Monday, December 8, 2008

Data Services Made Easy for Adobe Flex Applications

The approach discussed here provides a more intuitive solution to generate ActionScript classes on the Flex side that are direct counterparts of the enterprise object classes in the back-end server. This way the Flex environment just becomes an extension of the back-end server and the Flex UI gets access to back-end objects. The infrastructure to make remote calls to the back-end server is taken care of by the framework that marshals objects to the back-end to make service calls and un-marshals the results to ActionScript objects transparently so the developer can concentrate just on the UI logic.

Adobe provides Flex Data Services (FDS) that also provides a robust data services solution but costs a huge license fee and ties to proprietary Adobe technology. The new approach discussed here provides a clean, efficient way for back-end integration based on open source technologies like e4x and XML. This approach is suitable for any project implementing Flex for UI with J2EE/Web Services at the back-end. Moreover, this approach doesn't need to be deployed on the server side, which makes it a better solution than FDS while programming the UI for already-deployed production applications.

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