Anil Channappa’s Blog

With the announcement of Flash Player 10.1 and Air 2 for Android, you can now deploy applications developed using Flex and AIR to your mobile device.

Christophe Coenraets has created a couple of interesting applications

1. Real-time trader desktop: This application uses the real-time data streaming in LCDS and Flex to simulate real time market updates and trading capabilities.
2. Employee Directory Application: Demonstrates using the offline storage, integration with the Phone, SMS, email etc.

These were Desktop based applications that were ported to run on the mobile device. The UI were only changed to make it easier for mobile users to use these applications.

The messaging infrastructure is extremely powerful allowing you to create very interesting data-push applications.

Check out these applications:

Using your phone as a Remote control: The phone acts as a remote control sending messages to manage a plane in an AIR application running.

How fast is Flash player for handling real-time data push applications? - This application demonstrates that you can receive as much as 2000 messages per second to a single client. You can do that with really low latencies.

Summary:

Real-time data push can be very powerful. How you use it is completely up to you. We recently released performance benchmark for LCDS. If you are developing data push application – this is a must read.

Using the new version of LCDS, we were able to push 400,000 messages per second with an average latency of less than 15 ms. We ran this for 5 days.

With the new version of LCDS, we have included a load test tool with the product. The load test tool is written in Java and allows you to simulate simultaneous Flash player instances.

LiveCycle data services 3.0 is finally available. Thanks for everyone who provided us valuable feedback and helped us improve the quality and usefulness of the product.

The major changes to this release compared to the previous (lCDS 2.6.1) are:

1. Model driven development of Flex applications – Fiber and the Flash Builder Modelling plugin improves the productivity of rapidly developing web applications.
2. Reliable Messaging – The client server communication just got much reliable, thus allowing application developers to focus on the application and less on their infrastructure
3. Throttling – One less thing to worry about infrastructure. Clients of all kinds use your server, throttling allow administrators and developers to control the server throughput. The adaptive throttling capability
4. Edge Server – For increased scalability and performance, LCDS 2.6.1 already supported NIO and RTMP(s), but LCDS had to be deployed in the DMZ, which obviously is not secure. The edge server, deployed in the DMZ,  is a smart proxy that allows you to host your LCDS server in your application tier. Also, it is totally free if you have a valid license for the LCDS server.
5. Load test harness: Similar to creating your unit test cases, java developers will now be able to simulate Flex clients in Java.

We have also simplified our documentation.

Download the trial or a free developer version to get started.

Check out this cool online game. This was show in MAX 2009 keynote. The game setup and administration is developed using LCDS and AIR ?

At MAX (Adobe Developer conference), we released beta 3 of LiveCycle Data Services ES2, the next version of LiveCycle Data Services. LiveCycle Data Services beta was publicly released on June 15, 2009. The following changes are included in the new beta:

• The modeler now supports a graphical display for associations between entities making it easier to define relationships
• The properties inspector UI has been completely redesigned based on user feedback.
• Model driven form can be customized to suit project specific needs
• The server now has support for Edge Server. Edge server is a RTMP and HTTP proxy over NIO. Edge server is deployed in the Demilitarized zone (DMZ) allowing you to securely deploy your business logic on the application tier.
• Added support for Flex SDK 3.4

These represent the key changes, and not meant to be a comprehensive list of changes.

Quick links to get these bits:

LCDS 3: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/

Flash Builder 4: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashbuilder4/

As usual Christophe has another cool demo using the latest bits of LCDS 3 and Flash Builder 4.

Let me know if have developed any interesting applications using our beta bits. Also, I am open to any feedback.

Anil

LCDS 3 beta

Flash Builder 4 beta

The bits used by Christophe are newer than you can find on labs. If you are interested in getting the latest and greatest, try these steps

I am pleased to announce that we have made the LCDS 3 beta available (require Flash Builder 4 Beta) for preview. There is a lot of new and interesting features, including the ability to develop flex applications from a model. We have provided seamless developer, deployment experience that should definitely improve developer’s productivity.

You can find more information on labs.adobe.com.

We have a couple of introductory videos that should help you get started. Some of the folks are putting together more videos that walks through specific features in more detail, but those will not be available until the end of this week or early next week.

Download the product and let us know what you think of it. Feel free to use the Forums and bug base to provide us feedback or suggestions.

Anil

Check out the blog post for more details http://blogs.adobe.com/ktowes

Along the same note, many people have assumed that Adobe is planning to add RTMP support to BlazeDS. I just wanted to reiterate that we have no plans to add RTMP to BlazeDS, and will only be supported in LCDS.