The Mindful Coder

Code, yes. But think about it a little first.

WebOrb for .Net – Only viable Flex remoting solution for ASP.Net?

3 comments

WeborbdotNet

I have been exploring the best ways to enable remoting of a Flex / Papervision3D project we have been working on. My goals were to avoid XML based RPC communication as that would mean having to write XML-to-Object mappings on both the Flex and the ASP.Net end.

Several options emerged but in the end, WebOrb for .Net seemed to be the most endorsed and robust option. I think a lot of headache is pushed out of the way when you enable your Flex and ASP.Net teams to work with their own Object models without having to worry about a communication XML Schema. WebOrb also seems to be strongly endorsed by Adobe considering the remoting posts written by Adobe Engineers use WebOrb – at least for ASP.Net remoting. Of course if I was on a Java/J2EE backend, I would probably go for BlazeDS.

I work for a company that has built Flex applications from back in the day it was called Flash MX and we have always defined our own XML-based remoting mechanisms. In fact I think we built one of the first truly enterprise scale, fully Actionscript based applications when we put out IRIS Process Author.

The current project however – I can’t disclose the details as it would violate the NDA – will be our first project in which we take a different path – which will surely prove more efficient from the performance perspective, from the team separation perspective as well as the ease-of-use perspective.

I hope to write a series of posts on using WebOrb from the perspective of someone who has been used to doing things his own custom way before and is now using a standardized object-based remoting framework. I also hope to document any issues I come across that might prove helpful to others – especially considering I am on Windows 7 – uncharted territory for a lot of development tools.

If you know any other equally viable alternatives to WebOrb that I am not considering, please do let me know.

Written by The Fat Oracle

May 12th, 2009 at 11:35 am

Posted in .Net,Code,Flex,Remoting

Tagged with , , , ,

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  • http://justinjmoses.com.au Justin J. Moses

    There is also FluorineFx (http://fluorinefx.com/) which is Open Source flash remoting for .NET. Not nearly as feature full as WebORB, but an alternative none the less. Also, the open source aspect allows you to learn exactly what goes on under the hood – and tweak it if need be.

    Personally, I use WebORB these days – which is an incredible product. Nevertheless, I keep my eye on FluorineFx and compare it every new release or so.

    http://justinjmoses.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/we…

  • galtroarc

    Justin, you have summarized the comparison pretty well in that post. I did look at Fluorinefx but came away with the impression that while it was not as intuitive to use as WebOrb and also while as you point out both products could do with better documentation, WebOrb seemed to have better documentation and looked it was easier to adopt quickly. Also there seem to be more forums and developer blogs dealing with WebOrb than with Fuorinefx for now. This will prove important for practical purposes since given the limited documentation, the dev team will will be googling a lot.

    It would be very interesting to see how both products develop in the future.
    Thanksa lot for the input! :)

  • galtroarc

    Justin, you have summarized the comparison pretty well in that post. I did look at Fluorinefx but came away with the impression that it was not as intuitive to use as WebOrb and also while as you point out both products could do with better documentation, WebOrb seemed to have better documentation of the two and looked it was easier to adopt quickly. Also there seem to be more forums and developer blogs dealing with WebOrb than with Fuorinefx for now. This will prove important for practical purposes since given the limited documentation, the dev team will will be googling a lot. nnIt would be very interesting to see how both products develop in the future.nThanksa lot for the input! :)