Flex for J2EE Developers: The Case for Granite Data Services

For developers having worked on J2EE web applications for many years, getting into Flex will seem both very fun and familiar of the simplicity and power of ActionScript and the UI framework, and quite tedious and frustrating when it comes to developing the core application logic and the server integration. 

In some ways, developing Flex applications with widely used frameworks like Cairngorm and BlazeDS involves a lot of plumbing code (business delegates, service facades, conversions between JPA entities and value objects,...) and will remind you of the days of Struts and EJB2.

Enterprise RIA With Spring 3, Flex 4 and GraniteDS

Adobe Flex is one of the most widely used client technologies for building rich applications and Spring 3 is one of the most popular Java application frameworks. These two technologies make a great combination for building enterprise applications with a modern-looking and rich user interface.

There are various options to integrate them, and each has its pros and cons, such as Web/REST services and the Spring-Flex project promoted by Adobe and SpringSource. There are lots of articles and resources about them. Here, I will focus on an alternative approach using the open-source project GraniteDS.