Adobe Systems (News - Alert) Incorporated has announced plans to release source code for its remote and messaging technologies under a new open source product named BlazeDS.

 

According to Adobe, developers can now easily connect to back-end distributed data, as well as push data in real-time to Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR applications, for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences.

 

Adobe officials explained that with BlazeDS, developers can add data connectivity to RIAs for real-time collaboration and data-push capabilities, which can help in engaging user experiences, including guided self-service, live help, performance monitoring, and incident tracking. Also, developers can connect clients to existing server applications, including Java and Adobe ColdFusion components.

 

In addition, for added support, Adobe is also offering Adobe LiveCycle Data Services, Community Edition—a subscription offering that includes certified builds of BlazeDS—access to Adobe enterprise support resources and other benefits, such as product warranty and infringement indemnity and additional developer support.

 

Officials pointed out that the commercial version of the product, LiveCycle Data Services ES, includes enterprise class capabilities for building customer engagement applications, which require messaging scalability, advanced client-server data synchronization, conflict detection and resolution, offline data management services for Adobe AIR applications, and RIA-to-PDF generation.

 

David Mendels, senior vice president of business productivity business unit at Adobe, claimed that the combination of BlazeDS with Flex and Adobe AIR helps reduce the time it takes for developers to build responsive and innovative RIAs that deliver branded content and applications across all major browsers and operating systems.

 

“Contributing these technologies, including the AMF specification, to the open source community opens them up for other non-Java backends, helping to rapidly advance this important RIA feature set,” Mendels added in a press release.

 

According to Mendels, like the open source Adobe Flex that the company announced in April 2007, BlazeDS source code, builds and licensing will be hosted by Adobe, along with an open planning process that includes the publication of specifications for review and comment by the community.

 

Initially, contribution to the BlazeDS technologies will be encouraged through the public bug database, including feature requests and a community voting system. However, gradually, Adobe plans to promote external contributors to “committer” status that enables them to contribute code to the source tree.

 

BlazeDS and the AMF binary data protocol specification are supported by Adobe Flash Player—which is installed on more than 98 percent of Internet-connected desktops—and are available as public betas at labs.adobe.com.

Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.