Creating desktop applications for the cloud with Adobe Flex, AIR, and Amazon S3

Most Adobe Flex and AIR applications require one or more server-side business tiers that carry out services for messaging, data manipulation, and file management. However, by the time you are finished reading this article, you will know how to build useful desktop applications with Flex and AIR that employ the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) in place of a multi-tiered server infrastructure.

Rather than being forced to learn a complex web service application programming interface (API) in which everything is a GET request on a URL that appends a method name and arguments to the end (not RESTful ), Amazon Web Services (AWS) earns respect by adhering to the conventions of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and implements a truly RESTful web service, as defined in Roy Fielding's 2000 doctoral dissertation entitled Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures. Fielding is also one of the principal authors of the HTTP protocol. As described in Fielding s dissertation, Representational State Transfer (REST) is the utilization of the methods already contained within HTTP, which include GET, PUT, POST, HEAD, OPTIONS, TRACE, and DELETE. According to Fielding, a service that is truly RESTful is one that calls one of the HTTP methods on a resource and uses the metadata contained in the header information to describe the content being passed to the resource as well as any additional parameters the service needs. This explanation is not a gross oversimplification, either. The concept of RESTful services is really that simple.

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you need the following software and files:

Flex Builder 3

• Try
• Buy

Adobe AIR 1.5

• Download

Sample files:

• flex_aws.zip (ZIP, 1 MB)

Prerequisite Knowledge

You will need to be comfortable working with Flex Builder and programming in ActionScript 3.0. An understanding of the Amazon Web Services' Simple Storage Service (S3) will also be very helpful.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

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