RIA Server Architecture .NET

Question

I'm using WebORB as a remote gateway for Flex projects. I was wondering what would be the best architecture to use on the Server .NET side. At this moment we are using SubSonic to generate a Data Access Layer. Besides that each call from Flex uses a little bit a transaction script pattern because the server side really only acts as a way of getting data from the SQL Server 2005 database to Flex and from Flex to SQL Server 2005.

Are there best practices around how to deal with RIA along the server side? I've been playing with LINQ (stored procedures with multiple results sets gave us headaches however), and I am wondering about the ADO.NET Entity Framework...

Concurrency is also a big issue. I know these things are handled by datasets and LINQ also has support for this, but once the data is send to Flex there really is no connection anymore with the orignal dataset.

Are there others out there having experience with large RIA?

Answer 1

I've created an application with the architecture like:

Flash/Flex with ActionScript -> AMF.NET to call .NET method -> facade layer for incoming and outgoing parameters formatting -> simple ADO.NET using the data provider model and Microsoft SqlHelper that calls stored procedures.

I was happy with the results as I was a .NET developer and the response times were good, and I was able to get response datasets that directly could be bound to the Flash/Flex controls like grids.

Review this post for more information on my work and source code.

I hope this helps.