Flex RESTing with MySQL

Adobe Flex is the premier rich Internet application (RIA) technology in the marketplace. Because of Flex's toolset and support, you have many options for creating your next user interface (UI).

Like many coders, I get an idea for my next application and start feverishly coding it with eye-popping effects and graphics. After my coding fury has subsided, I realize that I need some mechanism to persist my data remotely. I hate spending a lot of time integrating my back-end databases: I know that data management is important, but it's time consuming and yet another learning curve to overcome. To shorten that learning curve, I am going to introduce you to a simple data service infrastructure to quickly get your Flex application up and running with its remote data store. By the end of the article, you'll have a good understanding of the following technologies:

* Configuring iBATIS, a lightweight data mapping framework, to communicate with a database
* Developing a Representational State Transfer (REST) resource that exposes a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Web service to a Flex client
* Configuring the Spring Framework, which is a lightweight Java container that can provide several important server features
* Utilizing the Flex data components to communicate with a RESTful Web service

This article assumes that you have a basic understanding of Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and the MySQL database. But the focus is to communicate a simple but comprehensive data service framework to quickly integrate with your Flex application. Figure 1 provides a high-level overview of the data service infrastructure that I am suggesting.