Installing and Configuring Flex Live Cycle Data Services, Tomcat 6.x, and ColdFusion 8 : Background

I have not written for over a month, as I had been busy travelling back and forth delivering Flex and Flash training between Boston and Toronto. During my "off-off-off" time (when a developer does not do work, research, or watch a couple of hours worth of Lost Season 2 lol), I took a moment to explore configuring Live Cycle Data Services (LCDS, formerly Flex Data Services 2.x or FDS2) with Apache's Tomcat Server.

There were a number of reasons I began to explore configuring LCDS/FDS2 with other J2EE servers.

One reason was that I could not get a stand-alone version of JRun with Updater 6 to run on Windows Vista. To note, I could install JRun 4.x with the SP1 update onto Vista, but I could not install the SP6 updater. The installation of Updater 6 would halt mid-way through, and updater 6 is required to run LCDS/FDS2.

I suppose I could have tried to install LCDS/FDS2 with the integrated JRun option on Windows Vista, but this leads me to my second reason to try and configure LCDS/FDS2; not all business clients run integrated JRun services. The clientele I work with (and the students I teach Flex to) may be using an in-house J2EE server such as Tomcat, JBoss, WebSphere, or Sun Microsystem's new GlassFish Server (In particular, I will be writing about GlassFish Server in a later blog entry). I am not knocking JRun, its a good J2EE Server, but you need to keep your clients happy!

A third reason is that clients, consultants, and developers using LCDS/FDS2 with their applications may need not only to know how to get LCDS/FDS2 configured with their J2EE servers, they may need to tweak settings appropriately. I know that on the Adobe Web site there is a "Flex Test-Drive Server" available, and it is a pre-configured Tomcat Server running FDS2, but the information provided focuses more on developing applications with Flex and Java then the actual configuration itself. I do recommend that you do explore the article itself anyway as it will give some details on the requirements to set up LCDS/FDS2 with Tomcat - see http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/java_testdrive.html, and credits should go to Christophe Coenraets, whose blog entries I also used as a point of reference (visit his site - http://coenraets.org/) .

Therefore in my upcoming blog entries I am going to attempt to do the following:

Install and configure Tomcat for LCDS/FDS2
Install LCDS (or FDS2, it will be the same process) on Tomcat.
Set up web services and messaging services on Tomcat (this was required for my courses , and good for local development for testing Flex code that access web services, uses messaging or data synchronization)
Set up ColdFusion 8 on Tomcat (also required for my courses that I teach as a potential back-end).

Alright, I am done for now. BRB with the next entry.

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.