Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 59. Using BlazeDS

Blaze Data Services (BlazeDS) is an open-source data-exchange technology that connects Flex clients to server-side resources, such as remote Java objects, HTTP services, and SOAP-based Web Services. It also supports publish-subscribe messaging so that live data can be streamed efficiently between the server and multiple clients.

This chapter introduces you to the Remoting Service and Proxy Service components of BlazeDS that have not been covered elsewhere. It begins with an introduction to the technology and then continues with a detailed example project that uses the Remoting Service and touches upon the Proxy Service. After reading this chapter, you should be able to create your own simple BlazeDS project, before learning more about the more advanced features in the official documentation.

Overview

While Flex provides a framework for rapidly developing applications with rich user interfaces, BlazeDS provides the same for connecting these applications to server-side resources. With BlazeDS, it's simple to connect a Flex or AIR client to a remote Java object deployed on the server, or to some other resource, such as a SOAP-based Web Service or RESTful-style HTTP service. BlazeDS provides a straightforward programming model and an efficient binary transport protocol to help you build rich and responsive Internet applications quickly.

BlazeDS is free and open source but is closely related to the commercial LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) product, covered in detail ...