Technologies included in BlazeDS were previously available only as part of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES. Adobe is making them and the Action Message Format protocol specification available as open source under the Lesser General Public License version 3. Public beta builds are available through Adobe Labs.
BlazeDS gives developers data connectivity, real-time collaboration and data-push functions for rich internet applications. Uses include guided self-service applications, live help, performance monitoring and event tracking. Rich clients can connect to existing server applications, including Java and Adobe ColdFusion components.
Adobe also plans to offer LiveCycle Data Services Community Edition as a support subscription with certified BlazeDS builds, access to enterprise support, product warranty, legal indemnification and additional developer support. The commercial LiveCycle Data Services ES product adds messaging scalability, advanced client-server data synchronisation, conflict detection and resolution, offline data-management services for Adobe AIR applications, and RIA-to-PDF creation.
“The combination of BlazeDS with Flex and Adobe AIR helps developers reduce the time needed to create innovative RIAs and rich, dynamic content and applications across browsers and operating systems,” says David Mendels, Senior Vice President of Adobe’s Business Productivity Unit. “By making these technologies and the AMF specification available to the open-source community, we are opening them to other non-Java back ends. This should help move this important set of RIA capabilities forward quickly.”
Wade Arnold, leader of the AMFPHP project, says releasing the technologies and AMF specification represents a step towards standardising cross-platform implementations. The collaboration is intended to establish a common programming model for extending applications across server technologies and improve use of AMF in Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP environments.
Adobe will host BlazeDS source code, builds and licensing through an open planning process that includes specifications for community review and comment. Contributions are supported through a public bug database with feature requests and community voting. Adobe intends to grant committer status to external contributors over time.
BlazeDS and the AMF binary data protocol are supported by Adobe Flash Player and are available as public beta versions from Adobe Labs. Annual subscriptions for LiveCycle Data Services Community Edition will provide certified builds, patches, enterprise support, product warranty and legal indemnification. Pricing is due to be announced when BlazeDS reaches general availability in early 2008.
New public beta versions of Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex Builder 3 and Adobe Flex 3 are also available as free downloads through Adobe Labs.
