Anil Channappa’s Blog

We have some open positions in our engineering team. Let me know (anilc@adobe.com) if you or anyone you know is interested in these jobs?

LiveCycle Data Services and BlazeDS are core products of the Adobe Flash Platform http://www.adobe.com/flashplatform/

http://www.dcooper.org/blog/client/index.cfm?CFID=801070&CFTOKEN=66561700

Thanks

I have had several questions on using BlazeDS in applications, and hence decided to create a  post that addresses some of the confusion.

The Free Software Foundations GPLv3 and LGPLv3 are popular licenses, but each comes with associated risks. Since it is possible for source code under either of these to cross the boundary into your own code, every company must have their own policies when it comes to using or including GPL and LGPL software into their own offerings.

BlazeDS is distributed under a LGPL V3 license.  You should check your company policy of using a GPL or LGPL software license in your product. For some companies a closed souce license may work better. Adobe offers a closed source license, which includes support and platform certification, for BlazeDS.   Please contact Garen Ingleby if this is of interest to you.

BlazeDS is only supported by the community through the discussion forums. This may not be a problem for many of you, but in several cases it would be worthwhile to use open source code that is backed by Enterprise support and Platform Certification.  Adobe goes through a rigorous testing and platform certification process that enables us to offer enterprise support and platform certification. Sorry for the confusion, but the support and platform certification is called “LiveCycle Data Service Community Edition” You can purchase this directly from Adobe.com for roughly $4K. Follow this link for more details.

Upcoming Changes

We understand that many of you are looking for exceptional value when it comes to BlazeDS and LC DS. We are working on a proposal internally to address just that. Watch out, I will post more details as we finalize this proposal.

I had talked about Blaze DS and LC DS integration with Spring (Catch up). Here is a short demo.

The first release of BlazeDS and Spring integration has just been released. Jeremy’s blog provides a detailed writeup on how to get your Blaze DS and Spring project up and running.

This release addresses the basic bootstrapping and RemoteService. Please watch out for updates such as

1. REST Support
2. Integration with Spring Security
3. Integration with Blaze DS Messaging

Note: The same configuration described by Jeremy should work with LC DS. If anyone has tried this configuration, let me know.

Got comments? Feel free to contact me, but the best way to get your feedback is to participate in the Spring Blaze DS Integration Forum

Today Adobe and Springsource announced integration betweeen the Flash Platform and SpringSource. More details here

You can also search for Adobe Collaborates with SpringSource in google for more links

Key highlights

1. REST support (in addition to AMF) for business logic deployed BlazeDS and LCDS
2. An option to configure BlazeDS and LC DS components using Spring configuration

Benefits:

1. Create your business logic once and access it over AMF from Flex and REST from AJax/HTML clients
2. Easy to expose your existing spring beans over AMF to Flex clients. This should help in migrating existing Enterprise Java applications to leverage Flex/AIR

The best thing is that this new integration adapter from Spring will work with your existing version of BlazeDS and LC DS There will be more details to follow, but I wanted to give you all an update.

For anyone who is interested in the history of this product

• Flex 1.0 (includes the SDK and Server) – Released March 2004
• Flex 1.5  – Released Nov 2004
  
• FDS (Flex Data Services) was decoupled from the Flex SDK in Flex 2.0 – Released 2006
• FDS was renamed LiveCycle Data Services – released as LC DS 2.5 in summer 2007
• LC DS 2.5.1 in fall 2007
• An open source version of remoting and messaging was released as Blaze DS in early 2008
• LC DS 2.6 was released in mid 2008
• LC DS 2.6.1 was released in Nov 2008

A new version of LCDS (2.6.1) and Blaze DS () is now available for download.

Key highlights:

1. Support the new version of Adobe® Flex™ SDK 3.2
2. (LC DS Only) Support federated portal Architecture – http://www.adobe.com/go/lcds26_wsrp
3. Java AMFlibrary – With this, java applications outside of LC DS and Blaze DS can send data allowing you to use LC DS and Blaze DS as your data gateway in your enterprise. More Info
4. Obviously some nagging bugs

More details

Blaze DS Release Notes

LC DS 2.6.1 Release Notes

We will soon be annoucing details of Blaze DS and LC DS to support REST in addition to AMF!!!

Why is this important?

1. You can now migrate your application in stages – no need for a big bang approach
2. You can create applications that can have Ajax/HTML and Flex UI to coexist
3. The same business logic gets used from Flex and HTML/Ajax

Watch out for more information on this. Meanwhile, I would like to hear what you folks think about this.

I would say Blaze DS is built by the same engineers who build LC DS, and hence is a great quality product. However, most enterprises who are happy with the functionality of Blaze DS can benefit from the support. Adobe offers support Blaze DS. We call this LiveCycle Data Services Community Edition (sorry for the long name).

With this you get support on all the platforms that LC DS is supported. See the list here (Go to Additional Components -> LiveCycle Data Services)

OEM

If you are software product vendor looking to OEM Blaze DS, get in touch with me (or you can have Adobe contact you) and I can help you with that. Please note if you wishing to create a enterprise application (not a product) using Blaze DS it is free.

2 reasons

Reason 1: Remoting = Faster performance

Flex enables applications to communicate with the server over AMF, a faster binary alternative to String encoding. If your business logic is available in Java, Blaze DS offers Remoting that enables Flex applications to direct communicate with your business logic over AMF.

Note: The fundamental difference between flex applications and web application is that you don’t generate your presentation logic on the server. The communication between the Flex client and your server (Blaze DS) is primarily data. Hence your application performs much faster than a typical web application.

Reason 2: Messaging = Live Flex Applications

The request response nature of HTTP makes it very challenging to create web applications that are not static with out any user interaction. Remember when you watching NFL (any sport scores) on the Internet, your screen updates every 2 minutes to get the latest scores. It is annoying and inefficient. Blaze DS offers a messaging infrastructure that enable you to build server applications that can push messages to Flex Application. Flex applications using Blaze DS don’t have to blink anymore.

To top it, Blaze DS is Open source and Free to use in production