1. What is Granite Data Services
Overview
Granite Data Services (GraniteDS or GDS) is a free, open source, LGPL'd alternative to Adobe® LiveCycle® (Flex™ 2+) Data Services for Java EE application servers.
It is not, however, a drop-in replacement; you will not be able to simply deploy a LiveCycle Data Services application into a GraniteDS server without modifications. The main goal of this project is to provide a framework for Flex 2/EJB 3/Spring/Seam/Guice/POJO application development with full AMF3/RemoteObject benefits.
It implements service factories required for:
- EJB 3 (session beans that return entity beans),
- Seam (with identity security and conversation support),
- Spring (with Acegi or Spring security and entity beans support),
- Guice/Warp (with entity beans support),
- Simple Java™ classes (aka POJO) interactions.
Here is an architecture schema overview:
It also features:
- Gravity: A Comet-like data push implementation with AMF3 data polling over HTTP (producer/consumer) and JMS interation.
- Tide: A data management service providing services similar to Flex Data Services, such as client entity caching, collection paging, and transparent lazy loading.
- Gas3: An ActionScript3 code generator that may be run as a standalone Ant task, as an Eclipse Ant plugin, or even as an Eclipse builder plugin.
- Web Compiler: A servlet that compiles your MXML/ActionScript3 code at runtime.
GDS is designed to be lightweight, robust, fast, and highly configurable.
