[flexcoders] Re: Adobe pulls Single CPU and 100-user licenses
I took a look at the FB4 Beta 2 License Agreement, and here's what I found: 2.4.7 Flash (R) Builder(R) with LiveCycle(R) Data Services(LCDS) Data Management Library. Your rights to this Software are limited. In order to (a) utilize the file called fds.swc (the LCDS Library) to develop associations , (b) utilize the LCDS Library to develop offline capability, (c) use the application modeling plug-in, or (d) utilize the LCDS Library to develop a product that competes with LiveCycle Data Services or BlazeDS, you must obtain additional licensing rights from Adobe. So, the lawyers have been working overtime... This weekend I'm going to spend some time with each of the available components, to see how complete the package can becomes after adding up the sum of the parts... Matthew
[flexcoders] Re: Adobe pulls Single CPU and 100-user licenses
Successful and available for everyone are two very different thingsI am more concerned with Adobe making enough money of LCDS Hi Jochem, I agree 100%, it should not be given away. A lower price does make it available to a larger market. For example, if a copy of LCDS were: - $1,000 for every firm with less than 100 employees - and $5,000 for every firm with 100 or morethe revenue potential would be nearly 11 times greater than if every firm having 500 or more employees purchased a copy at the list price. That's how big the SMB market is in America. This is from data provided by the US Census Bureau. I learned quite a bit looking at this data. The census data showed over 5 million small business firms (up to 500 employees). There were only 17,000 firms with 500 or more employees. If a firm had more than one location, it was counted again for each state where they do business. I didn't run the numbers based on every location needing a license because most firms have a data center supporting multiple locations, and LCDS has been proven to support thousands of connections. This does not include sales to any of the 20 million sole proprietors in the report. These are firms which are composed of all owners/partners and no employees like many LLC's (law firms, accountants, etc). I suppose there are some doctors in that category, too which could be prospects for office management software which needs data services. There is probably other ways to look at this, or something I've overlooked. The premise is that the SMB market is huge. For the last 3+ years, it had appeared like someone at Adobe had this figured out, while the more affordable options were available. Personally I thought it was explicit endorsement of interest in the SMB marketplace, which is why we got on board. I wonder how many CF users will have this same rude awakening when they go to upgrade to 9?
[flexcoders] Re: Adobe pulls Single CPU and 100-user licenses
Good to hear from you, Jeff! We are saddened too. We are quite passionate about LCDS, and always have been. We built somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 test cases for LCDS 3.0 during the most recent alpha/beta, so just in the last 6 months our investment has remained quite significant even though we're a small company without deep pockets. This was not welcome news to say the least, especially at the end of the beta process we just went through, upgrading everything. I feel like the crew of the SS Minnow! Here's what the developer of another Flex data project has said about fds.swc: [Our] data management implementation is quite different than the one in LCDS. The code and APIs from LCDS have not been ported. The reason for that is Adobe's license agreement. When you use Adobe's LCDS approach, your client code is coupled to their library (fds.swc). Even if you do not have LCDS running on the backend, but use their client-side data management library, you still owe the LCDS licensing fee to Adobe. Our attorney confirmed this and we also had a conversation with the LCDS team management about it as well. Our software uses the LCDS exclusive features quite heavily, especially for sending messages from server to client. We have an ERP system almost ready to release. If an inventory count changes, it is broadcast in case anyone is selling from an inventory search which has become stale. Price changes work the same way, as well as customer A/R balances, etc. We will be looking at how to recreate the auto sync functions and obtaining true data push (or reverse RPC). We're looking at Red5 http://code.google.com/p/red5/ for possibly adding RTMP to BlazeDS. At least if we start with BlazeDS, we can use our custom object proxies in the serialization process. Red5 has also implemented SharedObjects (between client and server) which is really neat. I will definitely read your articles. Unless Adobe hurries up and changes their LCDS licensing policies very soon, I'll be interested in working on a project which would at least integrate what is available, and build the missing pieces. Some of the client code found in fds.swc has been recreated by Farata Systems and released as open source http://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit/ . They've built change tracking/logging on the client for sending and array of ChangeObjects to the server through a RemoteObject, simulating what LCDS would pass to the sync() method... I have not looked at their OfflineDataCollection yet. I don't think they've got unsolicited data push in there, but I'm still investigating. They've also got an NIO streaming AMF channel endpoint written for BlazeDS on Servlet 3.0. Thank you for your willingness to contribute, Jeff. Let's watch this thread to see what kind of demand there is. We may need to move on it simply for our own product to be marketable. Best Regards!
[flexcoders] Re: Adobe pulls Single CPU and 100-user licenses
João, would you (and others) mind heading over to Anil Channappa's blog post http://anilchannappa.org/2009/11/20/lcds-3-0-released/ about this to voice your concern? There's a long string of comments which are calling for lower pricing so LCDS can be successful. We are very passionate about this product, and want to see it available for everyone. I think it's essential they know we're out here. Thank you.
[flexcoders] Re: Adobe pulls Single CPU and 100-user licenses
Hi Tom, in the same vein, Adobe downgraded ColdFusion 9 to include BlazeDS instead of LCDS. Dunno about price, but have you looked at ColdFusion? Comes with LCDS and a bunch of other stuff.
[flexcoders] Adobe pulls Single CPU and 100-user licenses
I'm curious how many of your projects were deployed into production using the no-charge Single CPU (or the 100-user departmental) licenses of LCDS 2.x. Since the release of LCDS 3.0, neither of these licenses exist. This leaves our small business customers running in production using the Single CPU license with no upgrade path going forward, unless they can come up with the steep license fees for ES2. I doubt any of our customers will be able to afford it. Needless to say, this seriously impedes our ability to do business on the LCDS platform going forward in the SMB market we serve. It also leaves our hands tied with respect to the software we've already developed and deployed. BlazeDS is not an option - it would require a total rewrite of client and server, and mass annihilation of features. How are these changes affecting your business?
[flexcoders] Re: decimal numbers in financial applications
Hi Anatole, I understand your sentiments, and I do understand and respect your viewpoint. However Gordon has been kind enough to quickly make some very clear statements for me regarding where we are at today, and as a result, I'm making progress in solving the problem. I'm afraid that trivializing the matter will impede this process. If there's any hope in building a grass roots ground swell of support for adding fixed decimal support to Flex, it has to come from educating the folks about what we've got, and what the options are. I'm happy others like Jeff want to know more about this. It is time, for those who are unaware of what happens when you expect and require the results and accuracy of decimal math while working with floating point values, to learn and understand what the difference is, the implications, and limitations of being forced to use floating point variables. The problem is far more serious and practical that it is theoretical. To appreciate the complexity of dealing with fixed decimal numbers, take a look at the over 10,000 lines of code in 7 different classes in the Java API which deal directly with fixed decimal support. Make no bones about it, there's a lot more going on than just carefully placed rounding statements. Jeff, the client side as it stands now is incapable of accurately performing any mathematical function with accuracy on arbitrary precision decimal numbers, especially when executed repeatedly. The adding machine on your desk and the same formula within Flash client will never agree with each other 100%. A balance sheet must balance to the penny. A journal entry must balance to the penny. A sales tax rate must be exactly 5.92 percent, etc. Don't depend on the Flash client to do this successfully without adding fixed decimal support of some kind to your application. When doing decimal data entry in the Flash client, if the data is first stored in a Number object before being transferred to the server, the value will appear to change randomly before being stored in the database. It is because some fractions can only be represented in binary as an aproximation (not exact). This is how we encountered the problem. It was a simple CRUD application written to FDS. The object had two fields - Description and Rate. Rate was a Number object in Actionscript, a BigDecimal 7 long with 4 decimal positions on the server. 1.92 was keyed into Rate in Flash, and FDS wrote 1.91 to the database. It's that simple. Anatole, out DAO layer is not able to compensate for this because we're using FDS. FDS passes in a BigDecimal already initialized with the wrong number. The problem, as you rightly point out, is a rounding issue. The problem is precisely that FDS must always be rounding down (because our value of 1.92, converted to double as 1.91999... ends up 1.91 in the database. FDS deserialization is not considering the scale and precision of the destination field during the conversion. If it did, we'd be highly accurate, but not perfectly accurate. After enough iterations, we'd still loose a penny eventually, and the CPA or CFO would storm into my office and say The system doesn't work right because... Prior to Flex, I've been working with C++ on the client side with a fixed decimal library which is at least 15 years old, and with IBM midrange business computers developed in the late 70's on the server side, with languages where there is no such thing as a float (ONLY fixed decimals). This is the kind of software/hardware which was developed to handle business transactions over 30 years ago, and much of the world still runs on them. Until Flex and all of the other new technologies have support for fixed decimals and can add up a balance sheet, we will not be able to replace these old back end systems which at the end of the day have to balance the books month in and month out - to the penny. Let's work to educate Flex users about the benefits of fixed decimal math, and ask Adobe to make sure it gets in to the next version. It will help solidify the future of the rich internet application a great deal. Best regards to all, Matt -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[flexcoders] Re: decimal numbers in financial applications
In case of Actionscript double (1.9199289457264239899814128875732421875 from the original post) it is $500 billion. Hi Anatole, Did you note that FDS _truncates_ the actionscript double when converting to BigDecimal? The extra information is lost in FDS. So in this case, when the tax rate keyed in at the client is off by .01%, this works out to be a 10 cent mistake on a $1,000 transaction. This problem would present itself any time the user is keying in a price on the client side, trying to save the data. Imagine a user doing a price change on thousands of items, hitting save, and watching hours of work disappear... You're right - letting the DB driver do the rounding would work if we had a separate DTO for each domain object where we could put the floating point number temporarily. Since we're using EJB 3.0, which is an excellent abstract persistence layer, we are able to allow the POJO entity to become the DTO, and thus our serialization framework (Flex) must either be fixed (by Adobe) to round correctly, or extended (a new serializable type class). So for us the immediate answer is to create a serializable BigDecimal in Actionscript which can pass through the protocol layer unscathed and give exact results on the client. This not only provides a fix for the persistence problem, but also allows the client to compute things without help from the server, and display them confidently to the user, knowing that when the server performs the same calculation, it will match exactly. Best regards, Matt -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[flexcoders] decimal numbers in financial applications
Dear Group, Java BigDecimal serialization to and from the Flash client appears very broken. At best I'd say it's just incomplete. How do those of you who write financial applications with currency or just simple applications which need fixed decimal support deal with this? For example, a number of 1.92 sent to the server in a Number ends up as 1.9199289457264239899814128875732421875 in the BigDecimal on the other end. If my BigDecimal had a scale of 2 the result is 1.91. I understand that Number is an IEEE-754 double-precision floating-point number, which is the problem here. If Flex is marketed as a piece of business software without good support for dollars and cents, fixed decimal numbers, accurate currency, in short - financial data which drives the business! (Having BigDecimal mentioned in the serialization documentation is so wrong in my mind with this kind of behavior.) Is there something I am missing? Is there a way to make this work correctly? If not, it looks as though I need to port BigDecimal to Actionscript. Thank you for your consideration. -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[flexcoders] Re: decimal numbers in financial applications
Gordon, Thank you very much for the reply. I'm very surprised that the decision was made at some point that support for fixed decimal numbers was not absolutely an essential and required part of the product and framework before release, when targeting the enterprise customer. We need an immediate solution beyond dumbing down the client side to only use strings. So much functionality would be given up in that scenario that I'd be ashamed and embarrased of our product in the end. I'm considering creating a port to Actionscript of BigDecimal for Javascript which is an open source project. See http://freshmeat.net/projects/js_bigdecimal/ Custom serialization is outlined on pg 1098 of the Developer's Guide. I'm hoping I can extend BigDecimal and implement Externalizable, create a new similar object in Actionscript, and get them to serialize/deserialize correctly. Hopefully there's nothing in the Java adapter standing in the way of making this work... Any help or advice on this would be appreciated. The BigDecimal is mentioned on page 1091 of the Developer's Guide as being deserialized to both int/uint and number, with no further explanation. As I've pointed out, BigDecimal is completely incompatible with both of these AS types. Matt -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[flexcoders] Re: decimal numbers in financial applications
Creating a new class is the good option. It would be time comsuming, but would bring about the desired outcome, assuming everything could be worked out. If you read Gordon's post again, you will understand what I was not too excited about. I was not objecting to creating a new class, nor was this suggested, except by me. Gordon mentioned one option was to do all of the math strictly on the server, and pass strings back and forth. I'm sure you can see why this would be a last resort. -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[flexcoders] Re: decimal numbers in financial applications
Hi Gordon, I appreciate your reply. Here's some more information for you, which might help. It looks to me like it's a one-way problem (client---server). Unless the user is doing data-entry on the Flash client, and then saves the data, this problem would appear not to effect them. This might explain why there's no outcry. For example, if I set the column to the right value in the database manually and then refresh the client view of the data, the value makes it down to the client unchanged, displays on the screen in Flash with the correct decimal value, and can be used in computations, which appear to be correct (so far). I hit the problem when I am creating or updating a record. Once Flash sends a new value to the server, and the Java adapter creates a new BigDecimal from the Number, the decimal portion gets changed ever so slightly. Then, the code must always round down just before assignment. If standard rounding were in place within the Java adapter, I would still not realize this problem exists. The wrong values are only off by one thousandths when dealing in hundredths. I am going to go forward with the porting or creation of the fixed decimal class, and will try to end up with BigDecimals on the other side. I'll let you know how it goes. -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[flexcoders] java enum does not serialize
Has anyone found a way to get java 1.5 enums to serialize and deserialize correctly through the flex server? Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ~-- Something is new at Yahoo! Groups. Check out the enhanced email design. http://us.click.yahoo.com/SISQkA/gOaOAA/yQLSAA/nhFolB/TM ~- -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[flexcoders] logical transaction commit with multiple flex destinations
We have come to the realization that Flex is designed to commit per destination, and not per transaction. The problem is that we have multiple destinations involved in a logical transaction. Have any of you encountered this problem, and decided to live with it, or have you found a way to batch the commit of multiple destinations? Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ~-- Check out the new improvements in Yahoo! Groups email. http://us.click.yahoo.com/6pRQfA/fOaOAA/yQLSAA/nhFolB/TM ~- -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[flexcoders] Re: Moderation + we're not moving to a new forum this week (or next) either :)
Personally, I have tried to use Flexcoders group and have all but given it up. 1. The Yahoo system has a horrible search facility, which is KEY to asking questions (has this been asked already?) and getting answers (has this information already been posted?). These two point are 99% of the purpose of the group. 2. The ads are distracting, annoying, etc. 3. Threads are next to impossible to follow, because there is no way to subscribe to a conversation through the web interface, and be alerted when new posts arrive. (I don't want to use a news reader on five different computers for one group.) 4. My own posts are even hard to find... I use so many other forums which are like a walk in the park, that my patience grows really thin when the extra functionality is simply missing here. Adobe's forum system would be an improvement - and it appears extremely quiet compared to Flexcoders. Let's go use Adobe's site if nothing else. Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ~-- Yahoo! Groups gets a make over. See the new email design. http://us.click.yahoo.com/XISQkA/lOaOAA/yQLSAA/nhFolB/TM ~- -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[flexcoders] token chain on ResultEvent
I thought that the AsyncToken was always supposed to be available in the ResultEvent? After a call to createItem (on a DataService), the token data I set is not in the token property of the event when the ResultEvent function executes. The result is an AcknowledgeMessage. But in the debug environment, I do see a dynamic object called __token_chain__ below the outermost token. Beneath it is a UID, and below that is the token I'm looking for - the one which contains the true result of my original call, in addition to the other properties set. Does anyone know how to gain access to the original token, or if there is a problem with not getting all the events here? Thanks! -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com SPONSORED LINKS Web site design development Computer software development Software design and development Macromedia flex Software development best practice YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS Visit your group "flexcoders" on the web. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
[flexcoders] Lazy Initialization Exceptions
We use Flex with a Java back end, and an O/R framework. Our Java classes naturally contain properties which are relationships to other classes - either one to many or many to one. Due to the fact that these relationships are so intertwined, many given objects end up referencing a large portion of the database if one were to recursively follow all of the nested relationships. As such, we desire to have the option of not loading certain relationships when the data is not needed. We use EJB 3.0 (JBoss implementation using Hibernate) as our O/R framework for object persistence. It allows the option of uninitialized collections and other referenced objects. But it keeps it's eye on those uninitialized objects in case you access them. It will load them at that time. The Flex process of serialization to AMF causes serious problems for this design. Since Flex tries to touch all of these properties while building the binary representation for sending over the wire, it triggers the immediate attempt to initialize any objects which are still in the uninitialized state. This causes the LazyInitializationException to be thrown by the O/R framework - because the transaction is already closed (which effectively means the call to the DAO has returned). The community only offers two suggestions, both which do not work with Flex (or Flash Remoting for that matter). The first is simply initializing everything ahead of time. This does not work because eventually you have to draw the line somewhere, and the Flex serialization routines will find that line and try to cross it. The second is the open session in view pattern, meaning that we open the transaction as soon as the Flex client makes a request, and close it only when the last response has been made. This does not work either, because Flex would end up initializing everything during serialization - which is what we're trying to avoid in the name of performance and efficiency. I have gone to the extent to writing a custom aspect to intercept returning calls from my DAO and null out the Hibernate proxies. This worked until I tried to use it for uninitialized many to one relationships. Nulling them out actually deletes my relationship in the database! Carbon Five wrote a utility for Flash Remoting which would create ASObjects as return values from a Java application. They implemented a concept of adding certain properties to an ignore list. This solved our problem when we used Flash Remoting, but was very cumbersome to use. This ignore list had to be built by hand in each function. Later Flash Remoting was improved seemingly by adding ASTranslator to the product, which lessened the need for this third party library, but working with the ignore list was not exposed. The only good solution I see is to add intelligence to the Flex serialization techniques which watch for the scenario of uninitialized arrays and object which come from relationships, and avoid triggering the lazy initialization. Maybe Adobe would consider helping out with this? Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated. -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com SPONSORED LINKS Web site design development Computer software development Software design and development Macromedia flex Software development best practice YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS Visit your group "flexcoders" on the web. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
[flexcoders] Re: lazy associations in FDS
Hi Matt, thank you for the response, it was much appreciated. It sounds like the framework for this feature is still being fleshed out. As I think more about it, a lazy association is a lot like paging, except that the first page needs to be retrieved when a control becomes visible - just like with paging when the second page needs to be retrieved as the first page runs dry. The lazy association array is delivered dry before we've scrolled down at all. Maybe much of the paging code could be utilized. The child record count is an important way to detect an empty relationship vs a not-yet-loaded one. The count would be the first thing to retrieve with a lazy association, and should be stored to indicate empty vs uninitialized. Instead of passing a null array, could we return some sort of an paging array object which has array status, total record count, current page number and the array itself as properties? This way the client will know what it's dealing with. It would be a terrific feature to be able to subscribe to the association (lazy or not, paged or not, or lazy and paged) which is specific to the parent in the relationship, like Order--Detail or Customer--Invoices. Take for example two people are editing the same sales order. Line items being added by one operator could be sent to the other, totals kept in sync, etc.. An awesome way to exploit the messaging protocol... -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com SPONSORED LINKS Web site design development Computer software development Software design and development Macromedia flex Software development best practice YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS Visit your group "flexcoders" on the web. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
[flexcoders] lazy associations in FDS
We understand that FDS supports lazy associations, but the documentation is unclear about whether it's necessary and in what manner to partially initialize an array which is not empty but in the lazy state, as opposed to the fully initialized state and the state of a truly empty array. Does anyone know how FDS works in this regard? We are using the Java adapter, so our application is responsible for how data comes out of the DAO layer. Any information would be appreciated - thank you. -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com SPONSORED LINKS Web site design development Computer software development Software design and development Macromedia flex Software development best practice YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS Visit your group "flexcoders" on the web. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.
[flexcoders] Re: forget Hibernate - use EJB 3.0 and Annotations in FDS
Since J2EE is already laden with all kinds of security functionality, it is unnecessary to provide a second framework for security. It increases the maintenance burden, and decentralizes the administration of the security rules. In addition, the type of security in this config file is too basic to be truly useful. Caling server side functions is much more about WHO is trying to use the service than it is about what is exposed for use. If Flex wants to add real value in the area of security, it would be in integrating with the *authentication* mechanisms of the J2EE specification, and the various J2EE containers... There are two kinds of applications: internal, and external. Internal applications are for use by the trusted employee, such as back office applications. These applications contain a dozen different modules each having hundreds if not thousands of different functions. An external application is normally a very small fraction of the internal application's total functionality which is shared with certain trusted business partners, or even the general public, depending on the purpose of the application. Flex is a great technology for developing both kinds of applications. We want to rewrite an internal application using Flex, and subsequently offer certain key functions on the internet. Flex needs to be well suited for this scale of development, and config files are a hinderance. Flex also needs to plug in to the rest of the picture. We applaud the use of Java - this is one major step in being pluggable, but a Java server in the enterprise means J2EE - and J2EE is becomming so much more practical for use in any application now with EJB 3.0. Flex should focus on it's niche - building a rich client - and plug in to all of the other good infrastructure which is available rather than reinventing it with limitations. The current version of Flash Remoting is on the right track - let's preserve what is there and extend upon it. -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[flexcoders] Re: get rid of xml configuration in FDS, use JNDI
Anatole, thank you for you message. JNDI is really about the hot-deployment you speak of. It's a publishing mechanism for an application to make itself available to others. It a mechanism for one application to obtain a handle to all of the functions provided by another self-published application. It's dynamic. XML is just a file on the file system. It might be human readable, but it's not that easy to author correctly without (another) tool. You mentioned of control over serial requests. Are you referring to the asynchronous nature of remote calls? The nice thing about designing software to work in an asynchronous mode is that it becomes prepared to receive a message at any point in the chain of events - not just at the entry point, or beginning of the process. It opens up several new possibilities. Like you, we'd like to see the flexibility of Flash Remoting remain if we are to adopt Flex. The additional functionality of FDS solves several problems. However, achieving a high level of integration with our business logic is the primary job of the gateway. If the gateway makes it harder to integrate with our server side applications the benefits are offset. -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[flexcoders] forget Hibernate - use EJB 3.0 and Annotations in FDS
We have ceased using standalone Hibernate in favor of EJB 3.0. We would like to see FDS 2.0 move in this direction. XML files for defining entities are no longer needed, because this functionality is provided much better by Annotations. Hibernate also provides an API to read the configuration after Hibernate processes the XML files, which could be used for legacy support. In enterprise development work, our goal is to completely avoid having the same information in more than one place. Having to define our functions, objects, and entity identifiers in a separate XML file specific to Flex is contrary to our design philosophy (the destination tags in flex-data-service.xml). Since our entities are annotated with security information, key information, information about relationships with other entities, our methods are exposed through remote interfaces, and our EJB's are published to JNDI, FDS should be aware of all of these aspects of our persistence layer wouth the need for pulling out into XML that which already exists in our server tier software. In another thread, I speak of what appears to be a lack of JNDI support in FDS 2.0 for locating services such as EJB's, something we've been happily using in the standalone Flash Remoting product. I am hopeful that while building a next generation product in Flex 2.0, Adobe will take advantage of all of the newest ways to make our workflow as efficient as possible, so these large applications with hundreds if not thousands of entities can be maintained from one source - the annontated Java class files which define them. -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
[flexcoders] get rid of xml configuration in FDS, use JNDI
I am evaluating FDS 2.0 for the first time, and am quite disappointed with the requirement of every single destination possible to be added to an XML file before it can be used... Adobe calls this software designed for the enterprise. However, with enterprise comes large applications, with hundreds or even thousands of objects, function calls, etc. I dread the thought of tediously adding all of our entities to an XML file, and maintaining another copy of function prototypes and API definition... We have developed a very nice workflow with Flash Remoting. We write EJB's, which get dropped into the server, which makes them immediately available to Flash Remoting through JNDI. It seems that FDS does not use JNDI? So another quasi-client layer for doing lookup and function calls is required? I see some nice features like data push (very cool), data queuing/sync for occasionally available services. But I'm not sure I'm willing to give up our efficient workflow for these features. I'm curious what others think about the scalability of having to lay out all of these XML files when developing an application. -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
