Hi,
Adobe Flex is awesome for front ends
Agreed!
it is simple XML based GUI design
Here I believe you do Adobe a huge disservice. Flex places *no* restrictions
on the source of the data that will appear in the GUI, or on the delivery
format of that data. Certainly, "XML delivered by a http-server" would be
the most popular and arguably the "easiest" dataProvider population
mechanism but, unlike Microsoft's one-size-fits-all with Silverlight-Ajax,
there are many and varied alternatives available in the mxml and
ActionScript toolkits.
Personally, I'm currently looking at using a Java Applet (embedded on the
same html page as the SWF) that takes up no real-estate on the GUI yet
exposes Java's very useful TCP/IP Socket interface for server data
retrieval. (RMI or any other Java middleware would also obviously work).
Now Flex has its own reasonably useful and native Socket interface, but it
doesn't surface a connection-timeout method or support OOB data or UDP, so
I'll stick with Java for now and skip the additional layer of abstraction.
(I plan to use the FABridge mechanism for communication and cross-language
method invocation between JavaScript and ActionScript.)
I keep wondering why
sun/java doesn't enhance Java Web Start to include XML based Rich
Internet Application functionality.
I thought that's what JavaFX was for? (Although I haven't heard anything
about it since it was announced.) I'm interested in hearing what others,
more knowledgeable about Java, have to say but IMHO Flex is years ahead of
the pack, and then there's its stable-mate Flash and it runs pretty much
anywhere and it's server-agnostic (although does push data-services with
some outrageous claim of keeping all clients in synch).
Seems they would have a big home
run if they did?
Seems like the horse has bolted? (As of last month Flex is also open source
I believe)
Cheers Richard Maher
PS. Is the only difference between resultFormat XML and e4x that the later
is specifically for RSS? Or one returns XML and the other an XMLList object?
PPS. Don't forget you can also call your Java SOAP web Services directly
from Flex. Compared to Perl or PHP how hard can it be
