Integrated Adobe Flex and IBM WebSphere Portal

Introduction: With the idea of Rich Internet application (RIA), Adobe®flex takes you to a higher level of WEB application development, while Ibm®websphere®portal provides a composite tool to build flexible solutions based on SOA Decision plan. But how do you combine the two? One approach is to integrate Flex directly into the WebSphere Portal server. This article takes you through the process of quickly building a Flex application based on rich clients and components for the WebSphere Portal, and provides a useful way to reduce the size of the WAR file.

Prerequisite

This article is intended for the users of flex developers who want to integrate applications with WebSphere Portal. This article assumes that you are familiar with basic programming for Flex and Java™ programming. In addition, the relevant sections of this article also require you to have administrator privileges on the WebSphere Portal server. However, this article does not require you to be familiar with the programming or management of the WebSphere Portal.

To follow this article, you will need to install the following tools to ensure that the examples given in this article work well.

Adobe Flex builder-This article is programmed with Adobe Flex Builder 3. Of course, you can also write with the appropriate JDK and text editors, but the extra effort will be much more.

WebSphere Portal V6.0.1 or higher-if you are using the WebSphere Portal V6.0, you should upgrade your WebSphere Portal V6 environment.

IBM Rational Software Architecture v7.0.0

IBM DB2 Enterprise v9.1

Sample Application Overview

Let's take a quick look at the business requirements for this sample application called ToDoList. Many users want to be able to keep records for appointments, anniversaries, reminders, or other activities. They also want to be able to easily look up some of their future content items, create new content items, or delete any items when needed. Can we provide a flexible tool for their needs? In this article, we'll show you how to build this application in a way that most developers create applications and showcase the full development process.

Figure 1 below shows the underlying architecture for this sample application. Before building a real application with Adobe Flex and IBM WebSphere Portal, let's take a quick look at the technical aspects of the example. The entire application will be built in a WAR file, which includes the presentation layer and the Business Layer module, which are developed in different projects.

The top box represents a Flex project as a presentation layer, built by MXML and ActionScript, and the bottom box represents a Java project as a business layer, built by Java and JDBC. The flex application invokes the Java service through a remoteobject, RemoteObject is one of the remote Procedure call (RPC) components provided by Flex. Within this sample application, we will import blazeds to implement this remote object.

Figure 1. Basic architecture