Working with Grails and Adobe Flex – Download Free Chapter from Professional Flex 3
In Professional Flex 3, I wrote a chapter on integrating Flex with Java-based Web Services (see below to download actual chapter). More specifically I used Grails (similar to Ruby on Rails, except for the Java world), which is based on Groovy (a dynamic language that compiles to the Java platform) to expose SOAP-based Web Services to the client built with Adobe Flex. The application isn’t anything sexy, but does show CRUD-based data operations for a Flex client using a SOAP-based Web Service implemented on the Java stack.
Note, in the actual book, there’s also similar demos (that I wrote), on http’s RESTFul web services with the ZEND framework (see Chapter 49 in Professional Flex 3), and Soap-based Web Services with Microsoft’s .NET WebService stack and the ADO.NET Entity framework (see Chapter 51 in Professional Flex 3).
Here’s just a few reason why I think Grails/Groovy for the Java world are great:
1) All your syntactical sugar of the dynamic languages for the Java platform. If you program in Python or Ruby you’ll know what I’m talking about.
2) Reliable, proven runtime with Java. Enterprises have been running a variety of highly supported Java runtimes supported by companies like Apache, IBM, Oracle, ATG, etc…
3) Most likely, your operational teams and data centers already support Java VMs and have operational procedures in effect around maintaining such infrastructure. While, they won’t be switching to a LAMP-based open source stack anytime soon, there is probably a path you can go down to use Groovy and Grails for application development that can be released to existing infrastructure, hardware, VM’s, etc…
Anyone stuck in a large corporate, enterprise environment at least has an option to get some syntactical sugar and agile speed in their development environment.
Now, add a sexy Flex interface and you’re cooking.
My publisher Wiley is allowing me to offer up the chapter. You can download it here (335KB PDF file). Don’t forget about the source code for Chapter 50, which is available here at Assembla (Subversion repository).
I hope you enjoy.
Comments
Comment from Martin
Date: December 17, 2009, 8:35 am
Adobe Flex is a pretty good program that I use for a short time working. As long as I still do not know everything, I can make good use of such instructions, thank you:)
Comment from Marquez van Hinten
Date: January 7, 2010, 3:26 am
Thanks for that chapter! I havent bought it yet but after reading a bit now I definately gonna buy it! Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
M.
Comment from James
Date: January 17, 2010, 12:41 pm
Adobe Flex is cool and very popular nowadays.I’m trying to learn more from this application,thanks for sharing.
Comment from Sammy
Date: January 18, 2010, 8:06 am
Hey there, Sammy once again. Just got a question towards Todd: is there anything planned in the direction of like Ajax or advanced PHP/MySQL?
Thanks in advance.
Comment from Lasse
Date: January 27, 2010, 2:49 am
Great book and GREAT help! Im just done with it after a few days of reading and a few days of trying out and understand everything correctly. I can only recommend it.
Sammy’s question about AJAX/PHP/MySQL is pretty good though.
Comment from Hans M.
Date: January 27, 2010, 9:53 am
Dont get me wrong but when you read this book, why do you need any starting help for PHP? O_o
Comment from Ali C.
Date: March 4, 2010, 4:53 am
Thanks for sharing buddy, good read and great effort!
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