Adventures in Web Application Develompent by Phil Duba: Philly CFUG Notes

Popular Entries

Top Commenters

Nathan Mische (12)
CFdevfusion (6)
CFFusionDev (5)
Peter Bell (4)
Sean Corfield (3)
Rey Bango (3)
Terrence Ryan (3)
ah7866 (3)
Scott (2)
Jim Priest (2)

Slideshows

Pool Surprises...

Search

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog.

RSS

AGGREGATORS

Philly CFUG Notes - Adam Lehman on CF8, Flex and BlazeDS

Posted On June 3, 2008 12:59 PM By Phil in BlazeDS,Flex,CFUG,ColdFusion

Last Thursday, Adam Lehman, Product Evangelist for Adobe, came to speak to the Philly CFUG about Flex, ColdFusion, and BlazeDS. I'll be honest, I still don't get the BlazeDS product and/or it's uses. This confusion could be from the fact I don't use Flex everyday and don't have a real paradigm I can relate the uses of the various LiveCycle products to. Anyways, Adam did show a few slides that show the differences between the products. What follows are my notes on the presentation itself.

First, Adam defined BlazeDS is a free, open-source, Java server-based remoting and web messaging technology that can be used to push data in real-time to Adobe Flex/Flash and AIR Applications. Then he put up a slide containing the Flex and LiveCycle productsion, including BlazeDS. Here's the breakdown according to my notes:

Flex
- Flex SDK3
  - MXML and AS3
  - Framework and Class Library
  - Command-line Compiler
LiveCycle Data Services ES
- Data Management (synchornization, higher performance, etc.)
- Web-tier compiler
- Portal development
- BlazeDS
  - Messaging
  - RPC Services
  - Service Adapters
  - Proxy Services

I think there were a few more in the LCDS ES edition, but my notes are a little fuzzy. Also, ColdFusion 8 comes with a limited version, Express Edition, of this product, licensed to 1 CPU. Also, if one were to use LCDS ES, it would be really for the following:

Enterprise
Scalability
- HTTP Streaming (BlazeDS supports in 100s, ES in the 1000s)
- HTTP/NIO channels
- RTMP sockets allowing for scaling
Additional features
- Data Synchronization
- Offline Cache
- Conflict Resolution on data
- Smart Paging
- RIA-PDF generation

So as you can see, LCDS ES has pretty extensive coverage, but it's price is really meant for enterprises doing heavy data/client interactions where that type of management is required. Next up was the comparison between the version that ships with CF8 and BlazeDS. The major differences are that the LCDS Express Edition (LCDS EE) that comes with CF8 is restricted to 1 CPU, and LCDS EE has native CFC to AS3 mappings. In other words, it doesn't require the type of connector and configuration file manipulations that integrating with BlazeDS would. Again, that was just my impression based off of the presentation, reviewing my notes from it, and what has stuck in my mind a number of days later.

Adam then dove into his code for the demo and built a chat application doing a general chat room first, followed by to one person in the chat room, then multiple buddy chats and then putting it inline with an overall application. All of the demos are available at his blog as part of the overall CF demo zip file. Overall, it was a good presentation and gave a basic understanding of what BlazeDS could do and how to integrate it with CF. I guess I'll have to do more "work" in this space to really see more uses as a chat application is good for concept teaching, but not necessarily real world enough for me "to get it".