Flex for .NET, some news.
Macromedia's Sean Neville has an interesting post on the Flex list
The .NET version of the AMF gateway supports ADO.NET data marshaling, and
the web service proxy supports data set marshaling through SOAP, but perhaps
more important than the underlying mechanisms is general support for the
pattern language, as it is philosophically different from Java.
A Java enterprise developer, if he adheres to patterns and best practices
for his platform, typically tackles a problem by sketching a domain model
based on the requirements, breaking that domain model into sequences and
class hierarchies (this is called the dominant decomposition), and then
dealing with issues such as security, distribution, and persistence as
aspects of that domain model. A .NET developer, on the other hand, typically
tackles the same sort of problem by sketching a data model rather than a
domain model first, and creating hierarchies of data objects rather than
domain objects. Rather than creating a pure OO model to which O/R tools,
CMP, Hibernate, DAO's, Data Transfer Objects, etc. can be applied, the
typical .NET developer composes a data model to which objects, xml,
relational data, documents, etc. can be applied. It may seem a subtle
difference, or it may seem impure in OO terms to Java patterns purists, but
one of its strengths is that it is by and large a simple and extremely
flexible way of managing data across tiers. .NET has no CMP equivalent per
se, and escapes debates about JDO vs. EJB vs. Hibernate by simply making
data objects a top-level first class design element rather than an aspect of
a domain model.
I'm not espousing one approach over the other, merely pointing out that
there are architectural differences in the way data is typically managed on
the two platforms and that we're addressing it in Flex as well. At a
practical level, this means support for ADO.NET-style data binding and
first-class handling of ADO.NET data sets
Would be interested to hear folks thoughts?