Adobe open-sourcing data access technology

Adobe Systems is announcing on Thursday plans to release source code for its high-performance remoting and messaging technology via an open source product called BlazeDS.

The technology is leveraged in enterprise rich Internet applications, Adobe said.

Adobe's remoting allows for connecting of Flex clients to Java server business logic. The messaging software enables building of real-time or data push applications.

Through the open-source effort, developers can connect to back-end distributed data and push data to Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) applications. The Adobe Flash Player is used on the client side.

"We've seen more and more of our customers who are using Flex technologies are building more sophisticated applications," said Phil Costa, Adobe director of product management for Flex and ColdFusion. "To support the growth of that developer community, we're releasing these low-level technologies as an open-source project so a larger community of developers can get access to them."

BlazeDS, which stands for data services, allows developers to add connectivity to rich Internet applications for collaboration and data-push functionality. Developers also can connect rich clients to server applications, including Java and Adobe ColdFusion components, Adobe said.

Remoting is primarily used to make remote requests against existing server logic, while the messaging technology is used most often to stream data out to the client. These previously were available to enterprises only as part of the company's LiveCycle Data Services ES offering. Also being contributed to open source is Adobe's AMF (Action Message Format) protocol specification, which has been a proprietary binary data protocol. Remoting uses AMF to access server-side business logic.

Adobe's implementation of remoting runs in Java, but the company also is working with an open-source project called AMF PHP to implement the same protocol in PHP.

Adobe's move should boost the profile for Flex development, said Jeffrey Hammond, senior analyst at Forrester.  

"While it’s focused on Flash (and AIR), there are a lot of folks out there that use Flash and Flex to build RIAs. Adding additional capabilities like data sync and push will likely make Flex development that much more attractive to developers who might have been considering AJAX frameworks because they could not get these capabilities out of the box with the basic Flex SDK," Hammond said.

BlazeDS will be offered under the Lesser GPL version 3 license in early-2008. BlazeDS and AMF are available as public betas on Adobe Labs. Using BlazeDS requires client libraries, which are included in the Flex SDK and Flex Builder.

Adobe may in the future provide a native AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) client to work with its newly open sourced technologies.

Adobe also plans to offer Adobe LiveCycle Data Services Community Edition, a subscription service featuring builds of BlazeDS and access to Adobe support services.

The enterprise-level LiveCycle Data Services ES (Enterprise Suite) includes capabilities for building customer engagement applications that require messaging, advanced client-server data synchronization and conflict detection and resolution. Offline data management services also are featured.