This article shall show you how the Adobe Flex SDK can be used in a Portal environment to enhance the user interface for a Portlet. It has also previously been possible to use Flex with JSR-168 Portlets and alike FlexPortal , but with the new Portlet 2.0 specification (JSR-286) some things have improved, such as the support for asynchronous requests, public render parameters and events.

Adobe Flex SDK FlexProductHome , meanwhile in version 3.0, is an open source user interface oriented framework that allows the creation of binary SWF files from XML markup and ActionScript. As opposed to the traditional more visual Flash approach, mainly used by people with a graphical design background, this approach targets at classical programmers. An experienced Java programmer will find it easy to get acquainted with Adobe's Eclipse- based, commercial development environment, called Flex Builder. A compiler called mxmlc is run to compile the MXML markup and the ActionScripts into a single SWF file. This SWF file will then be rendered on the client side by the Flash Player plug-in available in most web browsers.

The application is pretty simple. In view mode of the cms detail Portlet, you have a blue display HTML area where you can view the contents generated in edit mode in Flex Rich Text Editor. Upon clicking â save & viewâ new content is being stored into the user's preferences and a newContentItem event is being thrown. The cms history Portlet is listening to such events and stores each content item in a list in the Portlet session. The list is being displayed in a sortable Flex DataGrid. Double-clicking on an item in that list will in turn throw a contentItemFromHistorySelected event, which is consumed by the cms detail Portlet and stored in the user's preferences.

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