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James Ward
Adobe
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Try it yourself, first
- Getting started
- Step 1: Creating the back-end data source
- Step 2: Creating the Flex front-end application
- Step 3: Creating a back-end PDF generation service
- Step 4: Creating a PDF with form fields to store the data
- Step 5: Modifying the Flex application to read data from the PDF
- Step 6: Adding a way for the user to generate a PDF from the Flex application
- Step 7: Merging the final Flex application into the PDF template
Building a portable RIA with Flex and PDF
In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a portable rich Internet application (RIA) by inserting an RIA created with Flex into a Portable Document Format (PDF) file.
Portable RIAs are an evolutionary step in a process that started years ago. The web began as a platform for browsing, finding, and exchanging documents. Over the past ten years the web has moved beyond this document-centric role, and is now a platform for exchanging data. We typically refer to web sites used for data exchange as web applications. The next major evolution of the web is underway as web applications become more interactive and useful. The industry now refers to these next generation web applications as rich Internet applications or RIAs.
PDFs are another popular means of document exchange. Like the web, PDFs are also evolving into more than just a document exchange technology. When RIAs are inserted into PDFs, this familiar format for documents becomes a method for exchanging and interacting with data. The primary benefits of using PDFs for data exchange are that PDFs can easily be secured, emailed around, and accessed when offline.
Requirements
In order to make the most of this article, you need the following software and files:
Flex Builder 3
Adobe Acrobat 9
Adobe Reader 9
Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES
A Java application server
- For example Tomcat, JBoss, WebLogic, or WebSphere
Sample files:
- portable_ria.zip (ZIP, 3M)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
About the author
James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe's JCP representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early '90s; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid '90s; then Java and many of its frameworks beginning in the late '90s. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front ends for Java based back ends. Prior to working at Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems. James Ward's blog can be found at www.jamesward.org.
