Daniel R.

Model Driven Development Using Flex Builder and LCDS "Next"
Christophe Coenraets, Adobe

Only three people in audience are using LCDS, but that is part of the problem. Hard to use, hampering adoption.

Showing demo with data grid editing. Refreshing page shows changes were not lost. Two different clients against same data are synchronized. Showing multiple views of the same data. Two different companies and a search results window. Multiple view synchronization. LCDS is all about data management.

Why aren't people using it: Price shouldn't be the issue, it's all too difficult. Not focusing on server.

Currently: must create destinations (XML), create assemblers (Java), create DAO (Java), VDO (Java, AS), keep everything in sync. Don't have code completion, binding is difficult, no service introspection.

Accessing data is first hurdle. Configure server through Flex Builder wizard. Normal server properties (server name, port, context root). Can now explore data exposed by server. New "Adobe Data Model" wizard as part of project. Select server and tables you want to work with. Right now it produces XML but many have GUI later on. Including associations. Deploying data model generates code. Includes base class and subclass generation so that the base class can be regenerated without disturbing your extensions. We didn't build "demo ware" code can be used for simple to complex applications.

Dropped company list that show up as data grid. Dropping detail table in prompts for needed data based on dropped table from data model. Do have to manually write handler to connect the two data grids.

Why a custom data model? Wanted to do more than just describe data structure also wanted to define behaviors. You may have more than one data model.
Manually editing generated model to include a derived property. I.e. full name which is a combination of first and last name with some formatting. Change to data model synchronizes to other generated code.

Adding constraint to data model. Boolean variable showing valid state was added. Constraint also added to server side data model checking. Need to cast the data object in client code in order to get compile time checking that all properties are valid.

Business logic location? Can specify where a validation rule gets run. Constraint automatically would reject edit.

How it happens on the standards can't talk about how it happens yet. Is standards based, currently using Hiberante but that is subject to change.

Do you care how your data is updated in database? Will have hook before persistence but really shouldn't care about how is is saved.

Now have Flex and Spring integration. With remoting have SpringFactory that determines what method to call buts has lots of configuration today. Not really Spring like (connections are too loosely correlated as part is Sping and part is LCDS). New model is all Spring based with LCDS, easier to maintain.

Changes to schema will require refreshing the client's data model.

Tags: flex flexcampboston2008 gumbo lcds

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 5:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Flex for ColdFusion Developers
Mike Nimer, Digital Primates

What is Flex, presentation is CF application stack. CF connects to everything. Flex Data Services ship with Cold Fusion (BlazeDS RPC and Messaging wrapped with LCDS' Data Management).

How to connect a Flex application: RPC using HTTP, AMF, RTMP (no server required). Flash remoting requires server side piece like CF that translates protocol to CFC. Flex messaging can push message to all clients through an event gateway.

Need: CF 7.0.2 or 8. CFEclipse as an IDE. Flex Builder IDE. CF plug-ins for Flex Buidler (optional but you really want them) many wizards. Can also have separate LCDS but not needed as it is already part of CF.

Hybrid application, HTML and Flash. Full application, takes over entire page. Desktop application, using AIR with CF server.

Break out of page model and switch to event model. Small self contained components. Application around widget decides what to do with events. Properties in events out (rule of thumb for components).

Only writing CFC no need for CFMs. Binding to data grid the call service.method.lastResult. Can also use bindings if needed.

Any data type in CF can be set back. Can use either array, structs, queries or strongly types entities like User, Products, and other CFCs. CFC instance on server and AS class in Flex. Public only properties. Easy if you get it right. CF case insensitive and not typed. AS is case sensitive and typed. CFProperty used for WSDL generation and Documentation generation. Also used to specify contract between CFC and AS (uses case defined in CFC and property type). CFC also specifies alias (optional but really required for Flex). AS object uses RemoteAlias meta-data. Have to mark a cffunction method with access="remote" to be called by Flex.

CF by default runs as a service. Turn that off and run it from the command line. cfdump is a handy tag and you can see the output in the CF console. Can also turn on Flex logging to see the traffic. Very handy for debugging. ServiceCapture is a network tool or Charles. For a Flex debugging on server, primarily look at body property for requests and responses.

With the CF administrator you can turn on very detailed debugging that is returned to the client. Flex supports browser cookies. Need to specify services config when you compile the Flex application. With server config you can control what the client is allowed to do. Flex can only request CFCs under web root. Flex remoting adapter configuration can change how CFCs and methods are found, secure by default but you can open them up, force certain casing type.

Session and client variables are supposed in Flex. Can't persistent CFC to Flex Session.

Tour de Flex (Released at MAX)

Tags: coldfusion flex flexcampboston2008 lcds

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 5:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How to use Flex 3 & Cairngorm with LiveCycle Data Services 2.6
Brian O'Connor, Universal Mind

Material is on his website. Going to cover what it takes to develop with these technologies today, versus the brave new world that the other Adobe folk presented earlier.

Only a couple of people have used LCDS. About half the audience have used Cairngorm. Really looking to remove a lot code that you have to write.

BlazeDS versus LCDS: Data management only in LCDS and has better Service Adapters.

What is data management: Need paging, collaboration, automated CRUD, offline capabilities. Client has data service that connects to destination on server that uses an adapter.

Fill method gets all data from data source and caches it in middle tier and paged to client. Have the ability to control auto commit of changes to the data. Page fill gets only a subset of data at once. Can configure the fill type to use. How you program your adapter to execute it is a hot topic of performance consideration. refreshFill() can be a performance bottleneck. Is determined by the return value of method calls. For example 4000 clients shouldn't all refresh their data at once.

Data grid and data service cooperate to only request new data when needed (i.e. when user scrolls down).

Dispatch event, front controller, service locator, response populates data or view. Get garbage collected which isn't what you want. One class per data service with a manager. Have Singleton for getting access to the method.

Data Service Transactions handle multiple different access methods. Can start transactions on destinations with either commit or rollback after a bunch of changes. Can hookup with JTA. External updates to database aren't reflected to clients. Better to code in middle tier so that it can participate in refreshing clients.

Can also use data services to persist it to AIR SQLite database. Data service has saveToCache method (which is asynchronous). Don't have autoSaveToCache set to true. With a 4 level deep object hierarchy and 4000 rows it takes about 10 seconds to save. Hard to tell when your data is finished loading (fill is problematic). Have to daisy chain clearCache calls when working with multiple data managers. Client sometimes see managed object proxy instead of strongly typed wrappers. need to add properties.

Data manager handles sending back conflict events. Can determine how it gets resolved.

No built in locking support.

Tags: cairngorm flex flexcampboston2008 lcds

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 5:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Using Flex & Cairngorm with LCDS Data Management from Brian O'Connor, Principal Architect at Universal Mind.
Will focus on Flex 3.0 &LCDS 2.6 and post the slides and sample code on his blog.

Previously with Macromedia consulting and Adobe consulting. Some of the audience have used Cairngorm and a few have used LCDS.

Really looking at Data Management as the focus since it has a lot of power. Lots of problems with how best to model data management and data services this type of application.

BlazeDS versus LCDS. BlazeDS offers RPC Services and messaging with back-end support for JMS and Java with a limited proxy service. No RTMP, no data management, AMF support, and non-NIO (aka blocking) HTTP streaming. LCDS adds Data Management, many more back-end adapters (ColdFusion, Hibernate, SQL, etc.) and NIO (aka non-blocking) HTTP streaming.

LCDS can't be opened to the internet due to denial of service and security issues. Still issues with web servers being the block that sits in front of LCDS.

LCDS helps solve lots of data management issues, like paging million row result sets, collaboration, offline capabilities.

Start with a DataService pointed at a Destination that talks to a Java object called an Assembler. Data send to client to populate ArrayCollections. Can be pointed at client side Data Management Controls like a DataGrid. LCDS remembers which client has which data to do intelligent data handling. Default Fill and Page Fill are key methods of an Assembler. DataService.saveCache() handles persisting to local database for offline storage.

Running through a sample application. JBoss running in the background. Cairngorm application with DataGrid for editing data. Uses samples.war that comes with LCDS to make it easier to setup and run yourself. Showing difference between default and page based filles. Page only got first 11 rows.

Data Service calls fill on Assembler. Default Fill got all the data from the database. Assembler then pages it out to the client. Data Service populates ArrayCollection which is bound to DataGrid. More than 100,000 rows and you want to be sure to use Page Fill which will only grab the requested data from the back-end. Must include count() method so that a paged based query knows how much data can be returned. In either case after a data update has occurred Data Service calls CRUD operations on Assembler. Assembler uses refreshFill(). A badly tuned refreshFill() can kill performance. Really need to understand it. If you update the database directly without going through LCDS you need to notify it through the Data Services Transaction mechanism.

In order to sort by a column you need to manually determine the column and direction to sort by (called fill arguments) and then call a data service manager to get the data in the newly sorted manner. DataGrid is good a paging and data presentation but you need to manually add custom sort order or filtering.

With auto commit set to true clicking off a row will send the CRUD operation. RTMP is best to synchronize data. AMF polling is okay but you really want to use HTTP Streaming (can't proxy streams through Apache). Three options to resolve a conflict given to you as an Array of conflicts. 1) accept server, 2) accept client, or 3) custom conflict resolution. You can use these techniques with or without using auto commit.

Handling large data sets can be tricky. ItemPending errors didn't upgrade nicely from Flex 2 to Flex 3. The UI needs the count method to accurately reflect the total length of available data. Trying to lazy load ahead of the user was problematic updating from Flex 2 to Flex 3. Better left to Flex UI component logic unless you are writing something completely custom.

Configuration on a DataService in MXML overrides the base behavior defined in the data-management-config.xml file. Many errors (best to debug with trace log turned on) result from a missing or incorrect metadata identity element.

When using Cairngorm with Data Management the typical Command/Delegate pattern has problems. Best to have DataServiceManager as a Singleton so it sticks around and holds reference to DataService. Have manager create event listeners on DataService that it keeps around all the time. It is a different type of connection.

refreshFill() on an Assembler can be a performance issue. Tied to autoRefreshFill() result. Append to fill is added at end (not sorted or filtered). Don't need to fill when just doing an update, really should do it on an insert. AutoSync will pick that up for you. 4 different status that can be returned. Really want to optimize when and if a fill is ever needed.

DataServiceTransactions allow server side only code to tell the rest of the system that their are data updates that it should synchronize. Different entry points to the database may make it harder to use LCDS. Really depends on frequency and type of updates to the database and its ability to call Data Service Transactions.

AIRs ability to save a local cache lets you access it offline. Must use same parameters (i.e. same filtering and or sorting). Can do a sync that will handle updates and trigger normal conflict resolution mechanism. autoSaveCache may have row limit but has tested up to 16K without issues, stated limit is 2K.

Where to look for data aware components? No good resources yet, best to look at Flex source code and how it does it.

Some of the limitations are with clustering. Hard to do. Destinations and Data Synchronizing is hard. Built on top of JGroups which is very chatty so really can't scale.

100s/CPU with BlazeDS versus 1000s/CPU with LCDS. Really want to use RTPM but non-blocking I/O in LCDS is better. On the Internet polling type cab make a big difference especially with browser being used. A connect and wait system will eat up a browser HTTP channel.

Retrieved data is fed directly to UI as the model. Managed model objects have client and server side pieces which handle the pieces for you. Granularity of updates is per property can control with autoCommit settings.

Tags: cairngorm flex lcds

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rough draft notes

Tom Jordahl is talking about Using ColdFusion with LifeCycle Data Services.

Why Data Services?

Powerful back end. Talk to ColdFusion. CFML to manage complex data.

LCDS with CF 8 installed by default.

Messaging: Publish & Subscribe, asynchronous communication, message header and body (can contain complex types CF components or ActionScript types), CF can both produce and consume.

Why messaging?
Real-time notification to your Flex application.
Triger long running server side processes
Notify multiple clients at once

messaging-config.xml contains the data along with reasonable defaults.

Easy to have CF both handle and publish messages that will be broadcast to all clients that are listening.

Client can do HTTP pooling to get around RTMP firewall restrictions.

Data Management

Distributed data management, data replication and synchronization, able to manage large data, nested data one-to-one or one-to-many, has some occasionally connected clients.

All clients that are looking at data will get notifications based on updates that are made. The changes are batched up.

Why Data Management?
Easily synchronization data between clients with conflict detection, data replication, and performance optimization (such as data paging and lazy loading).

Assemblers manage the data. Can be written as ColdFusion Components or Java, leverage Hibernate. Four main mehtods: Fill, Get, Sync, Count.

CF 8 extension for Eclipse are freely available. Gives you RDS (Remote Development Service). Includes query builder. Automated creation of ColdFusion Components and ActionScript classes related to database object management including the Assembler.

Special CF channels: cf-polling-amf (work around firewalls), cf-rtmp (off by default).

Possible to have existing Java or CF applications notify clients of data changes using new Event Gateway.

Able to configure that certain data pieces don't trigger changes being published as a way to optimize changes.

JSP tag to compile MXML applications on the server available on Labs.

All data transmitted via binary AMF3 protocol.

www.adobe.com/go/lcds_devguide
www.adobe.com/go/lcds_javadoc

Tags: coldfusion flex flexcampboston2007 lcds

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rough draft of notes

Peter Farland is talking about Configuring, Debugging and Deploying LiveCycle Data Services.

Notes from the talk will also be posted to his blog.

Version issues with LCDS

A LCDS version is best used with the version of the Flex SDK that comes with it, in most

Flex 2.0.1/FDS 2.0.1
Flex 2.0.1 HF2/LCDS 2.5
Flex 2.0.1 HF3/LCDS 2.5.1
Flex 3/LCDS 2.5.1

Client side: rpc.swc and fds.swc and services-config.xml are the key pieces to keep synchronized. Don't forget fds_rb.swc.

If you find a bug open up the swc and look in catalog.xml to report the version you are using. The jar file has a similar version in the manifest.

Performance very tied to java version. 1.5.0_07 is very bad for performance. Avoid 1.4.2_02 to 1.4.2_05 and 1.4.2_10. 1.5.0_13 is recommended.

Configuration

Flex compiler knows about services-config.xml. -services compiler flag generates needed AS3 code. -services isn't needed if you want to roll your own ChannelSet management code.

Multiple Channels in a ChannelSet provides failover.
Use a single ChannelSet for all services in the client.
Only authenticate once per client ChannelSet.setCredentials().
Allows runtime determination of secure channel selection.

Programmatically create the ChannelSet to provide a poor man's load balancing. Randomize the order that the Channels are defined is. Still give you fail-over but the random list gives some load balancing (Math.random()).

LCDS messages brokers can create MessageDestinations on start programmatically instead of having to specify everything in a services-config.xml.
Important to optimize your configuration file and get rid of sample pieces and channels that are not used. Can improve compiler performance since it is less data to parse and manipulate. Be sure to remove debugging and redployer watchers from a production configuration file.
Sun's JDK XML parser should be replaced by xalan.jar.

Flex Builder only supports one project in memory at a time. Only the last edited project is retained in memory for incremental builds.

When debugging make sure you have references to data types retrieved from runtime otherwise they won't be linked in. Missing flash.utils.IExternalizable leads to "one of the parameters is incorrect" error which can be solved by referencing the class.

Client side debugging: will dump additional information to flashlog.txt. Paros Proxy, Charles, ServiceCapture are great client side traffic sniffers.

Server side debugging: Can configure debugging levels in services-config.xml. LCDS includes a server side tool sniffer.exe.

Common browser issue is non 200 HTTP status codes.

When doing deployment compile your SWF and simplify your web.xml file. LCDS 2.5.1 allows configuring client point to be secure while server uses HTTP to allow using SSL accelerators. RTMP can use the bind-address and bind-port to allow hooking it up to a load balancer. Resource availability can be problematic on hosted web servers since most are tuned for short lived connections on persistent connections that LCDS uses.

With LCDS express (limited to 1 CPU) 1000 plus users with RTMP should be possible since it is multiple threaded. Other techniques like servlets would block too many threads.

Tags: flex flexcampboston2007 lcds

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)