FluorineFx, WebOrb, LiveCycle DS

Well I am back after a long break.  I have changed jobs and moved to Orlando, Fl.

So lately I have spent some time researching the pros and cons of using the different remoting platforms for Flex.  I absolutely love Flex, I think Adobe has an amazing product there, but it has one failing, no strong backend system.  Yes yes, many people will say LiveCycle Data Services is the best thing there is, but I tend to disagree for a couple reasons, and yes the could be biased.

LCDS supports Flex remoting to make calls to Java objects.  My main problem with this is that I am not a fan of Java.  No, I am not a Java programmer, so that could be why.  But my exploits in Java, IE invoking web services etc… have seemed fruitless.  It seems very difficult to do very simple things in Java now.

Okay, now that I have gone this far, yes I am partial to .Net and C#.  Although I am not a fan of Windows itself, I think that Microsoft has come up with one of the best platforms for development there is, as well as the single best IDE out there.

So, Pros and Cons

LCDS has one main thing that I have found going for it:

Data Management is second to none, the ablity to push messages over the wire and view that on all connected clients.

WebOrb for .Net:

So, WebOrb is an enterprise level system for .Net-Flex remoting.  It has a great console to test the services that you have deployed to it.  It seems to be up to par almost with LCDS.  Its main drawback that I have found is that it doesn’t seem to support the IExternalizable interface, which allows for custom serialization of objects being passed for Flex to .Net and back.

They used to have a pretty high license fee, but in the past two months changed all the licenses to be free and sell support.  This is a good option to play with especially when your first starting out, as well as they have a pretty nice CodeGen tool to create your actionscript classes from the compiled .Net assemblies.

Custom Serialization:

With deep linking and LINQ objects, etc… You run the risk of passing unneeded amounts of data over the wire because of the objects that are linked to that object.  With IExternalizable, you decide what objects to pass, and in what order they are passed, so you only use the objects needed.

FluorineFx:

This is an open source package, which can be helpful in itself.  It has a console, but nearly as advanced as the WebOrb one.  It allows for custom serialization using IExternalizable, and leaves a pretty small footprint.  Unfortunately I have never been able to get the basic CodeGen they have to work, and the Console breaks all the time.

As of now, I have stuck with FluorineFx because (after getting used to it) it has a pretty simple setup procedure which is decently documented in their help files.  When I get a chance soon, I will be creating a .Net code gen tool, to create your actionscript classes for you, either using IExternalizable or through class aliases.

~ by ninjadeveloper on July 31, 2008.