Adobe has been extremely busy with its most recent launch of Flex 3 and AIR 1.0, but a few months back, Adobe also released an open source rendition on its Livecycle Data Services (LCDS) product called BlazeDS. BlazeDS is a means by which we can enhance the capabilities of Flex (and by association, AIR) to include the ability to invoke objects remotely as well as interact with a simple messaging infrastructure.

So what does all of that mean? Basically, the stand-alone Flex SDK only has the ability to connect to a certain set of services to utilize “backend” data: http-based (including REST) and SOAP-based web services. With the use of BlazeDS these are still available, but they are enhanced to handle cross-domain concerns (i.e. my Flex app can call your web service). Additionally, you can perform remote procedure calls (RPC) on Java objects and CFCs, which is helpful when integrating with existing applications.

Adobe has also gone through some great lengths to provide a “stupid” simple messaging framework which can be used to PUSH data to your Flex application. For those not familiar with the concept of push-based communications, think of it as fancy AJAX without having to use polling. Not the best definition, but I will clarify my point at the meeting.

In this short presentation, I would like to show in more detail how BlazeDS fits into the Flex picture in addition showing what the overall Flex picture really is from an integration standpoint. This presentation will be mainly conceptual and involve pretty pictures and diagrams. If you don’t necessarily care about how things work under the hood and would just like to see some working code, come late to the meeting to see the follow-up, “RPC and Messaging Using BlazeDS” which will be code intensive.

Hope you can make it.