And more in-between posts...Blaze DS shows up, an open-source Flex Data Service!

As an instructor of Flex, I have often taught students who work at organizations who use Flex, but not Flex Data Services (recently rebranded as Flex Live Cycle Data Services -really, they should have a shorter name for it). The reason they do not use Flex Data Services is usually a) price and b) the proprietary nature of the server.

Well it seems both points have now been addressed.

Just over the weekend, Adobe released BlazeDS, and according to the website, the description reads as follows:

"BlazeDS is the server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Adobe® Flex™ and Adobe AIR™ applications for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences."

Furthermore, it appears to now have open source and licensing origins...

"Adobe is announcing its plans to contribute the proven BlazeDS technologies to the community under the LGPL v3. BlazeDS gives the rapidly growing Adobe developer community free access to the powerful remoting and messaging technologies developed by Adobe.

Concurrent with this prerelease of BlazeDS, Adobe is publishing the AMF binary data protocol specification, on which the BlazeDS remoting implementation is based, and is committed to partnering with the community to make this protocol available for every major server platform. The source code will be available for download early 2008. Please read the FAQ for further details on BlazeDS and Adobe’s open source plans."

Check it out at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/blazeds/ .