What is Flex?

Adobe® Flex is a cross-platform development framework for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs). Flex enables you to build expressive, high-performance applications that run identically on all major browsers and operating systems using the .SWF file format in Flash Player 9 and .AIR file format in Adobe® AIR™ (Adobe’s new integrated runtime application).

What is FileMaker?

FileMaker® is a client-server relational database platform for building business productivity applications in a fraction of the time it would take to write the software in more formal computer languages. It is cross-platform (Mac OS X and Windows), provides interfaces to SQL-based systems, and offers an XML API for Custom Web Publishing.

Connecting to Data

Flex applications do not directly connect to databases; instead, they work with Web services to pass information to and from a data back-end. In the examples provided in the Adobe® Flex 2 documentation, the Flex HTTPService component is used to retrieve data from an XML file that is generated by PHP. FileMaker Server behaves very much like a Web service, but unfortunately the syntax of the FileMaker Server API is not compatible with the HTTPService component.

FlexFM class

To solve this problem and allow Flex applications to connect to the FileMaker Server Web Publishing Engine, Soliant Consulting has created a simple open source ActionScript class which can drive commands/queries to FMS and parse the results. Once data has been retrieved by the FlexFM class, it is available to all Flex objects as any other data retrieved through a Web service.

About Soliant

FlexFM is an open source project sponsored by Soliant Consulting.