Flash® Builder™ 4 and Flex® 4 Bible

Chapter 26. Integrating Flex Applications with BlazeDS and Java

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding the history of Flex with Java

• Understanding BlazeDS

• Getting and installing BlazeDS

• Creating Flex projects for use with BlazeDS

• Using the Proxy Service

• Understanding the Remoting Service

• Creating and placing Java classes on the server

• Using the RemoteObject component

• Setting up RDS with BlazeDS

• Using BlazeDS data connections in Flash Builder 4

Flex was originally created by Macromedia in 2004 as 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 integrated development environment [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 server-side capabilities were separated. The server-side functionality, including the Flash Remoting technology (now known as the Remoting Service) was packaged as Flex Data Services 2. Flex Data Services added support ...