Flex Data Services, Hibernate and Eclipse

Cover art by Ellen Joseph

Did You Know?

• Adobe's documentation and most other books tell you to set up your Flex project using a fixed endpoint. This compiles the deployment URL into the code, necessitating an edit and recompile for deployment to testing, staging and production servers. This book describes a simple and effective technique for dynamic endpoints, so a single Flex SWF can be deployed to any server without recompilation. Example projects are provided with the book.
• A free license for LiveCycle DS is available for many projects.
• A single instance of LiveCycle DS can support 50,000 simultaneous users.
• One of the principal use cases for the LiveCycle DS's Data Management Service is to synchronize occasionally connected Adobe AIR applications. It would require a significant amount of work to design a similar feature using BlazeDS. Learn how to use this feature by studying example projects provided with the book.
• Hibernate can be exposed to Flex clients through 'assemblers', for designs that have very little server-side logic; alternatively Hibernate can be shielded from the client using a service layer. Example projects are provided.

Learn more by reading the book!

Target Audience

Flex Data Services, Hibernate and Eclipse is intended for experienced architects and programmers who would like to design and implement non-trivial applications using the Adobe Flash Platform using a Java EE back end.

You should be familiar with Eclipse and programming in Java, and be able to make a “Hello, World!” Flex application before reading this book. There is no need to be a Flex expert. No prior experience with Hibernate or BlazeDS is assumed.

About This Book

ISBN 978-0-9842789-0-9

This book explains how to design, build and test the Flex Data Services and the server-side Java stack of an application built with the Adobe Flash Platform. Java EE technology such as Tomcat and Hibernate are covered in detail, including reverse engineering ORM POJOs from a database schema, and creating a schema from POJOs. Using the tools and techniques described in this book series, one or two people can put together a client-server system that would have required at least a dozen people ten years ago, in a similar amount of time. What’s more, the software stack described in this book can support tens of thousands of simultaneous users per server CPU, with excellent responsiveness, high reliability and presentation-quality graphics.

Because access to remote data sources is part of many applications, the free open source BlazeDS package is discussed with working code examples, as well as its big brother, LiveCycle DS and selected features of GraniteDS. This book also covers Hibernate, an object-relational mapping technology and shows how it works with databases, including reverse engineering ORM POJOs from a database schema, and creating a schema from POJOs.

View the table of contents.

Latest Update

Build 1585 has over 450 pages, with several important new working example projects. See the change history to learn what is new in the latest version.