For Flash Remoting, you might find this book helpful:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flash-Remoting-Definitive-Connecting-Applications/dp/059600401X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211070966&sr=8-2

Hope you’ll have success!

I’ll now pour my spare time into learning more about Flex/Air as it’s all too obvious to me that I’m going to need to have my applications more web-friendly ASAP. This Flash remoting business looks well worth a look too - thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Short reply to a long post - sorry about that. But that doesn’t mean your efforts weren’t much appreciated!

Sun is trying to sell Netbeans 6.1 as the best development environment for Java developers since the invention of sliced bread, and since it is a Swing application, it must serve as a reference for Swing GUI apps. And since it is not only an IDE, but also a Rich Client Platform (BlueMarine, for example, is based upon it), the performance of Netbeans 6.1 is the most relevant benchmark for Java GUI apps that there is. Well, I can only recommend to everybody to download it and see for yourself how slow Netbeans is and what a resource killer it is. You won’t need a stopwatch. And you certainly do not want to make it your everyday environment - at least not on Mac OS X, which has a 64 bit VM (both Java 5 and 6) and certainly is not as bad as Java zealots want to tell you.

So even the most recent incarnations of Swing, in my book, are just continuations of Java’s long history of failure as a desktop platform.

Now JavaFX tries to compete with the Flash platform, which, as we all know, already a long time ago has killed Java applets and actually managed to deliver on Java’s original applet vision. Java was too huge, too slow and too ugly and originally had no multimedia features. Flash is small, has strong multimedia features, is available on almost every platform out there, including cell phones, works and is accepted. Why would anybody want to install a Java runtime (or a Silverlight plugin, for that matter) when he already has a Flash plugin installed on his system that lets him watch videos on YouTube and play all kinds of Flash-based online games?

JavaFX is yet another dead-born, futile effort of Sun to conquer the browser. And Microsoft’s Silverlight will join the same fate. Microsoft only has the advantage of owning 85% of the browser market and so they can push Silverlight to a huge user base. However, Adobe owns the market for web development tools, and there simply is no reason why a web developer/designer would want to switch from the Creative Suite that he or she already owns and studied and masters and that is taught in schools and colleges to a Microsoft tool. And Adobe does not only target developers, they target designers AND developers and have very sophisticated and mature tools for both audiences: Flash Pro and Flex Builder Pro.

So I think that’s already 3:0 for Adobe here - Ubiquity, customer base, tools.

Treat adventure games that were completely done in Flash are the Nick Bounty series. I think they really show off what can be done with Flash:
http://www.otterarchives.com/bounty2/

I also know some great language learning software by PONS that was made with Flash. It was made for the German market and is called “Spanisch Voll Easy”:
http://www.amazon.de/Spanisch-CD-ROM-Windows-Lernende-Grundkenntnissen/dp/312560561X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1210973975&sr=8-1

I think people are still just trying to figure out the things that they can do with Flash/Flex, especially in the business market. It is a very strong platform, and as I’ve already said, it delivers on all the promises that Java had made for the browser.

When you look at Flash Remoting, it even gets better — your client side ActionScript code can call server side functions as if they were running on the client. And it doesn’t matter if that server code is written in Java, .NET, PHP, Python or whatever else, as long as a compatible bridge is there. That makes it easy to write client/server code and takes away the burden from the programmer of writing complex and compicated communication layers.

I do not yet know how good or useful Adobe AIR will actually be, but the promise of taking a web applet and using it as a regular (offline) desktop app sounds very interesting.

For me, this entire Web 2.0 excitement and those AJAX things are very old hats and actually deliver much less than Flash has already delivered years ago. It’s just that almost nobody ever understood the possibilities of the Flash platform, and the platform has mostly been misused for annoying animated advertisements.

Flash/Flex is the way to go if you want or need to create online GUIs. Only your creativity limits your possibilities.

And, no, I do not own Adobe stocks. It’s just that I’m completely sold on Flash for client side web applications.

By the way, if you need literature, the best books for Actionscript are from Colin Moock, check out http://www.moock.org.