Hi all,

Has anyone tried to combine Hibernate with Flash remoting?

I'm just wondering if any changes made to the ASTranslator (JavaBean translated ActionScript objects) would be made back in the Hibernate Entity in the server...

-Ian

I designed and implemented a medium-size project with both. AMF and Flash remoting sucks, it's even worse than "traditional" webservices. About your question: Both are not related and don't influence each other. Why should they?

Thanks for the quick reply.

I'm simply evaluating the rich client UI at the moment, using Spring with Hibernate for the persistance layer is a no-brainer, it's a great combination.

All I was hoping for was a system where I could lookup an Object via a service which quieried Hibernate, pass this object to my Flash UI, make some changes, pass it back to the service and persist the changes.

This is just for an experimental project, not client related at all. If the feeling is that I should avoid Flash Remoting like the plague, what other options do I have?

I'm using GLUE at the moment for Web Services, and I like its simplicity and ease of use. Perhaps this could replace the Flash Remoting connectivity.

Is anyone here using Flex? Hopefully it'll provide richer support for these features.

It will not work, at least not out of the box. As is the case with most idiotic webservice interfaces, AMF can only transport almost completely serialized objects. This means you can use:

- primitives or primitive wrappers
- arrays of them

So you have to flatten your richly typed object graph to that structure. The same applies if the object comes back from AMF. Together with the closed, proprietary and unknown API and protocol that AMF is, a horrible combination. I worked together with two very talented and skilled Flash developers and we had unbelievable problems. You can't debug Flash applications properly and it's overall a real pain. I really can't recommend it. Use Swing/Webstart for rich clients (or SWT/Eclipse...), but don't use anything Macromedia sells. They have no idea at all what software development is.

Note: The commercial Flash remoting (and OpenAMF) had no concept of security. Thats right, any client can call any method on the server. Just call it by name and reflection will do the rest, even System.shutdown(). We then added method-based access control lists to OpenAMF, but Macromedia AFAIK still denies that there is any problem in their FAQs.

in short: WOW.

Sounds like I'll stick with Hibernate & Spring for the data-access and Struts for the frontend, I'll just create a few rich UI components in flash and use them for navigation.

Thanks for your frank and open replies, it's good to get in contact with devs who have experience of these technologies.

I need to do something very similar. I'm building a web service client and server for synchronization in a distributed database application, where nodes use Hibernate to access their backing stores, and records are held as POJOs in memory.

So far I've been working on using reflection to serialize and deserialize the object, but this breaks after it's sent via the web service, because CXF creates proxy objects which have new members that I don't want to see or touch (e.g. handler). Also the logic is very complex, inefficient and probably buggy.

I know that Hibernate is perfectly capable of flattening my objects, as it does it whenever I call save(), but I can't find any sample code to get the flattened data without going direct to the database with JDBC. Does anyone have any ideas? Do I just get the mapping (PersistentClass), iterate over its properties and disassemble() them? If I re-assemble() the serialized data into POJOs, what happens to associated objects? Is any of this documented or supported in any way, or am I messing with Hibernate internals here?

Cheers, Chris.

I found the answer: an officially supported way to access metadata.