Advice on technology stack: Google App Engine, FLEX, GraniteDS (Tide), Java, Spring

Question

Friends,

Your technology stack is the rope that will save you or hang you. For a one man webservice startup - what kind of rope is this list?

Plattform: Google App Engine, Backend: Google App Engine Datastore, Servicelayer: Java, Frontend: Adobe Flex

Client/Service integration framework: GraniteDS, Client Application Framework: Tide (Part of the GraniteDS stack), Service Application Framework: Spring

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Ok, let me give you my context.

Flextras is right! Technology is mostly chosen because of knowledge/infrastructure ... This is how I ended up with the list given above:

First of all: FLEX appeals to me. It’s easy to build rich UIs and Adobe is pushing it in the direction Desktop, web and devices. Adobe marketing gives us the promise: ”Integrate with the other tools in the creative suite” and ”Deploy everywhere”. (Of course it’s too good to be true, but they seem to be on the right track.) So lets choose FLEX as our UI framework.

FLEX often must integrate with serverside technology. So what technology to choose for the service layer? I know PHP of old, but the dynamic, untyped feel of the language, just doesn’t feel right working side by side with flex.

Flex draws much of it’s inspiration from Java. And thinking in ActionScript and thinking in Java just feels right. (I’ve explored Scala but the tooling and best practices are not there yet for someone like me to adopt this great new language). I’ve chosen to learn java, hoping that it will make patterns and knowledge reusable between the server-side-programming and the client-side-programming.

The problem with java is it’s complexity and that it’s harder to deploy (for PHP you could easily deploy on a cheep webhotel). My idea is a test and I don’t want costs and servers (who does?). I want to focus on exploring my ideas. So I’m looking at Google App Engine who offers a free amount of Java quota for a startup web applications.

The problem with Google App engine is that it’s restrictive Sandbox model, and many frameworks doesn’t deploy as is.

I want a technology line that will work together with a minimum amount of hacking. And this is where I’m asking for your expertise, helping me choose the right frameworks for integrating FLEX with Java on the Google App engine.

I want to use strongly typed objects from server to client so I’m looking for an AMF solution. From what I can tell looking at forums BlazeDS needs hacking, Pimento/Cinnamon doesn’t work, Weborb or Adobe Livecykle aren’t free. GraniteDS however seams to be working on the Google app store without patching.

GraniteDS comes with a client framework called Tide that integrates with serverside technologies. But once again Google App Engine is a restrictive environment. Seam (which seams to integrate the best with Tide) seams to be a hack job on Google app engine. EJB3 or CDI is Java EE 6 technologies and not supported by Jetty (the servlet container powering Google App Engine). Spring seams like a viable candidate however.

The Google app engine dosen’t have a relational database, but has interfaced It’s new datastore behind the JPA interface that both Spring and Tide (GraniteDS) supports.

I’m not sure all this rambling makes any of us any the wiser.

What I’m asking is this: From FLEX to the Google App Store, what line of technologies gives me the least rope to hang myself with? Im suggesting Tide/GraniteDS/Java/Spring/JPA. But what do I know until I’ve tried it.

Answer 1

Given the vagueness of the question:

I'm using Flex/Cairgorme/Blazeds/JBossAS/Oracle Java EE together for a mission critical, high performance, scalable application. I would highly recommend this combo.