Flex Data Services for .NET (WebORB 2.1 Beta 3)

We have started final testing and packaging for Beta 3 release of 2.1 The new release brings full CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) capabilities to Flex applications working with a .NET backend. Client applications use exactly the same mx.data.DataService class to interface with the .NET backend data store as they would with the Adobe's Java implementation of FDS.

If you have downloaded and tried Flex Data Services for Java, you might be familiar with the Contact Manager application. The application demonstrates the use of all four basic database operations. Here's the same Flex application talking to a .NET backend through WebORB:

http://www.themidnightcoders.net/ContactSystem/ContactSystem.html

The client-side MXML is exactly the same as provided in the FDS distribution. The database is MS Access, but can be any other database that has a provider in .NET. We will be posting an article on our website describing how the example works.

Some additional things included in Beta 3 are:

• Parsing of flex-remoting-service.xml - this removes the need to re-declare deployed services in the weborb configuration file
• Parsing of flex-data-service.xml - weborb obtains information about deployed data destinations from the same configuration file used in the original FDS implementation
• Hot deploy of the files listed above - the product detects any changes to the files and redeploys all the destinations and services
• Support for conflict detection. If multiple users submit data queries that conflict with each other, the product will notify the users accordingly and will provide required information to resolve conflicts

The release should be available in the download section of our website shortly.