Ahmed Hashim's Blog

Beside Java ... Flex

Few months ago I did my Hello World Flex, I used Adobe Flex Builder and founded it interesting to produce RIA. After than I tried a simple application for file download and discovered some features in Flex. Now, I came with a new project and decided to use Flex to do the job.

What is my project? It is a small and smart product catalog with search facilities and customer reviews.

Why I decided to make this site with Flex? Java is not suitable because of the hosting issue, finally I want to upload my application in my cheap host which supports PHP only. Why not PHP? because I plan add this small project to a current projects, some of them developed with PHP and other with ASP. I thought about Flex to make it easy to plug to any website

The first problem I got is the DB connectivity, there is a way to connect to DB through PHP code or Java, but I didn't like the idea; it will be the same problem again. I asked one of my friends, he is a Flex fan and he told me about a new project which add the feature of DB connection from Flex. The Action Script SQL it is a very new project and tried it yesterday .. it works well as early beta version.

Comments

• Well under your requirements and client side display technology would be a good fit. This includes applets and even GWT. Nothing about these technologies puts any platform requirements on the implementation of the back end. With Java/applets you could connect right to a DB but you probably don't want to do that. Web services would be a better choice for communication anyway. Any particular reason you decided to declare Flex .. "Beyond Java"?

  Posted by: aberrant on June 11, 2008 at 06:54 AM

• As a Java developer, you may be interested in using Pivot to build your application:

  https://pivot.dev.java.net/

  As for connecting to the back-end - as the previous poster suggested, web services are probably the way to go. If your data is largely SQL-based, a REST service would probably be the easiest to set up.

  Posted by: gkbrown on June 11, 2008 at 07:02 AM

• ًWell, let's say "Beside Java" ... I will correct it :-)

  I don't like to use Web services because it will effect the performance .. all backend stuff I want to do is SQL queries; so I don't feel that it fits Webservices.

  Posted by: ahashim on June 11, 2008 at 10:52 AM

• Have you looked into REST at all? REST web services map almost one-to-one to SQL queries. See the "Web Queries" section at the bottom of this page:

  https://pivot.dev.java.net/nonav/tutorials/introduction.html.

  
  

  Posted by: gkbrown on June 11, 2008 at 01:31 PM

• Honestly I didn't play with REST at all .. properly it is the time to do .. but again, I have to deploy the REST Webservices into a container, I want to avoid this. I am about 20% progress in my project and see that this POC works well.
  

  Posted by: ahashim on June 12, 2008 at 01:42 PM

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