What is the query string of a BlazeDS request?

Question

I have a Tomcat service running on localhost:8080 and I have installed BlazeDS. I created and configured a simple hello world application like this...

package com.adobe.remoteobjects;
import java.util.Date;
public class RemoteServiceHandler {
public RemoteServiceHandler()
{
//This is required for the Blaze DS to instantiate the class
}
public String getResults(String name)
{
String result = “Hi ” + name + “, the time is : ” + new Date();
return result;
}
}

With what query string can I invoke RemoteServiceHandler to my Tomcat instance via just a browser? Something like... http://localhost:8080/blazeds/?xyz

Answer 1

Unfortunately you can't. First the requests (and responses) are encoded in AMF and second I believe they have to be POSTs. If you dig through the BlazeDS source code and the Flex SDK's RPC library you can probably figure out what it's sending. But AFAIK this hasn't been documented anywhere else.

Answer 2

I think that AMFX (which is AMF in XML) will work for you, using HTTPChannel instead of AMFChannel.

From http://livedocs.adobe.com/blazeds/1/blazeds_devguide/help.html?content=lcarch_2.html#1073189, Channels and channel sets:

Flex clients can use different channel types such as the AMFChannel and HTTPChannel. Channel selection depends on a number of factors, including the type of application you are building. If non-binary data transfer is required, you would use the HTTPChannel, which uses a non-binary format called AMFX (AMF in XML). For more information about channels, see Channels and endpoints.

This way you can use simple netcat to send the request. Not sure how authentication will be handled though, you will probably need do a login using Flash, extract the authentication cookie and then submit it as part of your request.

Please update this thread once you make progress so that we all can learn.