Thursday, March 22, 2007

Adobe Flex and Oracle

A few weeks ago I tried to run the sample Adobe Flex application on an Oracle Application Server (Fusion Middleware) and an Oracle Database.

It's not that difficult to get it running. I got a hint of Marc M. which parameters I should use in the startup of my oc4j and from that moment it worked really nice.

You should start the oc4j as:

"%JAVA_HOME%\bin\java" %JVMARGS% -Xmx1024m -Doc4j.jmx.security.proxy.off=true -jar "%OC4J_JAR%" -userThreads %CMDARGS%

What did I use and why? (my configuration):

  1. Oracle Database 10gR2 - data
  2. Oracle Application Server 10g (stand-alone - 10.1.3.1) - hosting app and monitoring
  3. Adobe Flex Data Services - binding with data
  4. Adobe Flex Builder (with sample apps) - building Flex app
  5. JDeveloper (10.1.3.1) - deploying app

A screenshot to show you the proof ;-)

12 comments:

  1. If there's one person who can bring Adobe and Oracle together, it will be Marc M.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I played with Flex a couple weeks ago, seeing how it could be integrated with Application Express.

    I was able to embed a nice scrolling grid in an Apex page. Instead of using the Flex data services, I fed the grid from an Apex On Demand process that returned XML.

    I was able to use their javascript bridge code to exchange values between Flex controls and Apex text items.

    I will be doing some more experiments when I get some time. It looks like a nice way to add some fancy GUI widgets to Apex.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes dccase!!
    Same here, and some more ;-)

    You may contact me by mail so we can have a little discussion about it, if you wish.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I've pondering integration of Flex Builder + APEX for about 3 months. The quality of GUI components that can be built using Flex is amazing; it kicks the crap out of HTML controls. And it adds "out of the box" client side features that are not trivial to implement with JS.

    Flex traffics in XML data so you need to have an on-demand process to disgorge XML. In regards to APEX this is a good and bad thing.

    Good: Oracle XML DB is already available to you with App Express. So the database can be configured to help you a lot.

    Not so good: As dcccase points out, you have to do all the data binding between Flex and the HTML items on your own. This is kind of a drag.

    In my office, I had to ask myself what is having a 5-star GUI worth when building business apps?

    For public-facing stuff it is worth it. For stuff that is all in-house, I opt for "out of the box" APEX html front ends.

    Oracle Apex Forum Handle: danusgov

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  5. Hi Danus,

    Thanks for your comment! Interesting.

    From the beginning of the year I'm a bit playing with Flex and also the integration with Oracle.

    You'll see something about that in a next post ;-)

    Dimitri

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  6. Hi Dimitri, since you seem to be a proponent of integrating Oracle's application express and Adobe Flex, I was wondering if you could state the advantages of doing this as opposed to running a Flex application directly through OC4j (as you've seem to have done already) or integrating with Oracle portal. Also, for integrating apex and flex, could you point me to some relevant docs. Thanks

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  7. Hi AK,

    I'm currently in the States, but I'll come back to that one soon...
    I didn't put it on my blog yet, but it should be available at the end of July.

    Dimitri

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  8. Hii please provide all the code with screen shots for integrating Adobe Flex in Oracle Appliction Express.

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  9. May I ask you who you are?

    You can drop me a mail at dgielis@gmail.com

    Dimitri

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  10. Hello,

    I am looking ways to integrate Flex Dashboard with Oracle Portal.

    Could someone provide some insight?

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hi, i work with Adobe Flex and Oracle. I have a problem, when i send a datagrid to oracle procedure! How can i make this, save a datagrid in a oracle DB??? Thanks.
    Pedro Robalinho
    probalinho@gmail.com

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  12. Hi Dimitri:
    Was googling to find hints on integrating Flex with Apex and ran across this blog entry from 2007. Did you ever publish a step-by-step?
    --
    I'm can't noodle thru the details. Flex creates a swf that must be uploaded to the APEX Static Files under the Shared Components for an application.
    --
    But Flex also generates a bunch of <-script-> code and a few other miscellaneous files needed to test Flash versions, etc.
    --
    So I am stuck trying to decide where to put the generated <-script-> code and how to point the code to the APEX Static Files directory to find the swf file.
    --
    Looking forward to a blog post to push us in the right direction.
    --
    Thx!

    ReplyDelete