We are planning to develop a Flex application that must make AMF calls to retrieve data from a secure server. However, we are not allowed to connect directly to that secure server with AMF. We can only make WSDL/SOAP or .net remoting calls to the secure server. Therefore, all instances of the flex application running on a client machine must connect to a single trusted server, which would then connect to the secure server.
These requirements are based on political reasons within the company and are not flexible (isn’t that always the case?)
In case the requirements are not clear, here is an example. When you access your checking account via your bank web site the web site downloads a flex/flash application to your web browser. This application shows you your accounts, transactions, balance, etc. However, your actual checking account details are stored on a secure database server at the bank that doesn’t accept inbound connections from clients. So, the flex application in your browser makes an AMF call to the banks web site, and it turns around can makes a WSDL/SOAP or .net remoting call to the database server. It gets the data and sends it back to the your browser via AMF.
Is there a “proxy” application we can run on the web server which will accept the AMF calls and turn around and make WSDL/SOAP or .net remoting calls to the secure server? Or do we have to write this by hand?
If you happen to be using asp.net in your web server you can use either FlourineFx (open source) or WebOrb (commercial) as your server.
Both options can be hosted in IIS or act as windows services.
You can then just drop your dotnet class libraries for connecting to your secure server within the the bin directories of the servers.