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...
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