Flex Remoting with

WebORB

What is Flex?

Flex is a way to make SWF files!

Flex is for developers.

Flex is for making applications ... that run on the web (Adobe Flash Player) ... on the desktop (Adobe AIR) ... or on mobile devices.

Flex: A development platform that is revolutionizing how the world writes and deploys software!

use case : a customer tries to complete a task (in this case: apply for a mortgage) on a website, gets in trouble, and starts a "live help" session with a support representative.

Among other things, the support representative can remotely drive the customer's application, enter data collaboratively with the customer, chat with the customer using a text-based and/or a video-chat session, close the support ticket, etc.

Sample Application 01

The Hybrid Store application shows how easy it is to integrate an Adobe Flex component into an existing HTML application, taking advantage of the expressiveness that the Flex framework and the Adobe Flash Player 9 provide. The sliders in the application are from the Yahoo User Interface Library.

As you move the slider, the Hybrid Store application calls functions on the Flex SWF file to adjust the specified properties. When you release the slider, the application calls another function that indicates that filtering is complete, so the catalog can animate any changes necessary.

Sample Application 02

The Restaurant Finder application shows how to use the Adobe Flex SOAP web-service support for CRUD operations in a master-detail type application.

The default state shows a list of all restaurants in the system. When you click on a restaurant, the details about that restaurant and summaries of reviews appear.

When you select a summary, the details of the review appear. You can add reviews to the review list. You can also filter the list of restaurants by restaurant type.

Sample Application 03

The dashboard, built by ESRIA, is a demo application which displays data using draggable drill down charts, forms, DataGrids, and links in a pod layout.

You can modify layouts by dragging and dropping pods to a different location and minimizing, maximizing, and restoring pod windows. Layout changes are saved using a LocalSharedObject.

Layout data is loaded from /data/pods.xml with values in pod.xml indicating which data files to load for a particular pod. You will need the datavisualization.swc to run this application. Sample Application 04

Flex Builder

Flex SDK (Open Source!)

Flex is a highly productive, open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops and operating systems.

This site is focused on the development of the Flex SDK. If you are looking for more information on how to use Flex, you may wish to visit the Flex Developer Center.

Flex 3 is the latest production quality release.Flex 4 (Gumbo) is currently under development.

Flex SDK (Important files)

Command line compilers

Flex Builder (Design View)

Flex Builder (Code View)

What is ActionScript?

ActionScript is an object-oriented programming (OOP) language that is designed specifically for Web site animation.

Originally released with Macromedia Flash 4 and enhanced for next versions of Flash, ActionScript is a sophisticated version of the script language introduced in Flash 3.

What is ActionScript? ........ contd

ActionScript makes it possible for developers to create onscreen environments (such as games, tutorials, and e-commerce applications) that can respond to user input through the keyboard or mouse.

ActionScript is an event-based language: just as is the case in real life, actions are triggered by events.

Flex Remoting using NetConnection (class)The NetConnection class creates a bidirectional connection between a Flash Player or AIR an AIR application and a Flash Media Server application or between a Flash Player or AIR an AIR application and an application server running Flash Remoting.

What is AMF

The AMF file format is a binary file format representing a serialized ActionScript object. This file type is used in many places within the Flash Player and AIR for data storage and data exchange.

In Flash Player AMF is used in SharedObject, RemoteObject, LocalConnection, ByteArray, RTMP (all variants) and all RPC remoting operations. The benefits of AMF are actually really misunderstood, so lets take a quick look:

WebORB Presentation Server

WebORB for .NET is a multi-protocol presentation server that is to designed to effortlessly connect AJAX, Flex or Flash clients with .NET objects, XML Web Services, native operating system resources and real-time messaging streams.

Using WebORB, client applications can communicate with each other or with remote server-side objects and services as if they are local in the client environment.

WebORB Presentation Server (overview)

Remoting - provides remote procedure call (RPC) support, enabling Flex clients to invoke methods on deployed .NET objects. Flex clients can use the RemoteObject API/MXML to bind to and invoke methods of the remote .NET objects. WebORB's remoting engine automatically converts client-side objects to the corresponding types expected by the method signatures of the user class.

Data Management - a rich and extensible system designed to simplify data-tier integration between Flex and .NET. The system includes design-time editor, code generator and a runtime framework to enable developer create robust data-driven Flex applications. Code generator is capable of producing both ActionScript and .NET (C#/VB) code supporting all fundamental database operations (CRUD) for the database identified by developer. Additionally, the data management system supports features like client synchronization which allows dynamic push of data changes to all connected clients.

Real-time Messaging - provides a runtime environment for real-time message and rich media content delivery. Flex clients can request streaming audio/video, publish or record live video streams, use Remote SharedObject API as well as producer/consumer (pub/sub) API.

WebORB Presentation Server (work flow)

WebORB Presentation Server (Free!)

All editions of WebORB (.NET, Java, PHP and Ruby on Rails) are available free of charge for all development, staging and production purposes. WebORB for .NET and WebORB for Java are licensed under the Midnight Coders License agreement.

WebORB for PHP and WebORB for Ruby on Rails are licensed under the Mozilla Public License.

Certain restrictions apply. Contact Midnight Coders sales department using the form below for additional details. We recommend obtaining a support package as an assurance of obtaining professional customer support. You can see a list of available WebORB support packages and purchase support subscription online.

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