Data Services Made Easy for Adobe Flex Applications

Flex has gotten popular lately because of its rich GUI capabilities. It also comes in handy with HTTPService and Web Service components connecting to back-end servers to fetch and update data. But using this mechanism to talk to the back-end server requires formulating a unique service object from the Flex side, making a request, and getting back data from the back-end either in XML or plain text format. The response data then has to be parsed and fed to the Flex objects to update the UI. For small to medium-size Flex projects it's a viable solution, but for enterprise projects with thousands of external service calls it will get quite repetitive and could result in a lot of unmanageable, buggy code.

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#11	Humberto A. Sanchez II commented on 10 Dec 2007 Are you having any success either releasing the reference implementation or starting an open source project around this?
#10	Indroniel Deb Roy commented on 4 Nov 2007 The wsdl2as framework mentioned here is not the wsdl2as open source one. It's a fresh implementation!
#9	Sebastien Arbogast commented on 29 Oct 2007 Your framework is exactly what I'm looking for. I thought similar functionality was already embedded into Flex but to my great disappointment, it's not. So I'd really love to see what you've come up with. And if I can help, it's with pleasure. Is open source flash's wsdl2as the framework you're talking about?
#8	Indroniel Deb Roy commented on 21 Sep 2007 This paper or the sample implementation (not currently available for public use) do not use wsdl2as tool(found in http://osflash.org/wsdl2as) to generate as3 code. So, why wsdl2as tool fails is not pertinent to this paper as such. Please, visit any discussion forum provided by the project to discuss about specific issues in the wsdl2as tool. The sample implementation in this paper do generate as3 code, but is implemented fresh from scratch. This paper is trying to just explain the architectural details of the approach ...
#7	Ryan K commented on 21 Sep 2007 wsdl2as simply does not work. Worse, it doesn't tell you what the problem is: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: local part cannot be "null" when creating a QName at javax.xml.namespace.QName.(Unknown Source) at javax.xml.namespace.QName.(Unknown Source) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.asxsd.TypeNameGenerator.typeName(TypeNameGenerator.java:29) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.asxsd.TypeBuilder.representationClassForComplexType(TypeBuilder.java:81) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.asxsd.TypeBuilder.typeNameFor(TypeBuilder.java:46) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.asxsd.MarshalingCodeGenStrategy.addConversionFromParameter(MarshalingCodeGenStrategy.java:78) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.asxsd.MarshalUnmarshalBuilder.buildMethodBody(MarshalUnmarshalBuilder.java:89) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.asxsd.MarshalUnmarshalBuilder.buildMethodBody(MarshalUnmarshalBuilder.java:111) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.asxsd.MarshalUnmarshalBuilder.createMethodForElement(MarshalUnmarshalBuilder.java:81) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.asxsd.MarshalUnmarshalBuilder.conversionMethodFor(MarshalUnmarshalBuilder.java:335) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.wsdl2as.ASXSDTypeMappingStrategy.convertExprToXML(ASXSDTypeMappingStrategy.java:44) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.wsdl2as.ActionScript3Builder.buildOperationParameterList(ActionScript3Builder.java:371) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.wsdl2as.ActionScript3Builder.buildBindingOperationMethod(ActionScript3Builder.java:280) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.wsdl2as.ActionScript3Builder.buildBinding(ActionScript3Builder.java:267) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.wsdl2as.ActionScript3Builder.buildAllBindings(ActionScript3Builder.java:243) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.wsdl2as.ActionScript3Builder.build(ActionScript3Builder.java:78) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.wsdl2as.Main.process(Main.java:88) at uk.co.badgersinfoil.wsdl2as.Main.main(Main.java:59)
#6	Indroniel Deb Roy commented on 12 Sep 2007 The generated code might need to change if there are major changes in the action script language or some API change in flex web-services support. In Moxie(flex 3) release there is no major change in the AS language and flex Web Service API, so the generated code should just work fine.
#5	Tom Van den Eynde commented on 12 Sep 2007 If I'm correct there will be similar support for this in Flex 3. If so: can the generated code easily be replaced by what is available through Flex 3 later on?
#4	Thiru Rajesh commented on 11 Sep 2007 This is indeed a nice article on overall architecture of flex based applications based on complex server side data requirements. It will definitely serve as an alternative to FDS for programming flex ui for public web services.
#3	Steve commented on 5 Sep 2007 This is one of those ideas that entice us designer crossovers with visions of easily discoverable, accessable, post-processable server-side stuff. And if we know enough T-SQL we can really take better at an architectural level. Can't help but wonder at the lack of followup/comments by the community. On the subject of compression; what's it take to bring XML into line AMF much less AMF3 (& setting aside scalability issues) for a 'text-heavy' object. What would the reverse look like? if one were defining the server-side objects from the native Flex? Couldn't we literally feed mxml components in a digestible way?
#2	Dave commented on 24 Aug 2007 Could you provide a link to a much larger version of your 1st diagram? http://res.sys-con.com/story/aug07/418939/fig1.jpg
#1	FDJ News Desk commented on 21 Aug 2007 Flex has gotten popular lately because of its rich GUI capabilities. It also comes in handy with HTTPService and Web Service components connecting to back-end servers to fetch and update data. But using this mechanism to talk to the back-end server requires formulating a unique service object from the Flex side, making a request, and getting back data from the back-end either in XML or plain text format. The response data then has to be parsed and fed to the Flex objects to update the UI. For small to medium-size Flex projects it's a viable solution, but for enterprise projects with thousands of external service calls it will get quite repetitive and could result in a lot of unmanageable, buggy code.