Remote Objects not working with Modules - apache-flex

We have some Modules which have their own remote objects configured in remoting-config.xml. Each is packaged and deployed as separate web archives (WAR). For ex. Module1.war, Module2.war.
We are trying to integrate them in a flex application which is deployed in a separate web app. For ex. MainApp.war.
The remote objects work fine when invoked from within Module1.war and Module2.war. But the java remote objects are not getting invoked when called from the main flex application MainApp.war.
I have looked at Flex Developers guide and flexcoders Yahoo group.

How are you configuring your remote objects? Are you passing the path to services-config.xml in the "-services" compiler flag? If you are, I would avoid doing this, since it doesn't give you much flexibility in the location of your services endpoints.
Christophe Coenraets has a great article on best practices for configuring RemoteObject and other data access classes in Flex. The general idea is to externalize the URLs into an XML configuration file, load that with an HTTPService when the application starts up, then use the URLs to configure your Channel/ChannelSet which are binded into the RemoteObject. Full article is here:
http://coenraets.org/blog/2009/03/externalizing-service-configuration-using-blazeds-and-lcds/

Related

A way to configure WebSphere 8.5 Liberty Profile programmatically?

I'm moving from IBM RAD 8 / WAS 7.0 to IBM RAD 9 / WAS 8.5. Liberty Profile. There's a plenty of configuration things such as URLs and namespace bindings.
I've found an information that WSADMIN is not working for Liberty Profile. I haven't found, however, the information, how to access similar functionality as in wsadmin/jython, for example for creating URLs, namespace bindings, etc.?
How to script such things under WebSphere Liberty Profile?
I'll try to address a few things that are implied by your use of wsadmin. I may be overshooting, but I hope this helps:
WSADMIN applies only to the full WebSphere Application Server. jython scripting for the Liberty profile is possible, though you're basically performing JMX operations on a server. Here is something to get started with: https://www.ibmdw.net/wasdev/docs/creating-remote-jmx-connections-with-jython/
There is no way to reconfigure a Liberty profile server via a JMX operation, however. All server configuration (or reconfiguration) is done by editing the server configuration file (either manually with an editor of your choice, via the eclipse tools, or with a script that modifies your XML).
The Liberty profile does not support CORBA or CORBA namespaces (corbaloc or corbaname), or remote EJBs. Liberty profile servers also are not part of the cell/node topology of full profile servers. Instead, Liberty profile servers form collectives, as described here:
http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v8r5/topic/com.ibm.websphere.wlp.core.doc/ae/cwlp_collective_arch.html
You can add strings to JNDI using the jndiEntry element in your server configuration as described here: http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v8r5/topic/com.ibm.websphere.wlp.core.doc/ae/twlp_dep_jndi.html
Information about configuring datasources (I am guessing at what you might need URLs and namespace bindings for) is here (see also the subtopics): http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v8r5/topic/com.ibm.websphere.wlp.core.doc/ae/twlp_dep_configuring_ds.html.
The easiest way is to edit the XML directly or using a script in the language of your choice. The idea is that the config is simple enough wsadmin is no longer needed - it's intended to be human readable and human maintainable. You can import XML snippets if you have repeated config elements you want to share similar elements across multiple servers, or create the same config elements multiple times.

how to deploy flex app using different web service urls?

Is there some sort of configuration settings in FlashBuilder 4.5 where you can easily switch between webservice urls? Right now I have to delete and recreate the web service every time I switch from local to production and vice versa.
The need/requirement is this – Since I work in a startup, we keep changing servers, and their IP addresses. And being a service oriented application – I need to be able to edit the webservice endpoints in my Flex application in a easy manner every time this happens.
My Solution for this -
Assumption is that my webservice endpoint looks like this -
http:////ListAllServices/
1) Create a file config.xml in a folder named “settings” that sits in the root folder of your Flex application – outside the “src” folder. And the config.xml will be a simple xml file of the following format -
localhostTestFlexApp
At the end of this exercise the directory structure of your flex source code will look like this -
flex_src(root of the source code)
-com(some source folder)
–testapp
—view
—
-images
-settings
–config.xml
-appName.mxml
2) Now in your application code, setup a HTTPService object either in mxml or action script. Set the url of that object to this value- “settings/config.xml” – And the above xml fiel containing the current settings will be loaded into memory .
Now you can store these values in a singleton object and construct your Webservice call at runtime.
And whenever you want to move this to a new server in production, edit the tag of your config.xml and you should be good to go.
And this can be automated as well via the EnvGen ant task.
This is not the best way but yes it is very helpful while switching among servers.
Alrighty... The way I was doing it before in fact worked. The problem was browser caching.
For the benefit of others I modified the subsclass for the generated service and replace the wsdl variable with whatever endpoint I need.

Using web services in different environments

We have a series of web services that live in different environments (dev/qa/staging/production) that are accessed from a web application, a web site, and other services. There are a few different service areas as well. So for production, we have services on four different boxes.
We conquered the db connection string issue by checking the hostname in global.asax and setting some application wide settings based on that hostname. There is a config.xml that is in source control that list the various hostnames and what settings they should get.
However, we haven't found an elegant solution for web services. What we have done so far is add references to all the environments to the projects and add several using statements to the files that use the services. When we checkout the project, we uncomment the appropriate using statement for the environment we're in.
It looks something like this:
// Development
// using com.tracking-services.dev
// using com.upload-services.dev
// QA
// using com.tracking-services.qa
// using com.upload-services.qa
// Production
// using com.tracking-services.www
// using com.upload-services.www
Obviously as we use web services more and more this technique will get more and more burdensome.
I have considered putting the namespaces into web.config.dev, web.config.qa, etc and swapping them out on application start in global.asax. I don't think that will work because by the time global.asax is run the compilation is already done and the web.config changes won't have much effect.
Since the "best practices" include using web services for data access, I'm hoping this is not a unique problem and someone has already come up with a solution.
Or are we going about this whole thing wrong?
Edit:
These are asmx web services. There is no url referenced in the web.config that I can find.
Make one reference and use configuration to switch the target urls as appropriate. No reason to have separate proxies at all.

Deploying Flex Projects Leveraging Imported Web Services

I'm sure there's a simple explanation for this, but I haven't had much luck at finding the answer yet, so I figured I'd put the word out to my colleagues, as I'm sure some of you've run into this one before.
In my (simple) dev environment, I'm working with a handful of WCF Web Services, imported into my FB3 project and targeting a local instance of the ASP.NET development Web server. All good, no problems -- but what I'd like to know now is, What's the right way to deploy this project to test, staging and production environments? If my imported proxies all point, say, to http://localhost:1234/service.svc (from which their WSDLs were imported), and all I'm deploying is a compiled SWF, does Flex Builder expect me to "Manage Web Services > Delete", "> Add", recompile and release ever time I want to move my compiled Flex project from development to test, and to staging, and ultimately into production? Is there a simpler workflow for this?
Thanks in advance -- hope my question was clear.
Cheers,
Chris
If you have path names which will change depending on the enviroment then you will likely need to recompile for each environment since these will be compiled in the swf.
I typically use ANT scripts to handle my compile/deployment process when moving from development and production environments. This gives me the ability to dynamically change any path names during the compile. These build files can be integrated into Flex Builder making this process very easy once you have everything set up, and can be done with one click or scheduled.
Thanks Brett. I've been meaning to dig into automating my build processes anyway, so now's probably as good a time as any. :)
You do not need to build a SWF for each environment. Here's a technique I use commonly:
Externalize your configuration properties into an XML file; in this case, it could be a URL for each service or a base URL used by all your services
When the application starts up, make an HTTPService call to load the XML file, parse it, and store your properties onto some bindable "configuration object"
Bind the values from that object against your objects that depend on the URLs
Dispatch an event that indicates your configuration is complete. If you have some kind of singleton event dispatcher used by some components in your app, use that, so that the notification is global
Now proceed with the rest of the initialization of your application
It takes a little work to orchestrate your app such that certain parts won't initialize until steps 1-5 take place. However I think it's good practice to handle a lot of this initialization explicitly rather than in constructors or various initialize or creationComplete events for components. You may need to reinitialize things when a user logs out and a different user logs in; if you already have your app set up to that initialization is something you can control then reinitialization will not be a problem.

Managing web services in FlexBuilder - How does the manager work?

In FlexBuilder 3, there are two items under the 'Data' menu to import and manage web services. After importing a webservice, I can update it with the manage option. However, the webservices seems to disappear after they are imported. The manager does however recognize that a certain WSDL URL was imported and refuses to do anything with it.
How does the manager know this, and how can I make it refresh a certain WSDL URL?
In your src folder of the flexbuilder project you should see the generated classes. For instance, if you use the manager to generate the proxy classes for www.example.com you should see the folders /com/example with the generated proxy classes inside.
To consume these webservices in ActionScript use the statement:
"import com.example.*;"
To consume the webservice in mxml include the .as file using:
<mx:Script source="yourscriptname.as"/>
To refresh the generated proxy classes, consuming the latest WSDL, simply open the manager and select "update".
Also, I found this article very useful for consuming web services.
I hope that helps, the question was kind of vague about the problem.

Resources