Should I invest in GraniteDS for Flex + Java development?

Question

I'm new to Flex development, and RIAs in general. I've got a CRUD-style Java + Spring + Hibernate service on top of which I'm writing a Flex UI. Currently I'm using BlazeDS. This is an internal application running on a local network.

It's become apparent to me that the way RIAs work is more similar to a desktop application than a web application in that we load up the entire model and work with it directly on the client (or at least the portion that we're interested in). This doesn't really jive well with BlazeDS because really it only supports remoting and not data management, thus it can become a lot of extra work to make sure that clients are in sync and to avoid reloading the model which can be large (especially since lazy loading is not possible).

So it feels like what I'm left with is a situation where I have to treat my Flex application more like a regular old web application where I do a lot of fine grained loading of data.

LiveCycle is too expensive. The free version of WebOrb for Java really only does remoting.

Enter GraniteDS. As far as I can determine, it's the only free solution out there that has many of the data management features of LiveCycle. I've started to go through its documentation a bit and suddenly feel like it's yet another quagmire of framework that I'll have to learn just to get an application running.

So my question(s) to the StackOverflow audience is:

1) do you recommend GraniteDS, especially if my current Java stack is Spring + Hibernate?

2) at what point do you feel like it starts to pay off? That is, at what level of application complexity do you feel that using GraniteDS really starts to make development that much better? In what ways?

Answer 1

If you're committed to Spring and don't want to introduce Seam then I don't think that Granite DS will give you much beyond Blaze DS. There is a useful utility that ensures only a single instance of any one entity exists in the client at any one time but it's actually pretty easy to do that with a few instances of Dictionary with weak references and some post-processing applied to the server calls. A lot of the other features are Seam-specific as alluded to here in the docs:

http://www.graniteds.org/confluence/display/DOC/6.+Tide+Data+Framework

Generally, the Tide approach is to minimize the amount of code needed to make things work between the client and the server. Its principles are very similar to the ones of JBoss Seam, which is the main reason why the first integration of Tide has been done with this framework. Integrations with Spring and EJB 3 are also available but are a little more limited.

I do however think that Granite's approach to data management is a big improvement over Livecycle's because they are indeed quite different. From the Granite docs:

All client/server interactions are done exclusively by method calls on services exposed by the server, and thus respect transaction boundaries and security defined by the remote services.

This is different to how Livecycle DS uses "managed collections" where you invoke fill() to grab large swathes of data and then invoke commit() methods to persist changes en-mass. This treats the backend like a raw data access API and starts to get complicated (or simply fall apart entirely) when you have fine-grained security requirements. Therefore I think Granite's approach is far more workable.

Answer 2

All data management features (serialization of JPA detached entities, client entity caching, data paging...) work with Spring. GraniteDS does not mandate anything, you only need Seam if you want to use Seam on the server.

Answer 3

Have you looked at the spring-blazeDS integration project?

Answer 4

GraniteDS with Seam Framework, Hibernate and MySql is a very nice combination. What I do is create the database, use seamgen to generate hibernate entities then work from there.

Answer 5

Actually, the free version of WebORB for Java does do data management. I've recently posted a comparison between WebORB for Java, LiveCycle DS, BlazeDS and GraniteDS. You can view this comparison chart here: http://bit.ly/d7RVnJ I'd be interested in your comments and feedback as we want this to be the most comprehensive feature comparison on the web.

Cheers, Kathleen