Finally, a Flamingo build with Android sup­port is out!

Flamingo aims to leverage server-​​side code when de­vel­oping apps for new media plat­forms. In this (Flamingo 2.1) re­lease, the fol­lowing fea­tures for Android have been implemented:

• Server com­po­nents call
• Conversation support
• Expression ser­vice (eval­u­ates el-​​expressions)
• Dynamic finders and updaters
• Validators
• Callsets

Server Components Call

Let’s look closely at the im­ple­men­ta­tion of one of these Android features…

One of the most ap­pealing Flamingo fea­tures is the dy­namic binding of client com­po­nents to the server side (for ex­ample, Sping beans or Seam com­po­nents). This frees de­vel­opers from rou­tine in­te­gra­tion tasks and al­lows them to con­cen­trate on the busi­ness logic.

Seam Component

Let’s take a look in more de­tail into how an Android client ap­pli­ca­tion can make a call to a Seam com­po­nent like this one.

TestDto.java

public class TestDto {
 
   private String value;
 
   public void setValue(String v ) {
      value  = v;
   }
 
   public String getValue() {
      return value;
   }
}

Test.java

public interface ITest {
   public static final String NAME="testService";
   public TestDto   echo(TestDto value);
}

TestService.java

@Name(Test.NAME)
public class TestService implements Test {
   public TestDto echo(TestDto value) {
      return value.setValue(“reply:”+value.getValue());
   }
}

Step 1: Server Configuration

As de­scribed in the documentation:

• Copy the re­quired Flamingo JAR files to the WEB-INF/lib directory
• Configure a Flamingo servlet in the web.xml file

Step 2: Client Configuration

The Android client com­mu­ni­cates with a server via HTTP(S), so an end-​​point has to be con­fig­ured be­fore any server-​​side calls are made:

String serverComponentURL = "http://hostname:8080/mywebapp/resource/hessian";
ServiceFactory.initialize(serverComponentURL);

Once an end-​​point is ini­tial­ized in the run-​​time, ServiceFactory takes care of binding client-​​side com­po­nents to their im­ple­men­ta­tions on the server side:

Test testService =ServiceFactory.getInstance().getService(Test.class,Test.NAME);

Step 3: The Server-​​Side Call

Once an end-​​point is ini­tial­ized in step 2, a call to the com­po­nent on the server can be made:

TestDto testValue = new TestDto();
testValue.setValue(“Some text value”);
testValue = testService.echo(testValue);

Please note that a JAR file with a de­f­i­n­i­tion of the Test in­ter­face should be in your Android classpath.

More to Flamingo

Flamingo is more than just the binding of ser­vices. It of­fers de­vel­opers many more fea­tures like:

• Validators
• Dynamic finders and updaters
• Expressions
• Messaging
• Code gen­er­a­tion

Download the latest ver­sion of Flamingo, Exadel Flamingo 2.1.0, and see for yourself.

Tags: Android, Exadel Flamingo, mobile apps