Past week the Flex Doc Team at Adobe released the documentation for LiveCycle Data Services Es 2.5. The documentation was realeased in livedocs format so you were able to read on the web.

Randy Nielsen, the Learning Resources Manager at Adobe Systems Incorporated, send me an email to point me out that the LiveCycle Data Services Developer’s Guide has been released in PDF format.
So we're now ready to download and print it !

This is the entire LiveCycle Data Services documentation :

* Getting started - http://livedocs.adobe.com/livecycle/es/sdkHelp/programmer/lcds/getstarted_1.html
* LiveCycle Data Services Developer’s Guide - [ LiveDocs ] | [ PDF ]
* LiveCycle Remoting - http://livedocs.adobe.com/livecycle/es/sdkHelp/programmer/sdkHelp/Invoking_LiveCycle/invokingLCRemoting.2.1.html
* LiveCycle ES ActionScript Language Reference (includes Flash Player, Flex SDK 2.0.1 hotfix 2, Data Services, and LiveCycle Form Guide classes) - http://livedocs.adobe.com/livecycle/es/sdkHelp/common/langref/index.html
* LiveCycle Data Services JavaDoc - http://livedocs.adobe.com/livecycle/es/sdkHelp/programmer/lcdsjavadoc

Flex Doc Team rocks !
They made an excellent job for the Flex and LiveCycle Data Services Es 2.5 documentation.
Thanks guys !

When you develop enterprise flex application the Quality Control phase (QC) is a fundamental aspect of each software development activity.
Flex and the LiveCycle Data Services ES include The Flex Automation Framework.

The Flex Automation Package provides developers with the ability to create Flex applications
that use the Automation API. You can use this API to create automation agents or to ensure
that your applications are ready for testing. In addition, the Flex Automation Package includes
support for Mercury QuickTest Professional (QTP) automation tool.

You can create applications and components that can be tested with automated testing tools
such as Mercury QuickTest Professional (QTP). This topic includes information intended for
Flex developers who write applications that are then tested by Quality Control (QC)
professionals who use these testing tools.

Continue reading the full Creating Flex Applications for Testing document.

On the Adobe MAX 2007 blog has been published the pre-conference training day, a full-day hands-on training sessions. These are the tracks dedicated to Flex 3, Adobe AIR and LiveCycle Data Services :

Flex 3: Integrating with ColdFusion
This session provides ColdFusion developers with hands-on, practical experience connecting their Flex 3 client applications to remote, dynamic data provided by ColdFusion and LiveCycle Data Services.

Flex 3: Integration with Java
This session provides experienced application developers with hands-on, practical experience connecting their Flex front ends to remote, dynamic data using LiveCycle Data Services.

Flex 3: Developing Rich Client Applications
Get hands-on, practical experience using Flex.

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR): Bringing Rich Internet Applications to the Desktop
This full-day course will include everything you need to get started building applications with Adobe AIR.

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.

Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES, formerly called Flex Data Services (FDS), provides data services such as remoting, data push, publish and subscribe for Flex applications. With LCDS you can integrate flex with J2EE infrastructures and a previuos post on our blog shows an example: LiveCycle Data Services and Hibernate integration in Flex RIA applications.
There are a lot of open source projects around flex, flash and AMF, and, on java side, GraniteDS is one of the most promising.
It's developed under the LGPL and proposes itself as an alternative to Adobe® LiveCycle® (Flex™ 2) Data Services for J2EE application servers.
GDS is still in an early development phase, with a 0.3 version released on july 30, while, at the time of writing, the 0.4 one is in a release candidate state; despite this, it's rather stable and you can safely test it in non critical production environment as its home page suggests.
Here they are the features already implemented and the planned ones; this list is continuously updated

• Full AMF3 support. See GDS AMF3 documentation.


• EJB3 services with transparent externalization mechanism and lazy initialized ActionScript 3 beans (Entity Beans / Hibernate). See EJB3 Services and Externalizers and Lazy Initialization.
• EJB3 Entity Bean to ActionScript 3 classes code generator. See AS3 Generation.


• Spring services. See documentation on Spring Services.


• POJO services (remote calls to simple Java classes that expose public methods). See Pojo Services.
• (planned) Data push. A Comet-like implementation with AMF3 data polling over HTTP (event/listener based architecture).


• (planned) Entity repository: a client side entity repository that ensures uniqueness (only one instance of each entity is present in the flash VM), weakness (only currently bound objects are kept in memory), and that acts as a services frontend (all server calls/events are managed by this central component). This will be loosely inspired by Cairngorm.


• (planned) Seam integration: a reliable GDS/Seam integration with full scopes (at least conversation) support.
• (planned) A set of Flex components suitable for complex data structures.

A key feature, implemented in version 0.3, is the support for setCredentials, setRemoteCredentials and logout methods of RemoteObject, more information in the release notes: http://www.graniteds.org/confluence/display/DOC03/Documentation+-+0.3

They provides various demos which you can you use importing them as new eclipse projects:

• graniteds-ejb3-0.3.0.zip: a basic sample with Granite DS and EJB3 working together


• graniteds-spring-0.3.0.zip: a basic sample with Granite DS and Spring working together


• graniteds-pojo-0.3.0.zip: a basic sample with Pojo and Granite DS

Moreover a live demo that shows Granite DS in action is available.

If you are interested in testing your LCDS application with Granite Data Services you have to make some changes according to the good documentation ready to help you; however you should check if all the features you need are implemented.
Granite DS is a promising project and the development is going on quite fast, but it still misses some important functionalities like messaging services and data push (planned feature) so by now LCDS is a must in a stable production enviroment, but i can suggest to keep an eye on GDS for the future.

Adobe has just announced the BlazeDS beta release. On Adobe Labs today we can read that "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."

As a matter of fact, BlazeDS is an open source part of LiveCycle Data Services, while the complete Live Cycle suite will still be closed source and subject to Adobe’s Licensing policy.

The source code will be available for download in early 2008 (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/blazeds/).

Adobe has also published AMF binary data protocol specification, on which the BlazeDS remoting implementation is based.

BlazeDS introduces the concept of HTTP streaming, that enables clients to maintain persistent connections with backend servers. HTTP streaming will practically allow the same data push functionality that is available with the LiveCycle Data Services, with the difference that the streaming will not use the RTMP messaging channel.

Among the news, Adobe will offer Adobe LiveCycle Data Services, Community Edition, a subscription offering that includes certified builds of BlazeDS, access to Adobe enterprise support resources and additional benefits, such as product warranty and infringement indemnity, as well as additional developer support.

After the release of the Flex SDK open source, Adobe gives further signals of willingness to pursue the construction of a stronger and wider developers' community.

I want to point out for the readers of this blog (mainly Java, Flex and Livecycle developers) an article I published on my personal blog :
Passing connection-level credentials to the JMSAdapter of BlazeDS
One of the limit if the Messaging Services of Livecycle Data Services is the inability to define a username and password in the configuration file to pass them to the JMS.
I discovered that in BlazeDS there is a new JMSAdapter that allows you to set the connection-level credentials passing the username and password.
The new connection-credentials XML node sets the the username and password used while creating the JMS connection.As the documentation said, use only if JMS connection level authentication is being used :

...

Topic
javax.jms.TextMessage
jms/flex/TopicConnectionFactory

jms/topic/flex/simpletopic

NON_PERSISTENT
DEFAULT_PRIORITY
"true"
AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE

1

For many developers this new features supported by the JMSAdapter could be very appreciated and could solve problems in many different scenarios where the authentication is required in JMS.

Read the full Passing connection-level credentials to the JMSAdapter of BlazeDS article.

Comtaste has just launched its new training courses on Adobe Flex3 and AIR for late spring-early summer 2008.

First courses to be scheduled are:

"Flex 3 and Flex Builder 3: Developing Rich Internet Applications with the new Flex 3 SDKs" (Milan and London 26-29 May, NYC-Manhattan 2-5 June)

"Developing desktop applications with Adobe AIR, Ajax and Flex" (Milan 14-17 April, NYC-Manhattan 9-12 June, London 23-26 June).

Our educational proposal, designed and set up by Flex expert Marco Casario, is mainly the result of our strong experience in real world enterprise projects.

Our courses reflect our clients' training needs that our consultants have encountered in the day by day running of enterprise-class projects, where Flex and AIR are also connected to backend applications under robust and rigid JEE architectures or other server side technologies.

Training programs and other details on company's website www.comtaste.com/en/training.htm