What are the drawbacks of using Spring BlazeDS Integration?

Question

I have a little prior experience with Spring framework and Flex, but never used them together. I'm starting a new project and would like to use Spring and Flex. I noticed that there is some special "Spring BlazeDS Integration" library. Due to tight deadlines I'm unable to do a proper evaluation and I would appreciate StackOverflow community help on deciding whether to use this library or not.

The questions are:

• What are the benefits/drawbacks of using "Spring BlazeDS Integration" vs. "plain Spring" on server side?

• Will Spring BlazeDS Integration greatly speed up development?

• Are there any flexibility constraints that would be introduced by using? Any other things to consider?

Thanks in advance!

Adriene

Answer 1

BlazeDS is an open source library created by Adobe. You can use it in order to call Java services (methods) directly from the Flex side, without having to create some web services. There are also another benefits like messaging, but the main thing is the fact that is simplifies the Flex/Java integration a lot.

Spring BlazeDS integration is a project created by the SpringSource guys, in order to use the Spring config files for BlazeDS settings and to use the Spring programming model. So if you are using Spring on the serve side and Flex on the client side it is a very good idea to add BlazeDS and to use the integration Spring/BlazeDS.

Amadeo

Any drawbacks, pitfalls to consider? – Adriene

No major drawbacks, and the community is quite active. Take a look on AMF serialization before starting to use it in order to understand the mapping between actionscript types and java types. – Amadeo

The Spring bean factory serves as the bean factory for BlazeDS service beans when they're integrated together (was more cumbersome at first - until Adobe and Spring Source cooperated to create a smoother integration). JMS message brokers are easier to expose to Flex clients via BlazeDS bridge adapters to JMS. Spring JMS template classes can be used to easily write JMS msg processing beans. – Roping

Answer 2

It has no benefits unless you are using Spring on the server. Since you are using Spring, it might be worth taking a look at it, but it will of course require some extra time to learn it.

In short, it provides much easier configuration of the backend infrastructure and services you want to expose to the client and it integrates perfectly with the Spring application contexts and the Spring programming model in general.

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