Professional BlazeDS: Creating Rich Internet Applications with Flex® and Java®

2.1. An Overview of BlazeDS

You know by now that BlazeDS helps integrate Flex and Java, but what exactly is BlazeDS? To answer this question, we define BlazeDS using its behavioral and structural characteristics. The behavioral aspects will establish what it's good for, and the structural facets will explain what it's made of.

Behavioral Definition:

BlazeDS enables and facilitates:

• Invocation of remote Java methods from a Flex application.

• Translation of Java objects returned from a server, in response to the remote method call, to corresponding AS3 objects.

• Translation of AS3 objects sent by a Flex application to corresponding Java objects for passing them in as method call arguments.

• Communication between a Flash Player instance and a Java server over a TCP/IP-based application-level binary protocol.

• Near real-time message passing between a Flex application and a Java server.

• Management of the communication channels between Flex and Java.

• Management of connection types between Flex and Java.

• Provision for adapters for communication with server-side Java artifacts like JMS queues, and persistence layers like Hibernate and JPA. (Some of these are in-built, and some can be obtained from open source projects or can be custom built.)

• Pushing data from the server to the client on the server's initiative and not as a response to a request.

Structural Definition:

BlazeDS is a:

• Java web application that leverages the Java Servlets specification.

• Web application that runs within a Java Servlet ...