Richard’s Corner

I have been writing Adobe Flex applications for a few years, and up until now, I have used ColdFusion and AMFPHP for all of my remoting needs. They both have their benefits, but I have been doing a lot more Java programming in recent months, so I wanted to find a Java alternative to these technologies.

Enter BlazeDS. In Adobe’s words, “BlazeDS is the server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Adobe® Flex™ and Adobe AIR™ applications for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences.” This sounded like a great solution to me, so I decided to give it a try.

After a few hours of fiddling around, with one of my existing Java projects, I was able to get a quick and dirty Flex application working with my back-end Java services. I was able to return ArrayLists of Objects with no difficulty whatsoever. I simply treated the ArrayList as a ArrayCollection, and it worked without a hitch. I was very excited by how well this worked, so I decided to try it out with one of my projects that is built on the Cairngorm MVC framework. Within twenty minutes, I was once again successfully using my back-end Java services.

In short, I was very impressed with BlazeDS. I plan on posting a few tutorials in the very near future, so be sure to check back.