Nov/090
Quick-Hit: Enunciate
In my most recent work project I was asked to develop a set of middle tier services to allow users to connect to commonly used pieces of data in the organization. As I gathered requirements from different developers that were hoping to utilize these services I found that my standard technology stack would not suffice for a number of reasons. First, the organization I was working with had very strict regulations on technologies which could be used. But most importantly, the vast majority of middle-tier web services I’ve done recently have provided data solely to Flex applications, but in this new project I had a number of different clients wanting to pull data.
I knew immediately that I wanted to write one set of web services but allow access to it via a couple of different gateways: AMF and SOAP. I started by asking around to numerous guys I know to see if they recommended anything that would make the SOAP gateway as easy as possible to write. One article that my coworker Andrew sent me pointed me in the direction of Enunciate.
As I sifted through all of the information in the site, I thought, there’s no way they can provide this much functionality for free, but I have to say, it’s pretty awesome. So what does enunciate do? Well enunciate allows you the ability to write the interfaces and implementations of your web services, add a few choice annotations, and Encunciate will configure all of your SOAP, REST, as well as AMF endpoints. Enunciate does all this via an xml based build script which fits in nicely with both ANT and Maven.
Along with all of the service configurations, Enunciate will also export libraries that different client apps can use to connect to your middle tiers. Enunciate will export a Flash library, Objective C (for you iPhone developers), as well as numerous others. I have not been able to use the swc in my eclipse workspace, but I’ve started exporting the source and modifying it as needed.
Another feature that’s really nice about it enunciate, is that it automatically generates all of the documentation for your web services. It gives detailed information about what is available via REST and SOAP. The AMF documentation is not as detailed as SOAP or REST, which is a little disappointing.
All-in-all this tool has blown my expectations away. My proof of concept was completed in no time at all. I plan to do a full how-to blog entry on Enunciate before the end of the year.