Found Census – great site which allows comparison between various data loading mechanisms for RIAs. Seems like Flex/AMF3 has a big advantage both in exec time and bandwidth:
And, related to my previous post, here is a demo explaining how to setup BlazeDS and Flex in IntelliJ IDEA, including debugging both the client and the server side – nice!
I never got around giving Flex a serious try.
The most interesting features, like the Live Cycle Data Services, allowing server push-based RIAs, are very expensive, and I did not had the need for anything else that I could not handle using some simple (Y)UI thrown together and hooked into a DB using Grails.
Now, the current implementation of our Atlantis backend polls every n seconds from the server and new messages are added, via AJAX. This led to some browser stability problems and a general bottleneck if several AJAX-”windows” are opened and each of them refreshed every n seconds, respectively.
Affter some research, I stumbled across BlazeDS, which might solve this problem – another part of Adobe technology that was released open source, and should provide the basic functionality needed to access hibernated Java objects from Flex, plus allowing push subscriptions and notifications from the server to the client.
I will check out this tutorial about getting Flex, BlazeDS and Hibernate to work together.
Also, there is a great post about the differences of the various flavors and licensing details, as well as another one.
I will post my findings here.
Came back from GDC on Sunday, and still did not have a chance to write that summary of the sessions I attended, and my general impressions…
In the meantime, I found this very useful presentation, describing how to profile SWFs using the Flex Builder 3 Profiler.
Interestingly, before Flex Builder 3, there was no “real” way to profile your SWFs, so I guess after AS3, this is one more definitive hint at Flash/Flex/AIR becoming a more and more mature and professional development platform.