Livecycle Data Services 3 preview

With Flex 4 and its great new features in the pipe, Adobe is also working on the next version of Livecycle Data Services (LCDS) (version 3). If you know a little about of Flash Builder 4, there are new features in there to help with model driven development. Well with the new LCDS extensions for Flash Builder 4, you can take this even a step further (codenamed: fiber).

Basically what you can do is define you model, connect it to your favorite database and then generate an interface to interact with the data. Basically I see it as tools to create/update small applications quickly or to perform rapid prototyping for larger enterprise class applications. Flash Builder in combination with LCDS 3 can really do alot for you by generating the database structure from your model definition and then will also generate an interface with the basic c.r.u.d. operations ready to go. It will also do things like allow you to easily apply field validation to your model. Sort of reminds me of my good old days working in VB!

To actually see some of this in action, go here.

Remote deployment on JBoss

Not completely Flex related, but I am thinking of deploying our latest AIR application with an LCDS backend on a JBoss 4.2 server (maybe 5.0). Question is, and I've been searching but can't find the answer so far, does anyone know how to do remote deployments of a WAR/EAR to a JBoss server?

Flex easy to learn for Java developers

Since the first release of Flex back in 2004 the main target audience has been Java developers. And this continues to be true even today, especially when you consider the server-side compliments of BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services are both Java based solutions. And this is also easily apparent in the real-world and I see it first hand everyday at my company, where everything we built is in Flex and Java.

One of the guys I work with the most, Jade, has developed Java Applets in the past and he picked up Flex very easily, to the point where he is using it for his own personal home projects. Another good example is our architect, who worked with me recently on a brand new project. I let him do a portion of the Flex UI and at one point he even went as far to create a new validator component that received the error messages from the server-side. Like I said, its easy to pick up :) One last example, I upgraded one project from Flex 2 to 3 with another fellow developer at his request, so that he could some of the new APIs that deal with Bitmaps objects.

The similarities between the two languages is uncanny and that really helps bring people over. Thus we use the best technology for creating UIs - Flex - and continue to use Java on the server-side to implement the business logic. It's the best of both worlds.

To get into more details, read my Flex/Java article on the Developer Center.

Careful of missing display-name tag

Recently one of my colleagues decided to add a mini-Flex UI to a portion of an existing J2EE application. In the process he obviously modified the web.xml to include all the parts required to make FDS 2.x (now called LC DS) work. Well he forgot to include the display-name tag in the web.xml and this prevented the application from starting-up properly. The exception below has found in the server logs:

flex.messaging.config.ConfigurationException:
Invalid channel endpoint class 'flex.messaging.endpoints.AMFEndpoint'
specified for 'amf-polling'.

at flex.messaging.config.MessagingConfiguration.createEndpoints(MessagingConfiguration.java:141)

at flex.messaging.config.MessagingConfiguration.configureBroker(MessagingConfiguration.java:82)

at flex.messaging.MessageBrokerServlet.init(MessageBrokerServlet.java:105)

(We are using WebLogic 8.1 SP6 in case you wondering) After some googling he found out that the missing tag was the mostly likely cause and indeed it was. So be careful people!