Article: An Introduction to BlazeDS

Posted by Scott Delap on Jun 06, 2008

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In December of last year Adobe continued their open source movement by releasing a large portion of what had been known as Lifecycle Data Services as the BlazeDS project.  Since that time a large number of developers have began to experiment with the product which provides messaging and remoting services.  InfoQ has covered integrations with Scala as well as Spring.  We now present a feature article by James Ward and Shashank Tiwari providing a more detailed introduction to the technology:

...Over the past few years numerous open source projects emerged to provide AMF implementations similar to an old Macromedia product called Flash Remoting. These projects allowed developers using PHP, Java, and other technologies to use AMF in their applications. When Flex 1.0 was released it also included AMF capabilities. When Flex 2 was released it included XML and AMF capabilities, but the server-side AMF capabilities were moved into a new product called Flex Data Services. Flex Data Services became LiveCycle Data Services ES when it joined the Live Cycle product suite. While LiveCycle Data Services ES Express has been free for a single CPU server, the pricing for servers with more than a single CPU discouraged some developers from using AMF or caused them to choose other non-standard AMF implementations.

In December 2007, Adobe made two significant announcements which allow everyone to begin taking advantage of AMF. The first announcement is that the specification for AMF is now publicly available. Publishing the specification allows other projects to implement AMF based on the specification rather than reverse engineering the protocol. No matter what back-end technology developers use - Java, ColdFusion, PHP, .Net, Ruby, etc. - the implementation of AMF can be spec-compliant. The second significant announcement was that a portion of the LiveCycle Data Services ES technology was being open sourced as a project called BlazeDS...

Continue Reading Building Web and Desktop Applications with BlazeDS and AMF

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   What about OSGI?

   by Christopher Brind

   Fantastic! Now make it deployable as an OSGi bundle allowing dynamic creation of Remote Object (i.e. exposing OSGi services). :)

   
   
   We've kind of done this with Solstice but Solstice is effectively a web application that contains BlazeDS, an OSGi container and some bridging code that exposes OSGi services as Remote Objects using BlazeDS for remoting.

   
   
   Our roadmap is to remove the web application/J2EE aspect of Solstice in order to make it pure OSGi, but if we were to do that right now we would more likely to choose something like Cinnamon to do remoting than BlazeDS in the long term, mainly because of Cinnamon already has an affinity with OSGi.

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   Re: What about OSGI?

   by Jens Halm

   I'm not intending to hijack a BlazeDS thread. I just want to correct a statement from the previous poster: Cinnamon currently has no special integration with OSGi and we never claimed to have one. I think the misconception stems from an article by Peter Kriens that described difficulties in deploying Hibernate, Cinnamon and the core Spring framework in an OSGi environment.

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   OSGI

   by Kabriel Robichaux

   I would love to see examples of BlazeDS, Solstice, or Cinnamon running on the SpringSource Application Platform with some examples and/or tutorials. I want to use Flex messaging and remoting and i want to use S2AP as it provides what i feel is the first viable production usable OSGi Application Platform. If any of the developers involved with these projects can point me to any integration examples/tutorials they have created that would be awesome.

   Reply