Chapter 2. Introducing BlazeDS

The Adobe Flash platform with its frameworks, Flex and AIR, provides a robust set of tools, libraries, programming idioms, and runtime for developing and deploying Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). However, that's not all you need to build an enterprise-grade RIA. You probably know well that data, more often than not, resides in external persistent stores such as relational databases, and lots of business logic resides in middleware applications that run in traditional server environments. Besides, server-centric distributed computing environments provide services from authentication, transaction management, communication, and message based integration to hooks that make interaction with web services and cloud computing farms possible. Therefore, integration with the server-side environments is pertinent and essential in most, if not all, complex RIA development scenarios. So, there is a need for a bridge to make Flex and AIR talk to various server environments, say those that run Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, or the .NET platform.

This is where BlazeDS fits in. BlazeDS is a piece of open source software that facilitates integration of Flex and AIR with Java server environments. BlazeDS enables Flex and AIR to talk with Java servers using remote procedure calls and asynchronous messages.

This chapter gently introduces BlazeDS and gets you ready for the under-the-hood details and integration wizardry that you will learn in the following chapters.

Here, and in following chapters, I will talk about Flex and Java. In all these cases, Flex implies both Flex and AIR. However, there are some cases that are relevant only for AIR, and I will be explicit when those situations show up. With that clarification, let's jump right in to explore BlazeDS.