Blog | Granite Data Services - Part 2

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News and Updates

Flex Connector 1.1 for Nuxeo Released With GraniteDS

By admin August 31st, 2011 GraniteDS No Comments

Nuxeo is a global leader in Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM), that enables architects and developers to easily build, deploy, and run state of the art applications. The Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (Nuxeo EP) is a Java-based content infrastructure designed to be used as a development environment for content- and case-based applications. Nuxeo EP is an extensible and configurable set of ECM services and modular plug-ins that allows an organization to build out specific horizontal or vertical applications.

Nuxeo has just version 1.1. of its Flex connector that lets Flex applications interact with Nuxeo using AMF, the binary format used to serialize ActionScript objects. The Nuxeo Flex Connector relies on GraniteDS to enable to easily read, search, create, update documents stored in Nuxeo, manage workflows and tasks, use conversion services, manage users and send notifications, etc. The following image highlights the integration:

To learn how to use the connector, please refer to the Wiki – . The Flex connector comes with several samples that will help you get started quickly.

So what’s up next? Nuxeos first goal is to update GraniteDS and the Flex SDK. The current implementation will have to be updated to the lastest 2.2 version of GraniteDS and all sample applications will be built on Flex4.

We are happy to see GraniteDS in use and look forward to powering the Nuxeo Flex applications!

Today’s Launch Of Our Enterprise Platform

By Franck July 18th, 2011 GraniteDS No Comments

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of the GraniteDS Enterprise Platform.

The Enterprise Platform of GraniteDS has been developed in response to the feedback we received in our many conversations with our users over the past weeks and months. Our team in Europe and the US conducted surveys, in depth interviews and spoke with as many GraniteDS users in person as possible. As a result, the release of the Enterprise Platform is the first step of many to come to make GraniteDS even more powerful and reliable for Flex / Java EE applications of any kind.

We are releasing the Enterprise Platform today as our recommended setup for projects using GraniteDS in production environments. The Enterprise Platform gives you:

  • An extensively QA tested and stable version of GraniteDS
  • Long term maintenance (5 years) with security updates and bugfixes
  • Flexible and affordable premium support or consulting with guaranteed quick response times

With the Enterprise Platform you will also get early access to new features that we plan to release soon like RTMP, extended mobile platform support, or out of the box clustering and integration with monitoring tools. For bundles and prices, check out our pricing page.

As a result, the GraniteDS Enterprise Platform enables developers and companies to leverage the full feature range of the open-source version of GraniteDS, along with a broad range of pre-packed enterprise-level services and full support for applications in development and production. This unique combination of features and services enables companies to leverage the full power of GraniteDS also in mission-critical applications through a highly stable, reliable and scalable distribution package.

Let us know what you think about this new offering! Please share your thoughts and comments with us at any time in the comments or via our ,  or our website.

Purchase the Enterprise Platform Now!

Review the pricing and choose your bundle here.

If you want to download and test a feature-reduced version of the Enterprise Platform (no clustering, no SSL, no technologies preview), check out the Community Platform that comes with pre-packaged real-time messaging native libraries (APR) and sample applications. Get it here.

Tudo Bem? Join us at FlexMania 2011 on July 8

By admin July 5th, 2011 GraniteDS No Comments

Thumbs up everybody, for some Rock and Roll!!!

This coming Friday, we will rock and roll with our great friends in Brazil. The conference has attracted over 4,000 developers last year and the crowd this year is expected to be even larger. It will take place from, 2011 and Franck has been invited to give a speech.

Why are we so excited about speaking at the conference? For a couple of reasons, actually.

First, Brazil has one of the most active Flex communities globally and GraniteDS enjoys a large user base in Brazil. This is great and we are excited to learn more about the community and get in touch with everyone via this conference. We are excited and a little proud to be among such a prestigious group of elite flexers!

Second, the Flex Mania conference is unique in that it provides developers from even the remotest areas access to state of the art speeches and presentations, as the entire conference will be held online via Adobe Connect. We think that’s great, in particular because it helps to grow the community in regions where long travel to expensive conferences would present a significant obstacle for many to actually participate. Therefore, a shout out to the awesome who is organizing this years event!

And finally, we are of course excited to announce some cool updates about GraniteDS. Franck will be giving a general overview of the GraniteDS platform and will highlight some of the new features in the 2.2 release (bean validation and big numbers on the Flex side) and some of the current developments (native support for the Android/iOS platforms). Also, Franck will show some highlights about the scalability of asynchronous servlets used in GraniteDS for real-time messaging.

Watch the conference live at and join Franck for his session on Friday, July 8 at 10am ET!

Granite Data Services 2.2.1 GA Released

By Franck June 14th, 2011 GraniteDS No Comments

GraniteDS 2.2.1 GA is a bug and security fixes release with one major new feature: Gravity is now natively supported with WebLogic 9.1+ servers.

The security fix relies on a new configuration option and prevents arbitrary Java class instantiations through malicious AMF3 requests. Continue Reading

GraniteDS Thrives as Flex Middleware in J2EE Environments

By admin May 25th, 2011 GraniteDS 2 Comments

Conversation-driven decisions have always been at the very core of how GraniteDS has been developed. Because of and with the help of our community GraniteDS has become one of the strongest and most powerful Flex / J2EE integration frameworks out there. So all of us have been looking forward to launching this year’s first user survey and we were simply blown away by the participation of our users. From several hundred selected users we invited to participate in the survey, a good 15% spend a good amount of time giving us very detailed feedback. Continue Reading

Meet us at Flash and the City 2011!

By admin May 12th, 2011 GraniteDS No Comments

The GraniteDS team will be present at the conference in New York City from June 9-12. We are looking forward to meeting you there! Please let us know if you would like to schedule a meeting with us or just stop by at our booth.

Please join us for a chat!

Franck Wolff presents GraniteDS at the New York Flex Meetup

By admin May 11th, 2011 GraniteDS 4 Comments

, the host of the New York Flex Meetup invited to speak to us about TLF and his open source library, and our own Franck Wolff, the creator of , to present at the event.

Watch the recorded video on ustream where Franck speaks about the history of GraniteDS and some of the latest, cutting edge features to expect very soon. Continue Reading

GraniteDS, Java EE 6 and Seam 3 at JAXLondon 2011

By William March 30th, 2011 GraniteDS 1 Comment

I really enjoy going to London for . I will be speaking about Flex and Java EE 6.The timing is very interesting because Java EE 6 is now really getting a lot of traction (don’t miss the sessions of the Java EE day) and the final Seam 3.0 is about to be released. I will be able to demonstrate some nice new stuff with Flex, GraniteDS and Seam 3.I’m also happy to speak just after the keynote of from Adobe who will certainly show lots of awesome Flash & Flex demos on various mobile platforms. If I can find enough time, I’ll try to also do a short demonstration of a multiscreen Flex/AIR application on an Android phone.

See you there !

GraniteDS Wizard (technology preview)

By Franck March 1st, 2011 GraniteDS 1 Comment

The new GraniteDS Wizard Plugin is intended to facilitate the creation of new GraniteDS project under Eclipse.

1. Quick setup and usage:

In order to install and use it, you need at least an Eclipse 3.4+ bundle and, preferably, if you want to benefit from all of its features, the folowing plugins:

  • FlashBuilder 4.
  • GraniteDS Builder 2.2.
  • JBoss Tools 3 (with at least the archives tool, see is you don’t know what it is about).

You will also need a JBoss 5.1 distribution, as the default template that comes the wizard targets this application server.

Once you have setup this environment, donwload the new GraniteDS Wizard plugin on Github and unzip it into your eclipse/plugins directory. Restart Eclipse and you should now be able to see a “GraniteDS�? section in the “New Project�? dialog when you select “File�? -> “New�? -> “Project…�? in your Eclipse menu:

Select “GraniteDS Projects�?, click on the “Next�? button and select the first available template in the next dialog:

Click again on the “Next�? button and you should now see a standard project creation dialog with a specific “Template variables�? section at the bottom:

Enter a project name, change the “JBoss installation directory�? to your JBoss installation directory, accept all other default options (or change them if you want) and click on “Finish�?.

You should now see a new Flex / JavaEE project, configured for both FlashBuilder and GraniteDS builder, and with a “.package�? file that automatically deploy the project in the choosen JBoss deployment directory.

Tip: unfortunatly, you should also have an error when the project is first build… This is FlashBuilder error (actually a known bug), complaining that it hasn’t been able to create the html templates. Just right click on the error and ask it to recreate the template files.

2. Under the hood, modifying the template:

Project templates in this GraniteDS wizard tool are mostly made of Groovy scripts. Go to your “eclipse/plugin/org.granite.wizard_1.0.0.alpha1/resources�? directory. You should see two subdirectories, “libs�? and “templates�?.

The “libs�? directory contains GraniteDS libraries that are referenced by templates (see below).

The “templates�? directory contains actual templates. There is only one template at this time, in a directory called “jboss�?. If you open this directory, you will see two files and one directory:

  • template.properties: this file contains the name and description of the template, as they appear in the second screenshot above. The “title�? property is the title of the third screenshot above. The last property (“controller�?) is for advanced use only, don’t change it!
  • bindings.groovy: this file defines variables that are displayed in the “Template variables�? section of the third screenshot and that will be used later for the actual project creation. You may modify the values in this file in order to get default values that fit your environment (in particular, you should change the “jbossDir�? value so it will be set by default to your JBoss installation directory). The good thing is that you may do this change without restarting Eclipse: template files are reloaded each time you run the wizard.
  • project: this directory contains all files and directories that the template is made of. As you can see, some directory names are enclosed between ${} characters: this means that their names will be resolved against the actual values of templates variables, as defined in the bindings.groovy file and adjusted in the third dialog shown above. Some other files are ending with a “.gsp�? extension: these are Groovy templates, similar to GraniteDS builder templates. Finally, you will even see files named “@libs!…“: these files will be resolved by copying GDS libraries found in the “resources/lib�? directory.

As you may now understand, this GraniteDS Wizard is completely generic and could be used in order to make projects that have nothing to do with GraniteDS: it is simply a general mecanism for displaying and editing variables before copying template files and directories.

Some more informations before a future proper documentation:

  • Binding variables use Groovy closures with dependencies: the jbossDeployDir value is { new File(jbossDir.value, “server/default/deploy�?) }, a closure that uses the value of the jbossDir variable. If you change the “JBoss installation directory�? in the interface, you will see the JBoss deploy directory value changing accordingly. This is similar to Flex bindings, when you write something like text=�?The value is {bindableVariable}�?.
  • If a file shoudn’t be generated for some configuration, you may throw a CancelFileGenerationException to prevent its generation (see the .flexProperties.gsp file for an example).
  • There are currently 4 types of supported UI controls: text input, checkbox, combobox and directory selection. The type of the variable must be set accordingly to String, Boolean, String (again) or File.
  • Input validation is made on the fly: use the “validation�? and “errorMessage�? attributes in the bindings.groovy file to set it up.
  • If you omit the “label�? attribute, the variable won’t be shown in the UI intterface.
  • You may disabled by default a variable in the UI interface if you set the “disabled�? attribute to false: this may be done with the “false�? literal, by a call to a method that returns a boolean value or even by a closure that uses another variable value (see bindings.groovy for examples).
  • You may create other templates by copying the “jboss�? one and changing whatever you want. Again, you don’t need to restart Eclipse in order to see your new template: just rerun the wizard, the new template will be displayed in the list shown in the second screenshot.

Don’t forget this is an alpha work: we will i mprove this JBoss template and provide other ones for different environments.

Maven archetypes updated with GDS 2.2 SP1

By William January 22nd, 2011 GraniteDS No Comments

Following the release of GraniteDS 2.2.0 SP1, we have updated the Maven archetypes (now version 1.0.0.RC2).

Unfortunately because of some weird behaviour of the Maven archetype plugin, it is now necessary to specify the archetype repository ‘central’ to be able to use the latest version : mvn archetype:generate
  -DarchetypeGroupId=org.graniteds.archetypes
  -DarchetypeArtifactId=graniteds-tide-spring-jpa-hibernate
  -DarchetypeVersion=1.0.0.RC2
  -DarchetypeRepository=central
  -DgroupId=com.myapp
  -DartifactId=example2
  -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT

There have been a few changes and fixes :

  • Upgrade to GDS 2.2 SP1
  • Upgrade to flexmojos 3.8 (so mvn flexmojos:flashbuilder should work)
  • Fixed bad default package name in Spring archetype
  • Changed Java compile options to 1.6

Update 25/01/2011 : seems the central archetype catalog is now up-to-date : mvn archetype:generate
 -DarchetypeGroupId=org.graniteds.archetypes
 -DarchetypeArtifactId=graniteds-tide-spring-jpa-hibernate
 -DgroupId=com.myapp
 -DartifactId=example2
 -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT

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