Should I invest in GraniteDS for Flex + Java development?
- by Boden
I'm new to Flex development, and RIAs in general. I've got a CRUD-style Java + Spring + Hibernate service on top of which I'm writing a Flex UI. Currently I'm using BlazeDS. This is an internal application running on a local network.
It's become apparent to me that the way RIAs work is more similar to a desktop application than a web application in that we load up the entire model and work with it directly on the client (or at least the portion that we're interested in). This doesn't really jive well with BlazeDS because really it only supports remoting and not data management, thus it can become a lot of extra work to make sure that clients are in sync and to avoid reloading the model which can be large (especially since lazy loading is not possible).
So it feels like what I'm left with is a situation where I have to treat my Flex application more like a regular old web application where I do a lot of fine grained loading of data.
LiveCycle is too expensive. The free version of WebOrb for Java really only does remoting.
Enter GraniteDS. As far as I can determine, it's the only free solution out there that has many of the data management features of LiveCycle. I've started to go through its documentation a bit and suddenly feel like it's yet another quagmire of framework that I'll have to learn just to get an application running.
So my question(s) to the StackOverflow audience is:
1) do you recommend GraniteDS,
especially if my current Java stack
is Spring + Hibernate?
2) at what point do you feel like it starts to
pay off? That is, at what level of
application complexity do you feel
that using GraniteDS really starts
to make development that much
better? In what ways?
