Blaze DS

After spending the evening on a demo application for the J-Spring next week where I'm going to give a presentation about Blaze DS, Spring, Hibernate and Flex it's done for the biggest part. The most projects I've worked on so far used LCDS (LiveCycle Data Services) so again it was some getting used to, but we have the most important part working now. Biggest difference again is that the RTMP is not available in Blaze. This is the Real Time Messaging Protocol that is available in LCDS.

This means that actual data push from the server is not possible, but we can establish something very similar using polling. So we can set up our destination using polling and this will give us information very fast, not as fast as with RTMP but still it is working just fine for most applications. What we did in our demo application is create a task manager and a task client that will receive tasks directly when a new task is created. Even though we are using Polling like any web application there are some advantages above polling a normal web page.

• We don't have to create any polling code ourselves
• New messages are retrieved automatically
• We are still using the AMF(Action Message Format) format, this is a binary format and gives us some bandwidth advantage over other ways to call
• We know that it's working like that so there might be a minor delay in receiving the message. When using RTMP Flex switches back to polling if RTMP is not possible on a client because of any network or firewall interference, so there might still be the same delay even if we don't expect it.

We are using RemoteObjects to connect directly to Spring to post messages and messaging to push messages from the server to the client, since our application is not completely finished yet I'll wait with posting the code until the application is finished and I might even wait until after the event and post the information at that time together with the actual presentation.