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:
- This article is a work in progress - a gathering place for my notes. I'll announce it on my blog if/when I consider it worthy... :-)
- This article assumes that you have at least a servlet container (e.g. Tomcat, JRun) and FDS installed. Here's an article on how I did this with Tomcat on a Windows machine.
- The URLs that I provide assume that you're currently on the server. If not, replace "localhost" with the server's IP address or URL (e.g. "http://server_name.domain_name.com")
- I use the string [Server_Root] to refer to the servlet container's root folder. (On my machine this is at C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 5.5\webapps\
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.