Some people started looking at Adobe Flex
for building rich clients applications with a WebObjects backend.
Flex can talk to a backend in three different ways :
Currently, only the two first solutions are available to talk to WebObjects. Some AMF3 implementations are open source, so in the future we can build such a thing for WO. GraniteDS would be a good start, since it's Java-based.
Some WO dudes in France are looking at a WebObjects-Flex integration, updates from their project will be posted here.
In an answer to Pascal Robert's inquiry about Flex in the mailing lists, two other WO dudes said :
Philippe Lafoucrière :
We are using webservices for some reasons, especially reusability of code.
You can find also a comparison of performances here :
http://www.jamesward.org/census/
Anyway, Using Flex and WO is working well, even you have to drop all the wocomponent coolness. Remember that your flex interface will be an asynchronous UI, and you will need to develop you app differently (it's not a web page any more).
Shaun :
I have been using flex with WO for about 8-10 months now, building a new UI for new section of an existing app at the moment. Basically, the approach I have taken is using flex HTTPService calls to direct actions that return XML.
The direct actions generate XML using some custom xml generation classes that make use of key value coding to inspect EOEntities, EOAttributes etc. but i digress...
Having the result format set to "array" in Flex makes building a object graph on the client-side pretty painless. I've also built a EOGenerator style script to generate Actionscript classes for the client side based on EOModel attributes, which makes things a bit easier.
I wanted to look into make LiveCycle Data services work with WO but its not supported on OSX at the moment and there have been way too many cool new things to get stuck into with Flex2/3 and AIR(beta) to bother, and they approach I've used so far works great.
I dont think I'll bother building anymore WO UI's from now on. The flex stuff is WAY too nice. For me, WOComponent & WODynamicElements died (RIP) about 8 or 9 months ago..
IMO flex is the future of rich UI web applications. AJAX, HTML, no thanks.
