Flex Article

Improving RPC performance in Flex RIAs

Note: This article was created based on Flex 2. Minor changes in the description and code may be necessary before it can be applied to Flex 3.

The development of Adobe Flex applications and RIAs in general creates unique performance challenges not normally associated with more traditional web applications. The amount of data being sent between a Flex application and the server can be captured and analyzed without the need for expensive tools. Using this information, it's possible to significantly improve the performance of your Flex application with small, incremental changes based on a few simple principles.

This article demonstrates using a basic tool, ServiceCapture, to capture client-server performance for an example application, highlights some typical performance issues, and suggests potential solutions to those issues whilst discussing implementation considerations.

This article focuses on monitoring and improving the performance of an application using RemoteObject RPC calls. However, the recommended practices also apply to the WebService and HTTPService components.

These practices are useful for existing applications that extensively use RPC components, and also for those considering using Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES. This article also shows where the built-in LiveCycle Data Services ES features provide out-of-the box solutions.

Requirements

To follow along with this article, you need the following:

Flex Builder 2

• Try
• Buy

ServiceCapture (You can download a trial of the software to use with this tutorial.)

Note: The code for the example application referenced in this article is not included as a ZIP file for download; instead, you can copy and paste the entire source code for the example application from the code blocks referenced within each page of this article.

Prerequisite knowledge:

Understanding of the Flex RPC components and familiarity with the Data Transfer Object (DTO) pattern.

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