled upon two interesting initiatives that could help Flex and Actionscript become more mature as an enterprise programming language.

Earlier this week Christophe Herreman announced on his blog that the Prana Framework has become an official Spring extension. The new name is Spring Actionscript and one thing I like about it is that it can be used together with existing frameworks like PureMVC and Cairngorm. I have worked with the Spring Framework on several Java projects in the past and I might use it for a Flex project as well. And let's hope that in the future there will also be support for annotation based dependency injection. With annotations you need a lot less XML configuration. You can read more about annotations here.

Today Christophe Coenraets announced on his blog that Adobe is working together with SpringSource on enhanced Flex / Spring integration. From the press release:

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced that it is working with SpringSource to simplify the development and deployment of rich enterprise Java(TM) applications through a collaboration that will provide integration between the Adobe(R) Flash(R) and SpringSource platforms. This collaboration will make it easy for Java developers to create enterprise-class rich Internet applications (RIAs) using Adobe Flex(R) software, a cornerstone of the Adobe Flash Platform, and Spring, the de facto standard for enterprise Java.

So now we can use Spring completely front to back. That will deffinately make the code more readable across languages.