After a hiatus during a paper/presentation/training season, I’ve finally gone back and cleaned up the Flash/Flex versions of Hessian and BAM. The Hessian side is now updated to be compatible with the latest Hessian 2 changes. As Scott mentioned, the BAM API and protocol has undergone some changes since the last revision, so I’ve rewritten the Flash implementation of that as well. It was a surprisingly large amount of work, but I think everything is now up-to-date as well as a bit more stable.

For those that are interested, here’s a quick hello world with the new BAM API with a Flash client and a Java backend…
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I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks writing presentations and articles, but in between those, I’ve managed to slip in a few hours to work on Hessian Flash. You may have noticed that there were some changes to Hessian in the last release (3.2.1) which are not compatible with earlier versions. The good news is that the changes make common cases really compact and fast as I found out when I ported the changes to Hessian Flash. Within a couple of weeks, we should have a usable version of Hessian Flash that’s compatible with the version of Hessian in Resin 3.2.1 and later.

As a brief respite from the training preparation, I spent yesterday fixing a slew of Hessian Flash/Flex bugs. Check out the changelog for more detailed information. This is the last snapshot that uses the old Hessian 2.0 draft spec, so you’ll need to upgrade your Java implementation for the next release/snapshot. As you might have noticed from reading the hessian-interest list, Scott’s been busy streamlining the Hessian protocol. While these changes have resulted in a number of efficiency improvements, they also break compatibility with older versions of Hessian. The next version of Hessian Flash/Flex will support this new version of the Hessian draft and only this version.

BTW, the new Hessian Flash/Flex supports the [RemoteClass] metadata, which does the same thing as the old hessianTypeName field, only better. Turns out that the Flash VM has support specifically to allow aliases for remoting. You can check out the feature request for more info.

I’ve got a couple of articles in the latest Flash & Flex Magazine about Hessian. You can even download one of them!

I’m submitting another article on using BAM with a Flash client that should hopefully be out later in the summer.

Last week I was working on our demo for JavaOne. It’s pretty much done, except for one small feature and I’m pretty excited about it. It uses our new HMTP (Hessian Messaging Transfer Protocol) to send messages back and forth between client and server. The demo itself is a Sudoku game where you play against another player on the same board. It requires both RPC style communication and messaging, both of which are natively supported by HMTP. Anyway, I’ll give a much more coherent explanation soon as I’m writing up a fact sheet and animation to show message flow today. We might be able to bring up the game live this week, so stay tuned for a link…

The demo is implemented in Flex 3 (open source :-)) using the AS3 implementation of Hessian and HMTP. I want to send a shout out to Riccardo Cohen who has been working with Hessian Flash. He was nice enough to write up a few tutorials to show how to use it with entity beans. Check it out here: Riccardo Cohen’s tutorials. Thanks, Riccardo!

I’m working on fixing some standing bugs on the Flash and Flex versions of Hessian this week. I’m pleasantly surprised at how many people are interested in this project and happy to get bug reports. People are comparing this project to BlazeDS, which I frankly haven’t had time to look at, but it seems that some people prefer Hessian.

Here’s a quote from user Koen Serry:

Since Hessian/Burlap are really a better alternative (on a flex client) for connecting to the backend than BlazeDS (which includes IMHO way too much dependencies as well as being not very developer friendly (eg. config file over convention)). Furthermore, hessian already proved itself on the numerous java fat clients.

If you’re using Hessian Flash or Flex, please let me know! I’m interested in seeing your applications, getting bug reports, or requests for certain kinds of documentation. Koen suggested a mail application example and I’d be eager to hear any other ideas people have.

Whoops… I didn’t get a chance to post my promised posts on the new features in 3.1.5 because I was working on fixing the formatting of the blog to look more like our new website. Although, that was only part of it — I’ve spent the last few days working on a couple of magazine articles about our Hessian and Comet offering for Flash and Flex. Now that that’s done (until they send back the edits… :-)), I’m working out the presentation for AjaxWorld…