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

5.3. Message Service Integration

A Flex client can leverage two message service components to send and receive messages. These are the Producer and Consumer, respectively. These components can be used with Spring BlazeDS in the same manner as they can be used in standard BlazeDS installations. On the server side, though, Spring BlazeDS offers a few value-added extensions.

In a Spring BlazeDS server, three types of message service components can interact with the Flex message service. The messaging service in Flex itself is agnostic to the messaging protocol used on the server side. Therefore, multiple server-side messaging alternatives easily work with Flex messaging. The three alternative server-side message services in Spring BlazeDS are:

• Native built-in BlazeDS AMF messaging

• JMS messaging using the Spring-specific JMS components

• Spring BlazeDS messaging integration

Let's explore each in turn.

5.3.1. Native BlazeDS AMF Messaging

BlazeDS supports an ActionScriptAdapter for simple message routing between two or more Flex clients. The communication between the two or more Flex clients happens via a server-side destination. This messaging adapter is limited in its functionality and does not support transactions. The core of the messaging adapter is the two methods that help route messages. These two methods are:

• pushMessageToClients — Delivers message to all clients connected to a server

• sendPushMessageFromPeer — Delivers messages to peer servers in the cluster, which in turn deliver ...