LiveCycle Data Services overview

LiveCycle Data Services, formerly known as Flex Data Services, is a powerful Adobe product that allows seamless interaction between a Flex client and any Java EE based server or most J2EE servers.
These services allow Java object or services to be called directly from the Flex client, in a transparent way: all the developer has to do, in the Flex code, is call remote services just like they were Flex functions or methods. All the problems related to marshalling / unmarshalling, mapping Flex and Java classes and types are solved internally by LiveCycle Data Services. For all of this to work, LiveCycle Data Services only requires some configuration to be provided, that will define the required behavior.
Using LiveCycle Data Services is, without doubt, one of the best approaches to consider in developing enterprise RIA applications, as it takes care, in an efficient and scalable way, of all the information exchanged by the Flex client and the Java server.

An eye on the server side

Connecting the client to the server being taken cared of, the development can just focus on creating a client and a server layer that handles any required business logic and persistence. LiveCycle Data Services is a Java EE web application, that has to be deployed into a Java EE container. From there it can access whatever server side required functionality and provide it to the Flex client. This kind of deploy ensures compatibility with existing Java EE application as well as with newly created applications. Connecting a LiveCycle application with an existing Java EE or J2EE application requires a little work, but we’ll cover it up in a future post.
The Java EE applications covered in the following blog posts will be the ones that use either Hibernate as a persistence manager or EJB3 in Java enterprise applications. We will see how to access Hibernate or EJB3 from LiveCycle Data Services, how to keep the data services separated from the Java business logic, using clean, modular and distinct components.

The world behind LiveCycle Data Service and Java

LiveCycle Data Services offers many possibilities, like accessing remote Java objects, binding client to server data sources, using publisher/subscribe messaging to communicate with the server, with or without JMS. Aside all these it’s also possible to configure a LiveCycle Data Services EE application to allow a controlled Flex client access to areas like Hibernate’s named queries, JNDI lookup or web server custom login.
LiveCycle Data Services offers numerous possibilities and can be configured and understood to get the outmost out of this potential.

Web resources
LiveCycle Data Services can be found here, http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/dataservices/, Hibernate http://www.hibernate.org/ contains all required resources and libraries. A commonly used Java EE web servers is Tomcat http://tomcat.apache.org/, while JBoss http://labs.jboss.com/ is an enterprise application container.