Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 46. Introduction to RPC Services

Flex comes with a rich set of libraries for interacting with data from remote servers. Whether you need to connect to existing SOAP-based Web Services being delivered by .NET or Java EE platforms, or XML/JSON-based Web Services via HTTP on any web server, or even AMF (Active Message Format) messages from LiveCycle, BlazeDS, or any of the many open-source AMF implementations out there, there's an API in Flex to meet your needs.

While Part IX will cover all Adobe's LiveCycle Data Services and ColdFusion in great detail, this part's chapters will cover working with data being delivered from other server implementations. First, we'll introduce you to how the RPC (remote procedure call) libraries work, and then in future chapters we'll discuss connecting them to a .NET backend via SOAP, a PHP sample working with RESTful HTTP, and, finally, a Java EE-based SOAP solution.

We'll be assuming that you're already familiar with your server platform of choice, whether it's JAVA EE, .NET, or one of the LAMP-based scripting languages.

Overview

The mx.rpc package is where all the action is for connecting to any of the types of remote services that Flex supports. The mx.rpc package supports asynchronous calls to backend services such as Web Services, HTTP-based services, and Adobe's open-source protocol, AMF. In MXML, these services are available as components: <mx:HTTPService> for HTTP-based Web Services, <mx:WebService> for SOAP-based Web Services, and <mx:RemoteObject> ...