4.6. Summary

From a humble beginning expositing the essentials of remoting, this chapter graduated to a deep dive into the things under the hood.

The chapter started by explaining what remoting is between Flex and Java. It defined POJOs and laid out the context within which they interact with Flex clients. The process of remoting was then viewed from alternative perspectives. First, a flow view showed how the request originates and moves through the wire. Then a structural view brought the key classes and artifacts to light.

Once the definition and flow of remoting was explained, the discussion moved on to configuration and setup. This section explained the entire necessary configuration and peeked into some of the advanced possibilities.

After configuration, the exploration focused on data serialization. Serialization between AS3 and Java is one of the key aspects of BlazeDS, and this section delved into the serialization to a substantial level. The section talked about data types and their mapping, explained exception cases, and discussed custom serialization.

To summarize and aggregate the different bits and pieces of BlazeDS remoting into a whole, an example was presented. This example was not sophisticated but was robust enough to illustrate some of BlazeDS's key features.

After the example and just before this summary is a small section that starts to scratch the surface of advanced BlazeDS and its customization. Many of the following chapters talk exclusively about advanced features of BlazeDS and its interesting extensions, so this section gets you started on the topic.

This chapter was all about POJOs, and the next one is about managed objects, which can be thought of as the antithesis of POJOs. In some ways, the next one starts where this one leaves off.