Flex3 and Rest Webservices.

In our organization since we want leverage Oracle Bpel , i used Flex with Oracle Bpel Webserivces for creating Dashboards and other Rich Internet applications.

Recently i was developing REST webserivces for another project. it was very interesting...As we all know in flex3 we can only use the HTTP service for invoking a REST webservice.


The main reasons why i selected REST instead of BPEL to bind/post data on a flex page is

did not require an ws-security extensions..

did not require soap-header information..

am not willing to select an open source implementation for that project...


Tools required: Ganymede 3.4 and myclispse 7.5 installation (make sure it supports jsr311 implementation).

Framework: Jersey.

use case:

submit a form with firstname and last name and persist in a database

Step 1.


Create a POJO class ,annotate with @XmlRootElement


import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement;

@XmlRootElement
public class Employee{

private String firstName;
private String lastName;

public String getFirstName() {
return firstName;
}

public void setFirstName(String firstName) {
this.firstName = firstName;
}


public String getLastName() {
return lastName;
}

public void setLastName(String lastName) {
this.lastName = lastName;
}

}

Step 2.

Create a Resource class



package com.prem.restservices;

import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.DriverManager;
import java.sql.PreparedStatement;
import java.sql.ResultSet;
import java.sql.SQLException;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;


import javax.ws.rs.Consumes;
import javax.ws.rs.POST;
import javax.ws.rs.Path;
import javax.ws.rs.PathParam;
import javax.ws.rs.Produces;

import com.sun.jersey.spi.resource.Singleton;

@Produces("application/xml")
@Path("empdetails")
@Singleton
public class CustomersResource {


String jdbcURL = "jdbc:oracle:thin:@hostname:port:SID";
String user = "username";
String passwd = "password";


public Connection getConnection() throws SQLException{

Connection conn;
DriverManager.registerDriver(new oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver());
conn = DriverManager.getConnection(jdbcURL, user, passwd);
return conn;

}

public CustomersResource() {
}



@POST
@Path("add")
@Produces("text/plain")
@Consumes("application/xml")
public String addEmployee(Employee employee) {

Connection conn = null;
PreparedStatement pstmt = null;

try {


conn = getConnection();

//Insert Data in your Database

} catch (java.sql.SQLException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
System.out.println("Exception in ad Employee" +customer.toString());
}finally{
try{
//Release Resources

}catch(Exception e){
//log in exception
}
}

return "employee " + employee.getFirstName() + " added";
}



Flex Code

mx:Script
![CDATA[
private function send_data():void {
userRequest.send();
}
]]

mx:Form x="22" y="10" width="493"
mx:HBox
mx:Label text="FirstName"
mx:TextInput id="firstname"
mx:HBox
mx:HBox
mx:Label text="LastName"
mx:TextInput id="lastname"
mx:HBox
mx:Button label="Submit" click="send_data()"
mx:Form



mx:HTTPService id="userRequest" url="Webservice URL" contentType="application/xml" showBusyCursor="true" useProxy="false"
mx:request xmlns=""
employee
firstName{firstname.text}firstName
lastName{lastname.text}lastName
employee
mx:request
mx:HTTPService