Adobe Flex Builder 2 (EN) Mac, TLP Commercial 1500-14999 54021980TS User Manual

Adobe Flex 2

Portals facilitate the aggregation of web content and applications in an integrated user interface. 
While many portlets are rendered in HTML, developers can use Flex to render the user interface 
of portlets and greatly improve the user experience within a portal. In addition, using Flex Data 
Services, developers can integrate the Flex application with existing security profiles and 
business logic running in the portal environment or within other applications running at the 
server tier.

JSR 168 created a common method to expose web applications as portlets so that they can be easily 
aggregated into a portal. Much of the pain of aggregating disparate web applications lies in 
dealing with application state.  Flex applications avoid this pain because the state of a Flex 
application primarily lives on the client. This also simplifies the process of exposing Flex 
applications as remote portlets. 

To integrate Flex with a portal environment, developers will generally create a JSP, HTML, and/or 
Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) wrapper that includes the compiled Flex application. 
When the portlet is requested, the compiled Flex application is delivered to the user and included 
in the portal page. Either the Flex application can run as a small window within a page that 
contains multiple portlets, or it can be launched as a full-screen application once the user selects 
it from the navigation bar.

The original portlet spec (JSR 168) was primarily about aggregation, but it failed to address issues 
like interportlet communication, which becomes particularly relevant to rich client applications 
built with Flex or Ajax. While there are no issues with using the existing WSRP standard for 
remote Flex portlets or with using existing vendor-specific interportlet communication APIs inside 
Flex applications, JSR 286 was begun to standardize interportlet communication and to remedy 
other shortcomings of JSR 168. Adobe is participating in JSR 286 as an expert group member to 
help ensure better support for client-side state and asynchronous requests. 

For more information on using Flex in a portal environment, visit www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/
articles/flex_portals.html.

Flex applications can deliver a rich user interface for back-end systems implemented on Microsoft’s 
.NET platform. Since application clients built in Flex are server agnostic, they can communicate 
with web services or HTTP services built with ASP.NET or C# just as easily as they can with 
systems implemented in Java, ColdFusion, or other technologies.

Additionally, while Flex Data Services is implemented in Java, it can be deployed with a .NET 
environment. As illustrated in Figure 13, the destinations exposed by Flex Data Services can be 
composed from multiple services built in .NET technologies.