How can I improve performance on my Flex / Java stack?
I am embarking on a new RIA project from Java to the backend. I am the only developer and the application is a business application. My current stack looks like this:
MySQL || Spring (JdbcTemplate for Data Access) || BlazeDS (deleted) || Flex (Cairngorm)
My question is, what changes can I make to improve performance? Hand-coding SQL, server side entity objects, client side value objects and all the Cairngorm stuff is obviously drag and drop, but I'm not sure how to represent the higher level structures.
Which Flex / Java stack has served you well?
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Manually coding SQL
Hibernate is an option to cut this out.
One thing that might be of interest is Grails with the Flex plugin available. It's built on Spring, Hibernate and BlazeDS, so it's all for you. It was incredibly easy to get it to delete stored objects and respond to AMF calls. I used this and then moved on to a RESTful E4X implementation as it was much easier for me to debug and customize as I could inspect the server output in the browser and more accurately control what I returned to my Flex application (lazy loading issues in collections using BlazeDS was sometimes a headache).
Here's a quick tutorial showing how easy the whole suite of Grails + Flex plugins is: BlazeDS in Grails
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I would seriously reconsider using Cairngorm. In my opinion this is a rather bloated framework and introduces a lot of abstraction that you will never use. Departure:
http://code.google.com/p/swizframework http://www.spicefactory.org
Both introduce the concept of dependency injection into your Flex application.
Also +1 for hibernation. I would use the standard JPA annotations on a Java class and extend this with Hibernate Annotations as you need some additional functionality you need.
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Check out springsource.org new Spring BlazeDS Integration Project
Spring Integration BlazeDS is a new addition to the Spring portfolio and a component of the complete Spring Web stack. The goal of this project is to make it easy to create Spring-powered Rich Internet Applications using Adobe Flex as an external client. The goal is to achieve this goal by providing top-notch support for using the open source Adobe BlazeDS project and its powerful remote control and messaging, combined with the familiar Spring programming model.
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As an alternative to hand coding sql, besides hibernation, you might consider JPA / Toplink. And since you're already out of the Spring camp, check out Spring ActionScript (formerly known as Prana), this is an IOC framework for Flex. It solves many of the problems inherent in Cairngorm. Also a good IDE supporting Flex / Actionscript like IntelliJ IDEA 8.
What's missing between Flex and BlazeDS is it doesn't have any kind of landing page where you have a list of all available services just by typing the url in the browser (similar to a webservice endpoint).
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