Is it just me or is GraniteDS just too complicated? I'm an expert using FMS Flash Media Server and I understand BlazeDS but Granite Data Services is beyond plug-n-play. First, what is the stack and why is it hard to figure out? Tide, EJB, Gravity, Pojo, Seam, Spring, Guice, etc..

I have Glassfish v3 installed on my Windows PC along with MySQL and I want to create a Flex 3 application that uses GraniteDS 2.0.x with consumer and publisher, possibly along with Cairngorm Enterprise and no, I do not want an example, I want steps. I'm using Eclipse with Flex 3 plugin, and I don't want to use Maven or Gas3.

1. How do I get GDS installed on the Glassfish server so that I have a gateway (http://xxxxxx/graniteamf/amf), what files, how and where to put them, etc.. 2. Do I use Gravity? Tide? EJB? etc.. 3. What are all of the configuration pieces and minimum params?

I'll take anything I can get to work locally that touches GDS for real time data services with push. I've read everything I can online including the GDS web site and can not find a clear concise simple step by step tutorial or documentation. And if I ever figure it out I will certainly write a tutorial for my blog; sadly it'll be the only clear tutorial available.

So if anyone can tell, show, or point me to the right location, thank you. And I have to warn you, for over 2 weeks now I have tried everything I can find with no success. Please help.

We know that our documentation is far from perfect and one of the main goals of the 2.1 release is to improve it, so any feedback is welcome. In particular we are going to add a few Getting Started tutorials for common use cases. Anyway the user forums at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/graniteds/ is a good place to go if you need such information.

Basically what you have to do is :
- Put granite.jar in your WEB-INF/lib or ear/lib.
- Add the GDS messaging servlet in web.xml. If you have already downloaded the distribution, have a look in examples/graniteds_chat/resources/WEB-INF/servlet3-web.xml.
- Define your messaging destination in WEB-INF/flex/services-config.xml (it's the standard Flex configuration) and additional configuration in WEB-INF/granite/granite-config.xml (both config files can be copied from the graniteds_chat example).
- Compile your Flex code with the granite.swc library and use org.granite.gravity.Consumer/Producer instead of standard Flex Consumer.

Hope this helps.