Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 56. The Data Management Service

The Data Management Service (DMS) operates at a higher level than the other LCDS types, providing more functionality to help develop data-intensive applications in Flex. As well as basic create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations, the DMS can automatically detect changes made by one user and synchronize them with all other users. This chapter introduces the DMS and describes an example application.

Overview of the DMS

If you're developing a Flex application that creates, reads, updates, and deletes data, the DMS is designed to help you. If you're dealing with multiple users and need to synchronize data between them, the DMS can do more, ensuring that a change made by one user is quickly reflected to the other users. Furthermore, if your application needs to stay fast and responsive, even when handling large quantities of data, the DMS has that covered, too.

The DMS provides higher-level, more broad-ranging functionality than the other LCDS types. It reaches farther into the client- and server-side code base of a rich Internet application, so developers can concentrate on the distinct parts of their application, instead of expending effort on the infrastructure for managing data. The DMS is composed of both client- and server-side libraries that work together to simplify the task of building data-intensive applications, which integrate Flex clients with practically any kind of server-side data store.

The DMS is covered in two chapters. ...