Granite Data Services (Free, Open Source, Flex & J2EE)

Granite Data Services (GDS) is a free, open source (LGPL'd), alternative to Adobe® LiveCycle® (Flex™ 2+) Data Services for J2EE application servers. It is not, however, a drop-in replacement: you won't be able to simply deploy a LiveCycle Data Services application into a Granite Data Services server without modifications. The main goal of this project is to provide a framework for Flex 2/EJB3/Spring/Seam/Guice/Pojo application development with full AMF3/RemoteObject benefits.

It implements service factories required for:

EJB3 (Session Beans that return Entity Beans),
Seam (with Identity security & Conversation/Task support),
Spring (with Acegi security & Entity Beans support),
Guice/Warp (with Entity Beans support),
Simple Java classes (aka POJO) interactions.

Since 1.0 version, Granite Data Services also provides a data push feature based on a Comet-like implementation with AMF3 data polling over HTTP (producer/consumer).

GDS is designed to be lightweight, robust, fast and highly configurable.

See more in documentation.

Main Features (stable, experimental or planned)

GDS is in constant evolution and those features are only informative.

(stable) Full AMF3 support. See GDS AMF3 documentation.
(stable) EJB3 services with transparent externalization mechanism and lazy initialized ActionScript 3 beans (Entity Beans / Hibernate). See EJB3 Services and Externalizers and Lazy Initialization.
(stable) EJB3 Entity Bean to ActionScript 3 classes code generator. See AS3 Generation.
(stable) Spring/Acegi security services. See documentation on Spring Services.
(stable) POJO services (remote calls to simple Java classes that expose public methods). See Pojo Services.
(experimental) Data push. A Comet-like implementation with AMF3 data polling over HTTP (consumer/producer based architecture). See documentation on Data Push (Gravity)
(experimental) Seam integration: a reliable GDS/Seam integration with full scopes (at least conversation) support. See documentation on Seam Services.
(experimental) Guice/Warp integration: a reliable GDS/Guice integration with Wideplay Warp persistence support. See documentation on Guice Services.
(planned) Entity repository: a client side entity repository that ensures uniqueness (only one instance of each entity is present in the flash VM), weakness (only currently bound objects are kept in memory), and that acts as a services frontend (all server calls/events are managed by this central component). This will be loosely inspired by Cairngorm.
(planned) A set of Flex components suitable for complex data structures.

Live GDS/EJB3 Demo

View a live demo here. This very basic sample application uses a JBoss4/Hibernate/MySQL environment with this model:

Person 1->n Contact n->1 Address n->1 Country

You may view (user:user) and create/modify/delete (admin:admin) persons or contacts with this demo, and search for person's first or last name. After reviewing this sample application, you may download graniteds-ejb3-1.0.0.zip or browse SVN repository.

Links

Granite DS

Related Resources

Related Projects