Flex in the Cloud
Cloud computing is really starting to come into its own. Technologies like Amazon’s EC3 and Google’s App Engine make the barrier of entry very low for developers to create scaleable applications and not concern themselves with the details of hardware and operating systems.
I’ve started playing around with getting a Flex application running on Google’s App engine and it’s pretty exciting. Murat Yener wrote up a very helpful pair of tutorials on getting simple XML messaging and BlazeDS to work with Google App Engine that helped me to get going. I got the XML stuff working without a hitch but there still seems to be some problems getting Blaze to integrate smoothly. There is a patch but even with that I was unable to get it working remotely. Things worked fine in my development environment but just not in the cloud.
Sekhar Ravinutala also has a very nice walkthrough of getting GAE to work with GraniteDS. I’m much more familar with Blaze personally so I’ll have some learning to do to work with GraniteDS. But this solution worked RIGHT out of the box. No problems (other than my own silly mistakes). Thanks a bunch Sekhar! I’ll probably be using this setup moving forward (unless BlazeDS comes together soon).
We also have Mark Piller from MidnightCoders at the Phoenix FlashPlatform User Group tonight. I’m looking forward to discussing the benefits of using their tool, WebORB in the GAE cloud. I understand that there is at least a patch to get it working on GAE.
And today I noticed that Cornel Creanga and collegues are hosting a lab at Max about deploying BlazeDS and LCDS in both EC2 and GAE. Not yet sure if I’m making it to Max this year but if I do I hope to make that part of my agenda!
I also wanted to note that when I started this research I was looking into the GAE SWF Project. I gotta say, THAT sure did make things confusing for me. I really don’t see what benefit you would have using this library . . . If somebody understands the benefits then please fill me in. It looks like the project is dead; the latest update is pretty old.
I’m looking forward to building on this platform!
Jason did you talk to Mark about WebOrb and GAE and if so do you have some info on how to set it up?
I did talk to him at length about that (and quite a few other things . . . he’s a darn groovy guy!). He’s got a post on the topic and it does run. Unfortunately since the GAE runs distributed across multiple processor units the free version of WebORB won’t work (you’re limited to a single processor), even just during development. His (very sensable) suggestion was to use the Amazon cloud when leveraging WebORB as your backend. That’s a technology I certainly plan to experiment more with (as well as force.com; salesforce’s similar offering) I’m sticking with GraniteDS + GAE for the moment.