InfoQ has a really good article entitled, 13 Reasons for Java Programmers to Learn Flex and BlazeDS. I've been a big fan of Flex front ends for Java for a long time and have a couple of application running in production with Adobe BlazeDS. I have a tutorial to help you get up and running with Flex, BlazeDS and Salesforce.com if you are interested.
The InfoQ article only has 13 reasons but I threw in two extra. Here are the reasons they state but you can check out the article for more detail on each one.
My favorite reason is #3, "You can have a job in another six months". If you are out of work right now why not get started learning Flex and BlazeDS? Adobe is offering unemployed developers free licenses of Flex Bulider to help you get back in the game. You can also learn Salesforce.com and get into cloud computing. Here's how you can get started for free.
Reasons why Java developers should learn Flex and BlazeDS:
- It's open source
- It has great community support
- You can have a job in another six months
- Higher business ROI
- Flex was the first language designed for creating UIs
- It has a programming model similar to Java
- BlazeDS runs in any Java application server
- You can use it with existing Java applications
- You can extend BlazeDS and modify it with Java
- You can call BlazeDS from HTML and JSP
- Flex and BlazeDS data transfer outperform other Ajax solutions
- You can call BlazeDS directly from Java clients
- It works with Spring
- It works with Google App Engine for Java. Here are the details on the setup.
- It works almost effortlessly with Salesforce.com
