Using What Once was "Flex 2 Data Services" from ColdFusion for Flex Applications

So here I am trying to figure out where ColdFusion 8's integrated LiveCycle Data Services fits within my development environment. It used to be simple. I installed what used to be called Flex 2 Data Services on an existing J2EE Server (such as JRun) and well, that was it. But how about if you have a J2EE Server (like Tomcat), with ColdFusion 8 as a J2EE Application, and it has (somewhere) what was Flex 2 Data Services, but is now branded "LiveCycle Data Services"? So begins my next point of investigation...

I decided to install the stand-alone version of LiveCycle Data Services -and voila, it appears that it installs as a J2EE application, just like the old Flex 2 Data Services. So far, so good. But I still suspect that I now have two copies of LiveCycle Data Services.

Here is an image below of the LiveCycle Data Services Admin tool, itself a Flex application.

I then continued my investigation by launching the sample application to give myself a quick review of the new services. The sample application appears to load an XML file into a data grid, seen below. What is interesting is that there is an option to view source. I tried it. It crashed my browser. Cool.

The second time around, I did get the source code, as seen below.

Ok, so far so good. So the standalone LiveCycle Data Services appears to function like Flex 2 Data Services...now I am going to check and see where it is (if possible) in CF8.

As it turned out, all I needed to do was ask one of my colleagues from New Toronto Group, Oliver Merk, who had already done the research -The short answer is that you can use ColdFusion's own webroot to work with Flex files (silly me, I should have just placed an .mxml file in there and ran it). For more info, look at his blog - http://blog.olivermerk.ca/index.cfm/2007/8/4/Creating-a-New-Flex-Project-Using-ColdFusion-8-with-LiveCycle-Data-Services

Now not only do I have multiple Eclipse installs, multiple J2EE installs (testing CF8 against multiple J2EE Servers) now I have multiple Live Cycle Data Service installs. Just goes to show you that redundancy helps.