Hi Mark,
Seeing that you want to use ASP.NET, WebORB would be the way to go. It
is pricey and Midnightcoders would make a killing if they would reduce
the pricing for it as more firms would jump on the boat.
I've been working with WebORB and must say that the tools that come with
it beat everything else out there in terms of rapid application
development. You get a fully implemented code generation module with it,
which is irreplaceable.
All that you really need to concentrate on is writing your class
libraries in .NET and create the services and DTO objects on the Flex
side and you're done. Can't get easier than that.
Jurgen
Mark Ingram wrote:
Hi Barrie, thanks for the response.
In terms of collaboration, anything will do. I tried a great example
using Flash Media Server 2, which was a chat client. Each client was
informed when a new client joined or typed a message. That's exactly
what I was looking for, as we created one the other week that was
based around polling. It worked, but it wasn't elegant.
The price tag on FMS seems steep too (not compared to FDS!). $4000 for
150 concurrent users? Or more users if you throttle their bandwidth.
The ideal solution for me would allow data-push and be able to
communicate with ASP.NET. I have looked at WebOrb, but again, $10,000
per CPU is a little high.
So here are the options as I see it:
Flex Data Services (LiveCycle Data Services): $20,000 per CPU
Midnight Coders Data Services: $10,000 per CPU
Flash Media Server: $4,000 per 150 users (unthrottled)
Polling WebServices: Free (plenty of development required though)
Another down side of FMS is that you can't develop in Flex Builder?
And from what I've seen it doesn't use ActionScript 3?
I feel awfully confused about all these similar products! Based on my
requirements, what would be the best option (see above)?
Thanks,
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* flexcoders@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*On Behalf Of *barry.beattie
*Sent:* 21 May 2007 15:22
*To:* flexcoders@yahoogroups.com
*Subject:* [flexcoders] Re: Am I using the right technology?
Hang on a sec...
in giving Mark an answer, he's been landed with more jargon.
Mark, I'm nowhere near the expert that Tom or others here are on this
subject ...
... and there are some good blog posts around (and the Adobe site
itself) with decent detail on all of it ...
but... I work at a university and they're forever going on about
collaboration, whether it's research partners, academics or student
teams. I'm hunting for a project to put this into practice...
(in a nutshell) both remoting and webservices follow the typical
request/response. so any sync'ing of data needs polling so the clients
can find out if server has new changes.
but FlexDataServices (or LiveCycle DS now-a-days) has a handle back to
each client from the server so it can push events/notifications
telling the clients that the server's data has changed.
this gives a pretty powerful hub-type configuration where one client
commits updates on the server which can be sent back to all the other
clients in a heartbeat.
however, this is NOT peer-to-peer collaboration. the server is
definitely in the middle of it all, receiving and broadcasting to
subscribers. Which is OK if the data/documents/whatever is to be
persisted and managed on the server. Keep in mind, that sort of
technology isn't cheap - not compared to webservices...
I'm no expert on all of this and I've got my own issues trying to work
out how flex can do true peer-to-peer collaboration (no FDS). I'm also
unsure what the upgrade path will be with our FlashMediaServers (FMS)
while I wait for ColdFusion8 (and it's reported LCDS and FMS integration).
but I do hope that's helped somewhat. Others can chime in with much
better replies. this is just something quick to help lift the fog.
what sort of collaboration do you need to do?
