Building Rich Internet Applications with BlazeDS Connectivity
by Giorgio Natili
Introduction
Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have become widespread in a very diverse range of contexts such as business, entertainment and education. If your software's architecture clearly distinguishes the business logic from other layers, then you should develop an RIA. You can learn the Flash platform (in other words, Flex) or Ajax or Java, or mix all the best features of each technology. In my experience, you can achieve better cross-platform results with the Flex framework and reach a wider range of users with Flex because of the Flash Player’s omnipresence and status as a de facto standard in web development.
An RIA really needs to deal with large amounts of complex data. One of the Flash Player's most powerful features allows it to handle data as a native ActionScript object. This creates a great opportunity but also introduces a great responsibility, because data and clients are therefore now much more strictly related. The native classes in the Flex framework handle data exchanges quite well, but in order to help them do this in a scalable and maintainable way, I suggest a centralized approach in which you control data flow and delivery in your application. This consideration caused me to write a small class set I named the ServiceConnector class, compatible with the AMF protocol used by BlazeDS, LiveCycle DS (LCDS), AMFPHP and WebORB, etc., which works as a data bus in a Flex-based RIA.
In this article, we will explore the ServiceConnector class and how to approach data exchange through it. We will not only to explain how this class works but also share the philosophy that led me to this solution. To find out more about this class set, refer to http://agile.gnstudio.com/nabiro.
Read more of this article in Flex Authority Volume 2 Issue 1!