WebORB for Java or BlazeDS?

Question

I'm in the beginning phases of a project that uses a flex front end with a java/glassfish back end. I'm curious which technology is better to connect the two, WebORB or BlazeDS. At first glance WebORB seems a little bit easier to deal with, but BlazeDS has a larger support community.

Answer 1

I can't say much about WebORB because I've never used it, but I have used BlazeDS extensively and it is a solid product. It's relatively easy to install, and it's well documented.

As an added benefit, it's an official Adobe open-source product there are engineers and testers that are accountable for fixing community issues :)

Answer 2

One important question is what features you intend to use: straight up RPC calls over HTTP/AMF, Consumer/Producer-style messaging, do you need RTMP, etc?

One important thing worth nothing is that WebOrb Community edition doesn't support clustering and you need to purchase the Enterprise edition to get that. Blaze DS does support clustering via JGroups if I remember correctly.

Answer 3

I'm starting to use Flex + Java too, so I'm comparing those two. In the first time I tried BlazeDS, but I found a terrible limitation: BlazeDS doesn't handle well the Lazy initialization of Hibernate; and none of the solutions I saw seems to be good.

Anyone knows a good way to handle Lazy with BlazeDS?

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see /blazeds-vs-graniteds-vs-weborb-vs-lifecycleds-for-business-applications-on-flex-and-java/

at artemgolubev(dot)com

Answer 4

While WebORB Community Edition doesn't support clustering, it does support more than 100 concurrent users, which I have been told by BlazeDS converts is a limitation for BlazeDS.

Also, my colleague and I just finished writing an integration selection guide which has been published in the Flash&Flex Developers Magazine September issue (2010)(available online at ffdmag(dot)com. We've tried to capture the important features you are looking for and have challenged other integration server vendors to contribute in the next update to this guide.

Finally, I just want to officially announce that WebORB for Java v.4.0 is out. There are two free versions (development mode and community edition).