I have been playing with flex for a couple of weeks now,and i am trying to use flex as the UI and keeping the backend in Java with as usal Spring,Hibernate stack.
So in this series i will create a getting started project(CRUD contact management) using Spring,Hibernate/MySQL,Cairngorm as the UI MVC framework,GraniteDS for remoting and Tomcat as the server . For now i will create an eclipse based project and later move that to maven. The base intention of this project is to setup a prototype with all the above technologies defined and explore all the aspects of GraniteDS features to serve as the POC for other developers if they are willing to try it.
Anvil is an Open Source Framework for creating Enterprise Portals with Flex as the Client and Java as the back end. It is being developed by Ryan Knight and Holly Edelson of Williams, James Ward of Adobe, Jon Rose of Gorilla Logic and many other great developers at Williams.
We wanted Anvil to be simple to deploy in any Java environment so it uses Plain Java Objects (POJO’s), Spring and BlazeDS. This allows it to be run in any application server or servlet container.
Here are some of the great features Anvil provides:
1. Single window or multi-window interface (similar to a Portal).
2. A pluggable security module which allows an enterprise to easily integrate their existing security systems into a Flex application.
3. The ability to load modules from different locations in the network for load balancing or fail-over.
4. Authorization and access control at different levels of granularity. This allows individual modules and remote services to be secured differently.
5. Common build scripts and templates to automate the building of Flex and Java.
6. A utility to auto-generating Flex code from Java.
7. A utility to auto-generate the project files for Flex Builder.
8. The ability to expose any Java class as a remote service to Flex
And many other great features! We will be writing about Anvil here and would appreciate any feedback or requests!