Bridging the gap between Flex and Struts using FxStruts

Preserving Struts concepts while using Flex

Let's begin with a quick overview of a few Struts tags and concepts:

• <bean:write/> - Takes the name and property of a Java object in a particular scope and outputs the value.
• <bean:message/> - Takes the key in a property file and outputs its value according to the chosen locale (picking data from the correct property file).
• <html:errors/> - If there are any ActionErrors present in any scope, output their values.
• Transaction Token - The Action class in Struts has functions such as saveToken() and validateToken() that output a unique ID and associate it with an operation. The main aim is to define a transaction such as, "the edit page has to be visited before the save page is visited."

FxStruts adds AMF and XML serialization capability to bean:write and bean:message Struts tags. It also optionally nests the value of ActionErrors objects (if any) that would have been the output of the html:errors tag and also the value of the transaction token with the result.

XML serialization aims to format the XML so that the ActionScript object decoded from it matches the server side object. However, I strongly recommend AMF over XML due to its lightweight nature and ability to preserve types across the wire.

Note: The AMF serialization code provided by FxStruts differs from that of BlazeDS in only one aspect: read-only properties (that is, properties with only getters defined) are serialized as well.

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