'The world is changing,' Yakov Fain told the audience at SYS-CON Events' Real-World Java Seminar in New York City today. 'Financial institutions are starting to hire Web designers. While running Flex training for Java developers for some of the Wall Street giants, the students (Java programmers) have shown me beautifully done functional specs for the GUI of new Web applications. In the past, programmers would just put screens together to the best of their design abilities. Web design group would make sure that the company logo looks right and proper CSS are in place.  But now the real Web designers are creating state of the art enterprise Web sites. ' The world of rich Internet applications has made it to Wall Street, Fain observed, before going on to demonstrate why Adobe Flex is so well placed to allow Java developers to ride the RIA wave.

"When you are working on real-world projects, using Flex is faster than doing the same thing in Java Swing," Fain said. "As Java developers you are accustomed to great tools," he continued. Flex 2, he contended, requires more third-party tools too.

 Fain, a professional enterprise developer, is co-author of Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex with Java, and an acknowledged expert on developing GUI with Adobe Flex, which he reminded the audience "is faster than with Java, but it;'s not a RAD tool."

Principal Consultant of Farata Systems, Fain was nominated and awarded with the title Java Champion by Sun Microsystems. He gave several live demos in the course of his session, and showed how, while you can create the client portion of rich Internet applications using Java Swing applets, Adobe Flex offers you another alternative that will result in an Internet application running the GUI portion of your application in the fast virtual machine called Flash Player, which will communicate with server-side Java components or frameworks: POJOs, EJBs, Spring, Hibernate, or any other Java-related product. 

He explained Flex architecture and how it can be integrated in existing or new Java EE applications. He also showed how Eclipse plugins can introduce rapid application development into an Internet project.