> While we've detoured on to Flex, are you aware of any ORMs running in
> AS3?

I've used the codegen in Flexbuilder a few times, it's not bad in
creating value objects, and DTO's to your chosen platform, as well as
middleware mapping between client and server, but it's not a true ORM.
Not sure what MidnightCoders can offer there talking back to a .NET
backend.

AS3 isn't really designed to directly connect to a database anyway,
without writing the whole thing using the AS3 sockets library (meh,
not enough hours in the day). Flash's whole bag is to be a user
interface, not an application in itself, and to connect and
communicate with a defined API on the server. The rest is left up to
the middlewhere.

the exception there is the SQLite libraries in AIR that work with the
client-embedded database for local storage (comes in handy to keep
working when disconnected from the server)

> The Flex/AIR world seems to still be a very connected world,
> rather than a self-contained/disconnected one.

well, it slots nicely into an N-tiered environment. While I used to
get away with small VB5 apps having the UI talking directly to the
database (using DAO - shudder), it wasn't really very flexible.

There's sometimes a tendancy for people to forget that none of this
RIA stuff is really Client/Server even though it can act like it. The
"occasionally connected" nature of anything webby (Ajax included)
means it can be disconnected at any time (eg: someone trips over a
network lead in the server room) and unless you use socket listeners
or messaging or polling, you'd never know. One thing I'm continually
impressed with in the Flex "kit" is the LiveCycle DataServices, which
can push any changes made by any client (Flash) to any other client
currently viewing the same data. When you tie that into AIR's ability
to detect if it's online or not, it's a pretty powerful couple of
features.

Mono was mentioned before as a way of getting around having
non-windows clients: maybe I'm far too conservitative or afraid, but I
find it really hard to embrace Mono. It scares me to not have exactly
the same runtime and API on all the platforms my code will be running
on. Worrying about possible feature divides depending on platform or
littering the code with "if platform-x do this else do that" is a
grief I could do very well without, especially if it's an app that's
downloaded and installed (and grows stale) instead of the website
always serving up the freshest version (SL, Flex, Ajax, etc)
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