Flex Data Services and WebORB FAQ

Here's a set of questions from an email exchange I had with someone considering using WebORB to integrate Flex with .NET. The questions are great and some will find this information useful:

1. Q: Would I still need to use FDS to use WebORB?
   A: No, WebORB provides a full implementation of the functionality available in FDS.
   
   
2. Q: What kind of pricing structure will WebORB have?
   A: Great question! Currently we're still offering it for the same price as we always had ($799 or $899/CPU depending on the level of support). We will probably be introducing a new edition of WebORB (we're leaning towards WebORB Enterprise Edition) which will have all the Flex related functionality. The pricing of it will mostly depend on the pricing set for FDS.
   
   
3. Q: Will WebORB data services integrate with the Cairngorm serviceLocator?
   A: Currently we're shooting to have a full support for FDS (RPC, Data Management and Messaging). Any integration with other products and frameworks will be done in a future release.
   
   
4. Q: Will the Data Management Services include it's own, stand alone, security feature (users, roles, permissions) ?
   A: WebORB already has an excellent security model for securing exposed resources (.NET objects, web services, custom types). We will include support for security as FDS defines it as well.
   
   
5. Q: Does WebORB support AMF?
   A: Yes, WebORB supports both AMF0 and AMF3
   
   
6. Q: Will WebORB be able to return multi-table datasets to a Flex ArrayCollection?
   A: Yes. We already have it working and that functionality will be released in the next beta release (2.1 Beta 3)
   
   
7. Q: How difficult is it to deploy WebORB?
   A: The process is very straightforward. All you do is copy the weborb assembly into the /bin folder of your asp.net application. Modify web.config to register an http handler and you are done.
   
   
8. Q: Will the final release coincide with the Flex final release?
   A: That's the goal. We're working some enormous hours to get there sooner :)