Accessibility

Flex Article

 

Architecting RIAs with Flex Data Management Services


Jeff Vroom

Jeff Vroom

Adobe

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Why use Flex Data Management Services?
  3. Conceptual overview of Flex Data Management Services
  4. Building the client's view of the domain model
  5. What about complex object models?
  6. What about large data models?
  7. Building a scalable data services application
Comments
Created:
27 June 2006
User Level:
Intermediate

Important note: Effective with the release of Adobe LiveCycle ES, the Adobe Flex Data Services 2 server product has been rebranded as a Solution Component of LiveCycle ES. This article was written based on Flex Data Services but will likely work as is with LiveCycle Data Services ES. Any articles referring to or using ColdFusion and Flex Data Services are not compatible with LiveCycle Data Services ES. To learn about the new capabilities of LiveCycle Data Services ES, see the tutorials in the LiveCycle Developer Center and read about Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES.

Adobe Flex Data Management Services is an important development tool for software architects who want to improve the efficiency of the development and maintenance of rich Internet applications (RIAs). Even though RIAs provide an improved user experience, developing them can be more complex than building dynamic HTML applications.

Flex Data Management Services is a declarative persistence framework that is bundled with Flex Data Services as part of the Flex rich Internet application platform. Flex Data Services consists of ActionScript libraries that run in the Flash Player runtime, which talk to Java libraries running in your J2EE server. Flex Data Services provides the ability for ActionScript code to efficiently call Java methods running in a J2EE server and provides publish and subscribe messaging to enable flexible push messaging to Flex clients (see Figure 1). Layered on top of those basic client/server communication facilities, the Flex Data Management Services framework provides rich and robust data management facilities in a client/server environment.

Flex Data Management Services Architecture

Figure 1. Flex Data Management Services Architecture

This article describes the motivation for why you would use Flex Data Management Services and gives you a high-level overview of its design so you can use it efficiently in your applications.

Requirements

Important note: Effective with the release of Adobe LiveCycle ES, the Adobe Flex Data Services 2 server product has been rebranded as a Solution Component of LiveCycle ES. This article was written based on Flex Data Services but will likely work as is with LiveCycle Data Services ES. Any articles referring to or using ColdFusion and Flex Data Services are not compatible with LiveCycle Data Services ES. To learn about the new capabilities of LiveCycle Data Services ES, see the tutorials in the LiveCycle Developer Center and read about Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES.

To make the most of this article, you need to install the following software and files:

Flex Builder 2 (SDK Included)

Free Flex 2 SDK (Included with Flex Builder 2)

Flex Data Services 2

Prerequisite knowledge:

Knowledge of Java and Flex.

Page 1 of 7
Next Page

About the author

Jeff Vroom is a software architect working on Flex Data Services. Prior to joining Adobe, Jeff was CTO of Tribal Fusion Inc. Before that, he was chief architect at ATG, where he was one of the leading contributors to the Dynamo product family.