What is the best way for Adobe flex to communicate with Java?

Question

I am currently working on a project for school which will be a webapp where the gui will be programmed in Adobe Flex and the backend will be programmed in java, probably as servlets running in Tomcat...

I am working primarily on the backend things, with another guy in my group heading up the Flex stuff.

He is convinced that to communicate with the Java code he'll need to jump through all sorts of hoops. I was under the impression that you could probably just query the servlet and render the response into the application?

I haven't really been able to find any good documentation on Flex (Haven't look that hard either), I just wondered if this is as daunting as he is making it out to be.

Any resources / comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Blaze Data Services is the way to go. You register a "MessageBroker" servlet in web.xml which acts as a front controller to your other services.

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/blazeds/BlazeDS/

http://livedocs.adobe.com/blazeds/1/blazeds_devguide/

http://livedocs.adobe.com/blazeds/1/javadoc/

Answer 2

As brd6644 stated, BlazeDS is definitely what you want for a Java backend. It integrates very nicely with Flex.

As far as Flex documentation goes, Adobe has a ton of free video tutorials online, and the official Flex language reference will be helpful, too.

Answer 3

There is also a turn key distro that contain a samples war file that you can deploy to a web server to get a feel for some of Blaze's capabilities.

Answer 4

You can use Red5, a 100% Java alternative to Adobe's FMS.