Professional BlazeDS: Creating Rich Internet Applications with Flex® and Java®

7.8. Managed Entities for Flex Applications

So far, the integration discussion has hovered around persistent objects transmission across the layers. Effective proxy management and lazy loading have been touted as the clear winning features. However, that may not be all that a complex business application desires. More often than not, what is required are managed data objects and entities.

Managed data sets are not new to Flex. LCDS supports them. A few open source Flex and Java projects also incorporate this idea in their approach to business problem solutions. However, there is still open debate on its applicability and its merits. Some in the community swear by it; others consider it an unnecessary overhead.

So, what exactly are managed entities and how do they differ from regular data access patterns in Flex? How can you include them in BlazeDS and where does JPA or Hibernate come in within this context? The answers to these questions is the content of this section.

Many a Flex application fetches a data collection from the server and allows CRUD operations on such a collection. In traditional hand-coded applications, each of the CRUD operations is passed down to the server and managed through custom service methods, which in turn call the persistence layer functions to make the modifications permanent. Sometimes, these service methods resort to invoking SQL statements on data stores and manipulating the result sets, which is certainly something that should be avoided in most ...