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/ .

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.