Adobe® Flex® 3 Bible

Chapter 24. Integrating Flex Applications with BlazeDS and Java

Flex was originally created by Macromedia in 2004 in the form of a server-based product. The Flex server incorporated the Flash Remoting technology that had been pioneered in ColdFusion and adapted its capabilities to work with Java-based classes stored in the server. Flex applications in their earliest incarnation were stored as source code on the server and compiled on demand when a browser made a request for the application's source code (its .mxml file). A command-line compiler was included for those developers who wanted to pre-build their applications prior to deployment. (Flex Builder 1 was a completely different product than the IDE used today and was based on the Dreamweaver code base. It was provided to developers as part of the Flex server license.)

When Flex 2 was released in 2006, the product line's client-side and serverside capabilities were separated. The Flex 2 SDK, including the client-side class library and the command-line tools, was made available as a no-royalty, no-license-fee product, and the new Flex Builder 2 was based on Eclipse and sold with fee-based, per-developer license The server-side functionality, including the Flash Remoting technology (now known as the Remoting Service) was packaged as Flex Data Services 2. In addition to the remoting tools that were included in Flex 1 and 1.5, Flex Data Services added services to support server-pushed communications for messaging and distributed ...