I am relatively new to the flex world. I am from the Spring/Hibernate world. In Hibernate, the POJO object or domain object , or simply beans that you use to persist you object into the database does not have to follow the bean definition/contract, i.e: public default constructor with getter/setters. There are good reasons behind creating those kind of 'hibernate beans' (I will call them that way for lack of a better name). In fact, only defining a one-parameter constructor (i.e. omitting the default one) guaranties you that your client cannot invoke your API without that needed parameter. Likewise, exposing only the getters for some private member variables (without the setters) makes sense when you don't want that variable to ever change, etc....hibernate manage to access these fields using cglib, and other tricks.
Now, my understanding of Flex and how remote services work (from what I could see in all the samples around about hibernate/spring), is that your java server bean get proxied 'dynamically' or 'statically' (via an Actionscript class object) according to the rule: Only "values found in public bean properties with get/set methods and public variables " are being copied over to the client proxy object. Which means that if I dont have a default constructor I am toast. It also means that my public getVar() (without a setVar()) from my 'hibernate' bean/POJO will never make it into my client proxy. An example of getVar(), is simply getdbID(), where the dbID is an autocincrement/sequence for example? This is creating me tons of problems, because we arlready have a well rounded/tested server API and we already have a JSF implementation using it....Re-writing a new one using flex is more something I am pushing for to prove that we can get better UI,etc.... What is flex/BlazeDS solution for fixing this case? One solution that comes to mind (not very bright, but should work) is to build a whole slew of plain java bean objects ( 1 for each of the'hibernate' bean) to ensure the translation on both side between the 'hibernate bean' and the 'expected' bean from flex. From the server to the client, the new bean would copy the content of the hibernate bean and return that 'proper' beans back to flex. On the way out (from the client to the server), it would have to recreate the hibernate bean before feeding it to the API and hibernate).... It's probably not the best solution, especially considering that eventually as some point, I will need to define another set of those objects(beans) on the flex side, using actionscript (I think these are what you guys call VOs) in order to do strong typing in flex........ I must be missing something! can't be that complicated Another possible solution (is it? not sure anymore) I believe is to play with the java/flex Externalizable/IExternalizable, but that means changing all my beans on the server (as I will need to implement Externalizable as per what I understood from the readings). Isn't there something that I can do on the client only??? How do you guys handle that? Any input would be valuable. Thank you,
