Adobe opens up its remoting and messaging apps

By Staff Writers

Dec 13 2007 3:17PM

Adobe Systems has announced a new open source project named BlazeDS that opens the source code in the company’s remoting and messaging technologies, Flex and AIR.

With BlazeDS developers will now be able to connect to back-end distributed data, as well as push data in real-time to the above-named applications.

The source code is being opened under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL v3), and are available immediately as public betas on Adobe Labs.

“The combination of BlazeDS with Flex and Adobe AIR helps reduce the time it takes for developers to build responsive and highly innovative RIAs that deliver rich, dynamic, branded content and applications across all major browsers and operating systems,” said David Mendels, senior vice president, Business Productivity Business Unit at Adobe.

“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.”

With BlazeDS, developers can add data connectivity to RIAs for real-time collaboration and data-push capabilities. It also includes guided self-service, live help, performance monitoring, and incident tracking.

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

The announcement builds on Adobe’s commitment to open technology initiatives and its support for a vibrant developer community. Similar to open source Adobe Flex, 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.

Contribution to the BlazeDS technologies will be encouraged initially through the public bug database, including feature requests and a community voting system. Over time, Adobe plans to promote external contributors to “committer” status, allowing them to contribute code to the source tree.