I'm very new to Cairngorm, so apologies for what's probably a simple question:
I'm working with a number of WCF services imported into Flex Builder 3 (via Data > Manage Web Services), and I'm wondering how to expose those services to the ServiceLocator in Cairngorm. From what I've read so far, it looks like Cairngorm prefers the services be defined in Services.mxml (or somehow in MXML), but that won't work in my case.
I'm working on an app right now where Services.mxml is driving me nuts... calls are just not being made. I've read the blog posts that describe solutions to this issue but it's a recurring, nagging problem so I want to find a more reliable approach. I believe that you could simply replace the code in your Delegate where you retrieve the reference to the web service
this.service = ServiceLocator.getInstance().getWebService("web service name here");
to something like this:
this.service = generated.webservices.MyService();
I'm hoping that, after that, the rest should be straight forward. I'm planning to do some testing tonight so I'll let you know how it goes.
Related
I'm trying to get my first internship, and one of the skills required is ASP.Net. They said I needed to bring some code in, so I went though Microsoft's MVC3 tutorial (http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/getting-started-with-aspnet-mvc3/cs/intro-to-aspnet-mvc-3)
I changed it around the app around a bit to suit their specifications, which they were fine with.
Now they've asked me to design an interface which will provide IOC. I'm completely new to the topic, and am wondering if anyone knows some good beginner's guides or tips on IOC with MVC. I'm probably going to use ninject.
If you're familiar with the 'movie list' app from the tutorial, they would like me to design an interface which will ensure that the MoviesController will have no awareness of the database.
I know that's pretty vague, but that's pretty much all the instructions they gave me. Anyone have some advice for a IOC newb?
Thanks!
You'll find it useful to read Scott Allen's article on abstracting away the dbContext to an interface, then read the MVC3 section of the ninject wiki to get your dependency resolution set up.
The basic idea is that you pass your controllers an object implementing a custom interface to the dbContext when you construct them, and thereafter you do all your data manipulation through that object/interface.
That way when you want to test your controllers, you can pass a dummy object that returns whatever data you need without having to create a database full of test data.
I'm about to create a small web app on Asp.Net 3.5.
Thought this time maybe I should try using Backbone.js..
Is it practical/easy to implement?
I've just spent the whole day trying to set up a WCF Service to return Json without positive results.
I would love to hear the best path for implementation from someone who has already used Backbone.js with Asp.Net.
Alternatively I would love to hear of alternatives that are easy to integrate with Asp.Net.
I've just spent the whole day trying to set up a WCF Service to return
Json without positive results.
Take a look at this tutorial, is short and straight to the point.
Thought this time maybe I should try using Backbone.js.. Is it
practical/easy to implement?
Well... as usual, it basically depend on what you want to do. Backbone can help you if you want to implement the MVC pattern in your client-side code, but it requires some time to get into the APIs so if your goal for the moment is just to create and consume a WCF service using Javascript you could consider using jQuery or MooTools and then switch to Backbone if you need.
PS
Here and here you'll find two quickstart backbone tutorials.
Use the REST Singleton Service template in the WCF REST Starter Kit Project Templates to get WCF with JSON support up and running quickly.
My company has a fairly old fat client application written in Delphi. We are very interested in replacing it with a shiny new web application. This will make maintenance a breeze and many clients want a web application.
The application is extremely rich in domain knowledge, some of which is out of our control. Our clients use the program to manage their own clients and report them to the government. So an inaccurate program is a pretty big thing. The old program has no tests. We are not sure yet if we will implement automated testing with the new one.
We first planned to basically start from scratch. But we are short handed and wanting to basically get everyone on the web as soon as possible. So instead of starting from scratch we've decided to try to make use of the legacy fat-client database.
The database is SQL Server and can be used in SQL Server 2008 easily. It is very rich in stored procedures, functions, a few triggers, and lots of tables with over 80 columns... But it is decently normalized. We want for both the web application and fat client to be capable of using the same database. This is so that if something breaks badly in the web application, our clients can still use the fat client and connect to our servers. After the web application is considered "stable", we'd deprecate the fat client.
Has anyone else done this? What tips can you give? We want to, after getting everyone on the website, to slowly change the database structure to take care of some design deficiencies. What is the best way to keep this in a data access layer so that later changes are easy?
And what about actually making the screens? Is there any way easier than just rewriting an 80 field form in ASP.Net? Are there any tools that can make this easier?
The current plan is to use ASP.Net WebForms (.Net 3.5). I'd really like to use MVC, but no one on the team knows it including me.
We are not sure yet if we will implement automated testing with the
new one.
Implement automated testing. What's the point in replacing one buggy program with another?
Good question, but "Slowly change" the db structure after getting everyone on the website, sounds like a joke...
I would rather take the opportunity to create a fresh db structure, write a bulletproof migration script for you db, that you can try out and rewrite a zillion times without any side effect fro your clients, and then write whaterver you want (fat/web) on the new db, have it tested and migrate everyone when it's ready.
I have a couple suggestions:
1) create a service layer to abstract away the dependance on the DAL. In a situation as you describe having a layer of indirection for the UI and BLL to rely on makes DB changes much safer.
2) Create automated tests (both unit and integration), especially if you plan on making fairly significant changes to the Domain or Persistance layers (BLL/DAL). To make this really easy you should always try to program to an interface. This makes your code more flexible as well as letting you use mocking frameworks (Moq is one I like) to ensure your tests truely are unit tests and not integration tests.
3) Take a look at DDD (http://domaindrivendesign.org/) as it seems to fit pretty well with the given scenario. At the very least there are some very useful patterns that can help make your application more flexible.
4) MVC isnt very hard to learn at all, it is however an easy way to get unit testing setup for the UI as a result of the MVC architecture (testing the controller and not the view). That said, there is no reason you couldn't unit test web forms, its just a bit more work. MVC really is just a UI framework/design pattern (more Model2 but we can ignore that for now). It gets you closer to the metal so to speak as you will be writting a lot more HTML and using a Model (the 'M') for passing data around.
For DDD take a look at Eric Evans book: http://www.amazon.com/Domain-Driven-Design-Tackling-Complexity-Software/dp/0321125215/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317333430&sr=1-1
Hope that helps
ASP.NEt forms is a no starter, is completely inappropriate for something like this. I recommend to start with something like Creating an OData API for StackOverflow including XML and JSON in 30 minutes, then build your Web app on top of that (ie. push it to the client, use JQuery/Silverlight).
I have a java server side project which contains JAX-WS web-services (using JavaEE 6 and the #WebService annotation).
Is there some kind of plugin that would allow me to generate Flex client stubs during my maven build ?
I have taken a look at enunciate, but it seems to generate only AMF client.
I've also tried to look at GraniteDS, but their doc seems a little opaque to me.
Notice my Flex project is compiled using flexmojos, which contains a flexmojos:generate mojo that should be able to generate domain object (however I don't understand how to say it to use domain classes from ANOTHER project, and not from a different folder).
So, is there any maven plugin that would allow the kind of feature described in this Adobe page ?
Well most solutions use the WebServices WSDL description and generate stuff from that.
I documented this process in my Wiki. Don't be confused about the CXF Part, just have a look at the "Seting Flex up as Web Service client" part. When I did this, I used the code generation features of Flash Builder to generate the code and to work with that code.
I know this is not the cleanest way to do it, but it worked then (about 2 Years ago). Things like wsld2as weren't available then ... perhaps you should have a look at that.
Let me start off by stating that I am a novice developer, so please excuse the elementary nature of my question(s).
I am currently working on a Flex Application, and am getting more and more confused about when to use server side scripting, and when to develop web services. For most of the functionality I am working on, I am taking various files from the user (client), uploading to the server for processing/conversion, then sending back to client in new format.
I am accomplishing most of this using asp.net generic handlers (ashx) files, but not very confident this is best practice. But at the same time, does making web services make any more sense? What would be considered best practice for this? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
The way I look at it is as follows:
Web Services mean Established Best Practice.
For most of our development, we don't need to create "Web Services", or what I'm thinking when I think REST, SOAP, and the Twitter API. You only need to start doing that once you've got something you're going to be using every day for years.
Clean and DRY code will Lead you to Creating a Web Service
If you spend the time to clearly define the parts of your upload-process-render Architecture, and you find that it can be applied to almost everything you are doing, then all you need to do to make it a Web Service is define a clear, 1-2-3 set of rules for using the system (GET/POST data, etc.). As long as you are consciously building an architecture the whole way, you'll end up creating a Web Service if it's worthy. Otherwise there's no need.
It sounds like you have a clear workflow going, I don't know anything about asp.net though.
As far as it being confusing sometimes, and best practices, I suggest the following:
Create a Flex Library Project for your "generic ashx file handling" Flex classes. Give it a cool, simple name.
Create a .NET Library Project that encapsulates all the logic for your server-side file processing. Host it online and make it open source. I recommend github. Test it as you go, and document it, its purpose and the theory behind it.
If you don't have to do anymore work at this point, and it's just plug and chug, then you've probably arrived at something that might become a Web Service, though that's probably a few years down the road.
I don't think you should try to create a Web Service right off the bat. Just make some clean and reusable code, make a few examples, get it online and open source, have others contribute and give feedback, and if it solves a specific problem, then make it a web service. You can just use REST for now probably, and build your system around that. RestfulX is a great library for that.
Best,
Lance
making web services without any sense make no sense ;)
Now in the world of FLEX as3 with flash version 10, you can easily read local files, modify them with whatever modifcation algorithm and save local files without pinging server.
You only have to use webservices if you want to get some server data or to send some data to server. that's all.
RSTanvir
Flash / Flex uses a simple HTTP POST approach for file uploads, so trying to do that using SOAP web services will be problematic. Your approach of using ASHX here sounds reasonable to me.
To send / receive data that isn't file based (e.g. a list of files the user has uploaded previously), I would recommend looking at the open source Fluorine FX library. Fluorine uses AMF which is a highly performant way of doing data transfer with Flash. It's also purely configuration-based, which means you don't need to code against any of its APIs, just configure Fluorine to expose your .NET service classes. You could easily add attributes to those same classes to expose them as SOAP web services via WCF if you need that in the future. I would not recommend using SOAP with Flex however, due to the performance losses and also because the Flex implementation of SOAP has a history of bugs and interoperability problems.