This is the first article in a series of posts that will introduce j2flex - a persistence framework for Flex powered applications. j2flex is the outcome of our day-to-day work with Flex, LiveCycle Data Services and J2EE in real-life projects with the goal to make your life easier.

So what’s it all about: When we started with Flex 1.0 back in 2004 we realized quickly that although Flex facilitates integrating with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) of course not every customer is able or willing to create such an infrastructure just for the sake of using Flex. With Flex 2.0 this is even more true - a lot of smaller shops start evaluating Flex 2.0 but then realize that they do not know how to integrate Flex with their data store. Some of them even do not have a dedicated data store in place and say: “Ohh, Flex is soo cool - but how do I connect to a database?”

This is one of the areas where j2flex offers a simple yet powerful solution: j2flex allows Flex beginners to quickly setup a powerful persistence store for Flex applications. With j2flex you can directly read data from and save data your database without too much worrying about how this works - and without writing server side code. It just works. Sounds nice? Well, it really is

But j2flex also offers a solution for integrating a Flex application into an existing J2EE infrastructure - including mapping the physical data model to the Flex world, dedicated authentication and authorization, workflow support and much more.

If that’s still not enough, you can easily extend j2flex to meet your needs, either through the Flex/ActionScript 3 or Java API. It conforms to Flex 2 Framework standards, can be used with Cairngorm and gives nice integration with the Data Management Services of LiveCycle Data Services.

This was just a little teaser - I’ll be posting more information, samples and resources during the next weeks so stay tuned. Btw, the first public demonstration of j2flex will take place at MAX Barcelona at our booth in the exhibition hall.