J2flex - A Persistence Store for Flex applications

Posted by Jon Rose on Oct 22, 2007

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Development,

Operations & Infrastructure

Topics

Java ,

Rich Internet Apps ,

Data Access

Tags

Flex ,

Adobe

J2flex - A Persistence Store for Flex applications

j2flex.com has started rolling out their j2flex product over the last month, blogging about a number of details, and putting the API documentation online. j2flex is a “Persistence Store for Flex applications,” similar in basic features to Hibernate or iBATIS from the Java community.

The j2flex.com site does not currently offer any details on licensing, or how to gain access to the product. On the site, the features are detailed across a number of blog entries:

Mapping the physical data model to the Flex world

Dedicated authentication and authorization

Workflow support

Easily extend j2flex to meet your needs, either through the Flex/ActionScript 3 or Java API

j2flex.com describes the product as growing out of their internal Flex development needs starting back with Flex 1.0, and their desire to provide a simple backend option for groups without the ability or need to develop a more significant backend.

… a lot of smaller shops start evaluating Flex 2.0 but then realized that they do not know how to integrate Flex with their data store. Some of them even do not have a dedicated data store in place and say: "Ohh, Flex is soo cool - but how do I connect to a database?"

After introducing the product, the j2flex.com site introduced “The main concepts:”

The main concept in j2flex is something called a “meta database”, an object-oriented data model stored in a relational database system like MS SQL Server or Oracle.

… In the world of j2flex every object stores an OBJ_ID and an OBJ_TYPE value. Both of these are numeric and together they a unique primary key to lookup date from the several tables.

… This approach allows us to persist pretty complex data definitions very easily and without much hassle, including 1-1, 1-n and n-m relationships.

… If you already have a full-blown physical database model in place, it’s quite easy to make it work with j2flex. All you have to do is to add OBJ_ID and OBJ_TYPE columns to your physical data model.

Their next post covered “CRUD operations” on the client side (API), starting with some overall goals and details:

One of the main goals for j2flex was to keep things simple. For a default installation this means, that you do not have to code a single line of server side code to persist

… j2flex comes as a compiled ActionScript library (SWC) that has to be added to the project's build path. The main class you're working with in the client side code is called J2flexService.

Hopefully, j2flex will soon provide more details on licensing the product, as it will be interesting to see where it fits in the Flex community.

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   j2flex requires LiveCycle Data Services

   by Mustafa Egilmezbilek

   From the j2flex - CRUD Operations (www.j2flex.com/2007/10/11/12/#more-12):
   "Actually, j2flex 1.0 requires an existing installation of Adobe's LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) product so under the hood it uses the same messaging and transport infrastructure as LCDS (i.e. AMF3 over HTTP and/or RTMP)."
   
   Even if the j2flex's license is quite inexpensive, the LCDS license is enough to discourage developers to stay away from using it.
   
   Mustafa

   Reply

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