Looking for an easier way to use Java and Flex?

Brian LeGros | January 20th, 2008 | programming  

Marcel Overkijk has taken advantage of the recent open sourcing of Flex to provide a plug-in for the Grails framework to expose AMF endpoints from your Grails application. The AMF end points are created via a service class in Grails. Grails, being built on Groovy, can very easily utilize any Java code, requires little work to configure, and can bundle a WAR for you with a single command. The plug-in looks really promising as does its road map which looks like it will have tools comparable to some of the other remoting packages available for Flex. This plug-in is built for use with BlazeDS, Adobe’s recent open sourcing of a subset of its LiveCycle Data Services product. Although I haven’t tried it yet (and its not recommended for production use), this is a great option to dumping a bunch of JARs into a shared Flex context or trying to setup your own BlazeDS server. Why not let Grails (and this plug-in) do the work for you? Seems like a much easier deployment option, IMO.

I’m also excited to look at Marcel’s code to see if I can learn anything to help in the implementation of an idea I had a while back regarding a Java factory for Flex to create objects from JSR 223 compatible languages using Java’s new script invocation API.

Thanks for the hard work Marcel! I look forward to messing around with the plug-in.



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Discussion

  1. Maxim Porges Says:

    That looks cool.

    - max

  2. Brian LeGros Says:

    @Max - Yeah it definitely looks cool. I’m think it deploys Flex into the same context as the Grails app since it auto-generates the remote-config configuration, but I’m not sure. Regardless, the tools to generate the AS class skeletons and such should will be nice when they are done. Wouldn’t it be cool to expose AMF endpoints in the SOA w/o having to find a Mule adapter? They have REST and SOAP too. :)

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