While Flex, the popular open-source rich-client framework, offers a sophisticated API for accessing server-side data, including Web services and remote Java objects, Flex's design center is the client: domain objects, once retrieved from a server-side data source, may be cached on the client, manipulated in ActionScript, Flex's programming language, and displayed inside Flex components. A developer must explicitly migrate changes made to domain objects on the client back to the server.

Such a client-centric programming model is common for most rich-client frameworks, including the popular Ajax libraries, such as YUI and Dojo. However, that client-focused view makes it somewhat cumbersome to integrate those frameworks with a Web programming model where data is primarily managed on the server. Java Server Faces is one such framework, and it has been somewhat cumbersome until now to use Flex in the context of a JSF application.

Building on its experience with JSF and rich-client Ajax components, Exadel released Fiji, a new framework that makes Flex/JSF integration much easier:

While using JSF and Flex together is possible already, implementation is complicated and time consuming... Fiji extends JSF by providing a natural and elegant way to use Flex components...

Fiji aims to solve several challenges Java developers routinely face when working with Flex in the context of a Java Web app. For example, Fiji provides an easy way to encapsulate a Flex component within a JSF-based page, as well as a standard mechanism to skin Flex components based on a JSF page's style. In addition, Fiji consists of the following bits of functionality:

• Flex modules abstraction mechanism (Re-use of modules also in non JSF environment)
• Data transfer mechanisms(Flash modules initialization and management)
  • Using DataService
  • Using HttpService
• Standard interfaces for performing interaction between a JSF page and Flex modules
• Inclusion existing flex modules using on-the-fly compilation
• Look and feel interfaces management (Skinnability)

Fiji also comes with a library of ready-to-use Flex charting components for JSF, a universal wrapper that allows the use of any Flex component within the page, and it allows binding Flex components to the same JSF-managed beans, including Seam components and Spring beans, used by other parts of an application.

Several of Fiji's components rely on open-source Flex technology, such as the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol used to facilitate data transfer between server-side beans and client-side Flex components.

What do you think of Fiji's Flex/JSF integration?