Comments on: Grails Flex Integration, version 1.0

By: Sébastien

Sébastien — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:22:22 +0000

I’ve tried that before. Unfortunately, it seems that hooking Flex build into Grails is cumbersome at best, not a very good idea at the very least. Flash Builder 4 really makes a difference in terms of productivity and it makes even more sense to me now to develop your Grails server and your Flex applications as separate projects, and treat your Flex client as a simple SWF from a Grails standpoint. That said, if you manage to hook Flex ant tasks into Grails build with Gant, it will certainly be an excellent alternative for people who don’t want to use Flash Builder.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:14:03 +0000

Hello Sebastien,
I am very interested in the flex (especially flex builder) with grails integration.
Unfortunately I am more familiar with grails than with flex.
Is it possible to start the flex build process (i.e. the compilation) from the command line?
In this case one could utilize the grails build event mechanism to invoke the flex compilation.
That is you could add a file called “_Events.groovy” into grails’ script directory that contains something like this:

eventCompileStart = {
// This closure is called when compilation starts.
// See http://grails.org/Scripting%20events for the documentation of scripting events
// here we could call the flex compilation process
// or define appropriate ant targets
}

By: Sébastien

Sébastien — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:21:36 +0000

I think we should stay pragmatic and not try to put too much stuff in here. I’m a big Maven fan, but it’s a whole different beast. I don’t think we should depend on it for the build to work. First let’s add Flex compilation to the Gant build, and then we can add it to the grails maven structure. In addition, from what I’ve read, the whole dependency mechanism will change in Grails 1.2, to be closer to what Maven does. The same for Jetty 7: do we need it for the Flex plugin to work?

The risk is that if we try to push too many things, it will fail like all other previous trials. So I’d rather keep it simple.

By: John

John — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:16:52 +0000

Oh right, and add jetty 7 to it out of the box?
http://blogs.webtide.com/athena/entry/asynchronous_blazeds_polling_with_jetty

By: John

John — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:04:33 +0000

While we are at it, couldn’t we get the whole stack working in flash builder nicely as well? Somebody picked this idea up already:
http://riadiscuss.jeffmaury.com/2008/09/maven-and-flex-builder-tutorial-part-i.html

Basically we would use Maven for group management, dependencies and all-at-once compilation, but could still work on flex/flash builder for ui design, code completion and debugging.

And yes, I’m willing to contribute.

By: Sébastien

Sébastien — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:02:05 +0000

The first reason is that most of the web applications I’m working on are applications, not websites. And web technologies like HTML, CSS and Javascript were never meant to build applications. Now I know that we’ve tinkered a lot in the past few years with all these Javascript/HTML generators like GWT, JSF, GSP and GrailsUI, but for me it’s just that: tinkering. And you still end up trying to do new stuff with old stuff behind the scenes, which I don’t find clean alone (let alone performant). Flex on the other hand is a natural fit for this kind of applications. You don’t need to worry about cross-browser issues (well… for the most part), you get a consistent user experience and the programming model is much much cleaner: in the end, my MXML and Actionscript get compiled to run on a very good VM and all is good. Now I’m not saying Flex is the silver bullet, but it sure is adapted to the kind of applications I’m dealing with right now (administration back-office), and I know it pretty well too. Plus, there are some very interesting things coming up in Flex 4 that make me think I was right to invest in that technology.

Now I’ve tried GrailsUI, but it’s still very limited. It offers an interesting component palette but that’s not enough to build up a whole presentation layer. I need something to happen when I click a button, and for that, I’m back to Javascript and links, right? I don’t like this way of doing things. I’ve been raised with event-driven stuff and controls and remoting, not with links, REST, div’s and JSON. And once again I know there are some Javascript alternatives that abstract those things up, but why use those layers of abstractions when you can program directly for a runtime that is available on 98% of machines?

But at the end of the day, it’s all about getting things done, so I’m for using the tools that you master the most. I’m not saying that Flex IS better, I’m just saying it SEEMS better to ME.

By: Wilson Ikeda

Wilson Ikeda — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:35:32 +0000

“…they have never been the best solution for me”

Hi, i started learning grails and i’m thinking in using flex for my next app frontend but i’m concerned about the deploy / performance of flex apps. Could you explain the cons that make you choose flex besides say grailsUI?

Thanks.

By: Jeremy Anderson

Jeremy Anderson — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:43:33 +0000

Very cool. I’m cloning this right now so I can look into this. I would love to help out where I can. I must say I’m rather impressed with how much easier integrating Flex with Java has been since the Spring BlazeDS integration stuff has been released.

By: Grails Flex Integration | Why? Nowhy! DFdou's Blog

Grails Flex Integration | Why? Nowhy! DFdou's Blog — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:07:55 +0000

[...] from http://sebastien-arbogast.com/2009/10/24/grails-flex-integration-version-1-0/. Ever since I discovered Grails, I’ve never stopped looking for the best way to make it work with [...]

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