Over the past few years, the now-open source Adobe Flex framework has been adopted by the Java community as the preferred framework for Java rich Internet applications (RIAs) using Flash for the presentation layer. Flex helps Java developers to build and maintain expressive web/desktop applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. Beginning Java and Flex describes new, simpler, and faster ways to develop enterprise RIAs. This book is not only for Java or Flex developers, but also for all web developers who want to increase their productivity and the quality of their development. The aim of the book is to teach the new frontier of web development using open source, agile, lightweight Java frameworks with Flex. Java lightweight framework programming helps Flex developers create dynamic-looking enterprise applications. Flex and Java are becoming very popular for both business and interactive applications.