Boston Area
Flash/Flex-Related
User Groups:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exploring Your New Flex Data Services (FDS) Server

By Douglas McCarroll, October 14, 2006

Consisting of a few quick notes on things you can explore with your brand-spanking-new (or whatever) FDS server...

Note:

Take A Look At [Server_Root]

Here's how mine looks in Windows Explorer:

Each subfolder within [Server_Root] is a webApp. The flex, flex-admin, and samples webApps were installed by FDS.

I've expanded the flex webApp. What's this?

The Flex WebApp Template

Let's explore. Open the Tomcat Web Application Manager (TWAM): http://localhost/manager/html

You might as well bookmark it. You'll be coming back often.

You'll see a list of applications. Click on the /flex link in the first column. You'll see "This is an empty Flex Data Services application that serves as a template for creating your custom application."

That's pretty straightforward. I suggest that you go back to your file viewer and explore the subfolders and files within the [Server_Root]/flex/ folder. I'm not going to attempt to go into these in detail now. Suffice to say that we'll need to be familiar with these files and folders as we continue to work with FDS.

The Flex Admin App

Next, go back to TWAM and click on the /flex-admin link. You'll see something like this:

Interesting!

Obviously, this RIA gives us a look under the hood at what is happening in FDS. I'm not going to attempt to explain what this shows - it's outside the scope of this article. (Translation: I haven't figured that out yet myself.)

What is clear, however, is that we'll be able to refer back to this tool as we read the FDS docs and come across terms like "destination", "endpoint" and "message broker", and see these concepts applied in real time.