Flex Camp @ Lisbon - Part 3
I forgot to mention one important upcoming Adobe tool that will help a lot the designing/developing workflow.It is called Adobe Thermo. It is another point of view in MXML files manipulation, that is used in Flex applications. Thermo stand for Flex Builder as Microsoft Expression Blend stands for Visual Studio. It allows designers to create prototypes that fit perfectly the design they made, and then developers can add behavior without screwing up the design.
What is BlazeDS?
It is an open-source Java-based web server technology that allows using Remoting and Messaging services with Flex. A Release Candidate is available for download. It communicates using AMF (Action Message Format) natively supported by Flex (after all it is a format developed by Adobe). AMF serializes and de-serializes data in a binary format. According to what was said during Flex Camp this format has a great performance when compared to SOAP/XML. The messages must be shorter, since it is binary and not text-based.
Some BlazeDS functionalities:
- RPC (Remote Procedure Call) such as Web Services, Remoting, REST
- Messaging (Publish/Subscriber architecture)
- Web proxy (it helps to solve cross-domain security restrictions while working with Flash)
- Support for AJAX clients
- Support for clustering (for scalability)
- Is is a Adapters-based system, which allows to develop custom modules that are coupled to BlazeDS
What is Adobe LiveCycle Data Services?
It is a super-set of BlazeDS. This software is payed and adds some functionality to BrazeDS. It has the capability to deal with data conflicts, can compile source to swf on-the-fly and generate PDF files on the server-side.
What is AMFPHP?
It is a PHP library that allows to use Flash Remoting with PHP as the server-side technology. I’ll just quote a more complete description from the official website.
“(…) AMFPHP allows thin client applications built in languages such as Flash, Flex, and AIR to communicate directly with PHP class objectsPHP developers can leverage their PHP experience in server side code development by connecting to data sources such as web-services, databases, and business applications and return that data to the client. Client applications can also offload cpu intensive methods to PHP services and wait for the result set for presentation to the user. AMF allows for native data types and complex object mapping between the client and the server. (…)”
It is pretty straight forward to use. I really liked the demonstration.
As I have said before this was a great event. I’m looking forward to start playing around with Flex. I’m downloading Flex Builder 3 “as I speak “.
