ColdBox Beta 2: Flex/AIR Integration

Well, my secret project is out of the bag today. I have been working in embedding a remote proxy into ColdBox in order to enable remote applications like Flex and AIR to communicate with ColdBox and provide an event model for our model. If that makes sense!! Well, so what do we get? This feature lets you create an event driven model that can easily be called from any flex/air application. Not only that, but you can reinitialize the entire application, get settings, and yes, announce custom or core interceptions. You can create custom interceptor chains for your model that can be executed asynchronously when a user hits a save record button for example. The possibilities are endless.

Not only that, but this enables you to actually create two front ends using the same reusable ColdBox and model code. The code is the same, you create event handlers, you interact with a request collection, with core and custom plugins, but you don't set views or layouts because the framework is now a remote framework for your model. So what do you do, well, return data, arrays, xml, value objects. Anything, right from withing the event handlers.

As you can see from my event above, my event is called "getIntroArrays", which uses a plugin to do some logging and return an array to flex. So simple, what is even better is the following:

What is this? Well, the event context object now has a new method called: "isProxyRequest()" which let's you know that the ColdBox proxy is executing the event. With this you can run alternate code or eliminate presentation. WOW!! That simple!!

What is even more impressive is that your coldboxproxy component is actually an inherited proxy. So you can override the proxy or customize it according to your needs. You can intercept proxy calls, create your own custom proxy methods and tap into the framework as you see fit!! You have the flexibility to do so.

Here is a sample flex code setting up the RemoteObject

Here is a sample of the call:

As you can see, you call the process method with the event you want to execute. If you would like to pass in a whole bunch of params then you do the following:

And there you go, you send in the params and execute the event. Well, I hope this is a good teaser of what you will be getting in beta 2 of ColdBox 2.5.0. The requirements for having a Flex/Air enabled application are very minimal, just by simple returning results from your handlers and setting a hard coded AppMapping variable, so coldbox can parse your application.

I will be posting much more on this topic as beta 2 time arises. Ohh by the way, the code is in SVN with a full Flex/ColdBox application. Enjoy!!