I have decided to stop development on anvil flex. It had a good 2 year run, but it’s sorely out of date. Mostly it has been replaced by other frameworks. Flex has made dramatic changes in the past several years and made a lot of anvil out of date. The Spring BlazeDS project provides much better back-end support and integration. On the Flex side the biggest downside is most of the data is passed using custom events. Today I would rewrite this using something like Swiz.
It has been really interesting developing anvil flex and I have learned a lot. Probably the biggest lesson is how hard it is to keep an open source project up to date. It gives you a much deeper appreciation for major open source projects and the amount of commitment it takes.
Some parts of anvil flex are still useful. It allows dynamically loading and managing modules. It also has a unique portal framework. The code will remain available on sourceforge and provides some good sample projects.
admin flex
I have been working with transactional databases for a long time, so I was very sceptical about Amazon SimpleDB at first. The most obvious short coming is that it is non-transactional. It also uses what Amazon calls “eventual consistency”, that is multiple copies of the data are stored in different places so it takes time for the data to propagate to all storage locations. That means the data will eventually be consistent, but an immediate read might not show the change. This could lead to the classic database problem of dirty reads. This obviously will not work for any application requiring data consistency; the ACID properties of traditional databases.
Where I think SimpleDB could be useful is that it more easily maps into an object model. This could be ideal for developing rapid prototypes. I have developed countless applications that where a proof of concept and just need a basic data store. Often in these cases it would be nice to not have to worry about mapping the data to a relational data model; the impedance mismatch problem.
To test the service out I built a simple GWT client for administering SimpleDB. Using the Java library it was very easy to create new data models and query a domain. The main problem I did see was the speed of access. Basic operations like deleting a domain took several seconds. This obviously would not work for production systems.
Overall I would say for the right applications SimpleDB could be beneficial.
Ryan Knight Cloud Hosting, Databases Cloud Hosting, Database, SimpleDB
Ohloh is a really great site with interesting metrics on open source projects. Here is the link to Anvil Flex. It is interesting to look at the analytics, but not sure how where the 67,000 lines of XML come from. I would believe the 20,000 lines of Action Script though!
Ryan Knight flex anvil flex
