Adobe® Flex® 3 Bible

Chapter 28. Integrating Flex Applications with ASP.NET

Web application developers who are immersed in and accustomed to working with Microsoft's ASRNET application server have good reason to want to stick with it. Beyond the advantage of leveraging existing knowledge, selecting ASRNET as the middleware application server for a Flex-based application offers many benefits:

• A powerful implementation of a SOAP-based Web service provider

• The best possible integration with Microsoft's Windows operating system and SQL Server database platform

• A selection of programming languages in which you can develop your server-side logic and resources

In addition, the ASRNET developer community is served by a large third-party market of components and development tools. When you need a component for integration with an ASRNET Web site, you'll likely find it available for sale or for free somewhere in the .NET community.

As when working with Adobe ColdFusion, a developer can select from any of the three Flex RPC methodologies to retrieve data and call functions from the server. As with any middleware application server, if you know how to read and write XML-formatted data in ASRNET, you can use the Flex framework's HTTPService component to exchange data in generic XML formats. And for those who are addicted to the performance available with the Remote Object component and the AMF messaging format, there are implementations of AMF-based communications available as freely licensed open-source projects (Fluorine ...