Grails, Flex, Soap

Today I have written a small PoC for Grails, Flex, SOAP. The initial task was (and still is) to find out which communication takes place in a Flex application.

Having no clue about Flex, a little understandig of Web Services and some minor understanding of Grails, it took me no more than 3 hours, including googling for web service usage in Flex and hunting of really stupid beginners bug.

This shows the real muscles of Grails and its really awesome plugin ecosystem.


grails create-app HelloFlex
cd HelloFlex
grails install-plugin flex
grails install-plugin xfire
grails create-service hello

Ok, everything needed is installed. 2 more things to do. in HelloFlex\services\HelloService.groovy:

class HelloService {
static expose=['xfire', 'flex-remoting']
def hello(String echo) { return echo.reverse() }
}


Note the use of expose: this service is both available via flex-remoting and via SOAP.

Second: create HelloFlex\web-app\test.mxml


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
<mx:WebService
id="userRequest"
wsdl="http://localhost:8080/HelloFlex/services/hello?wsdl">
<mx:operation name="hello" resultFormat="object"
fault="mx.controls.Alert.show(event.fault.faultString)"
result="showResult(event)"/>
</mx:WebService>
<mx:Script>
<![CDATA[
import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
import mx.rpc.events.FaultEvent;
import mx.controls.Alert;
[Bindable] private var passage:String;
private var options:Object = {"output-format": "plain-text"};
private function showResult(e:ResultEvent):void {
passage = userRequest.hello.lastResult;
}
private function send_data(input:String):void {
userRequest.hello(input);
}
]]>
</mx:Script>

<mx:Text text="Echo Service" fontSize="16" fontWeight="bold"/>
<mx:Text text="Input" fontSize="12"/>
<mx:TextInput id="lookupPsg" textAlign="center"/>
<mx:Button label="Submit" click="send_data(lookupPsg.text)"/>
<mx:TextArea height="352" width="590" id="psg" text="{passage}" editable="false" fontSize="11"/>
</mx:Application>

(sorry for the mess, dunno how to format this better )

Hitting http://localhost:8080/HelloFlex/test.mxml displays the Flex application which uses SOAP protocol to consume the webservice.

Built on the shoulder of giants...

Update 12th Jul: Marcel Overdijk has already written a similar (well, actually better:)) example back in january.