Myo's random rambling

I love Flex as good UI layer tool for all the good things it provided. However, sometimes, it just nagged you. Backend to my flex application is Java and flex apps talk to the backend via WebService powered by JAX-WS. Since I switched over from JAX-RPC webservice to JAX-WS, I have been getting the error that “Element not resolvable” only because Flex cannot interpret / digest the xsd:import. So, I get around with some ugly hack called Timer, but we all know this is not perfect especially on the slow day for the server. This seems to get fixed on Flex Hotfix2 that’s released recently; however it just introduces a lot other problem, at least seems to me. According to some postings from mailing lists, Flex team did re-write on the webservice portion of the framework. Now, a lot of my webservice methods are getting runtime exception with the hotfix2. One problem I see is, my backend replies with an empty array in one of the property. But flex couldn’t decode that properly and I’ve got fault thrown at with “Property undefined cannot be found on String object”. But it is fine if I request the response as “e4x”. It took me a while to really find out which property this is offending since there is no useful information in the error message and I couldn’t debug the Decoding process without much of the source code. So, hopefully when flex is fully open sourced, it would let me trace better. My project is near to the stabilization period so I couldn’t afford to retest or modify webservice to work with hotfix2. I will just have to modify my ugly fix to be more robust with slower server.

But I am looking forward to more stable and usable webservice support in wonderful Flex world. If you have any thoughts, better hack or work around, I really love to hear from you.