I have been using Flex for about 6 months and feel very confident with the basics of it. I am now interested in trying to integrate Flex Data Services/LCDS (with Hibernate) in my applications, HOWEVER, I am having a hard time understanding how to put all the pieces together. I have dug through tutorial after tutorial and either they:
a) Just tell you how to get Flex Data Services running (which I figured out) OR b) Assumes you already have it running, your project files are already setup, and gets into all sorts of customizations & specialties. What I need is what happens in-between! I have successfully installed and run the samples from LCDS in my Tomcat service so I know the server is working OK. What I don't know is what to do now. Specifically here are some of my questions: 1) Previously when using AMFPHP, I created a separate PHP project in Eclipse to manage my PHP files and then a Flex project for my Flex files. Is this what I do with LCDS? Should I have a separate Java project for my Hibernate/Java code OR do I somehow manage this all within my Flex FDS project? 2) How do I compile everything? I am not necessary looking to have the server to compile in runtime so do I just compile everything the way I did before (Run As -> Flex App)? What do I do with my Java code? How does the Java & Flex interact in FDS? Is there some middleware for this? 3) If I use LCDS do I now need to have Tomcat server the SWF file to the client or does my general Apache server serve the SWF and then the Tomcat server handles the back end data services? On this same note, can I still access my PHP classes through AMFPHP in the same app (I assume yes)? 4) I tried to follow the "Use the Data Management Service" tutorial in the Flex Manual and got hung up in two places. First, I get a compiler error that says: "Unexpected attribute 'url' found in 'endpoint' from file: services-config.xml" (I assume I look in the WEB-INF/flex dir for this file, but I have no idea what to change). Second, if I ignore the error and compile anyway I get a 404 error saying that "The requested resource (/samples/DSLessons/ DSLessons.html) is not available." I don't see any compiled swf or html files in the DSLessons dir where I would expect them... I assume this is where they go?? Admittedly, I am much newer to Java than PHP and some of my disconnect may be related to this knowledge gap. I am also used to the whole remoting setup so I may be thinking about this in the wrong way. I have had a great deal of success using AMFPHP to interact with my MySQL database and thus it is frustrating to feel "stuck" like this, but I am determined to push ahead. It just seems like there are so many setup options and requirements that it is hard to get just a basic app running with Data Services....I am sure once I get it running I will be blissful, but for now I am hopelessly stuck... Thank for the help! - Kevin
