Friday, June 19, 2009

LiveCycle Data Service 3.0 Beta available

We launched LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) 3 public beta yesterday on http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/.

We have beefed up tooling and simplified developing flex application development. You can now develop new fully functional flex applications with no server code in under 10 minutes. We have a few videos to help people get started http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/videos/, and plan to add more (I am on the hook for one or two).

Now is the chance for folks to try out the new Data Model development features we have added and give us some feedback.

3 comments:

Roman Smolkin said...

Hi Jordahl,

I hope you can point me in the right direction...

I've been a ColdFusion developer for about 5 years, and can do a lot of cool stuff with jQuery and alike, but time has come for me to have to write my first Flex app, and I'm hoping you might have a few suggestions.

I'm doing research on if it's even possible for me to do what I need. I'm building an app to manage scores for sporting events, and some things like the leader boards, really need to be refreshing in real time. So as new scores come in, they should immediately be reflected on all leader boards, ideally with some animation or highlight that indicates a score just changed. Now the closest thing I've seen to what I need to do were all those CNN, Fox, CNBC apps during the last presidential elections, where as results were coming in the data was automatically pushed to all the connected clients. I don't even know how that works conceptually, is it the server somehow pushing the data to the Flex clients? Cause I don't want every Flex client to have to keep hitting the server every couple of seconds querying for changes like a web page would have to.

Do I even need to use Flex to do this? Can LiveCycle be used with just JavaScript/ColdFusion somehow to do this.

Any help, suggestions, examples are highly appreciated.
Thanks,
-Roman

Tom said...

Hello Roman,

Yes, you can (and should IMHO) use Flex for this kind of application. You will also need a server to push the data changes to the client and that server is LiveCycle Data Service.

I am sure you can find lots of information on Data Services on Adobe.com and on the web.

Roman Smolkin said...

Now I am having a hard time getting any real details on LiveCycle Data Services. Do we need to buy that in addition to the ColdFusion services we have? Some say it's very expensive, others say it's already a part of ColdFusion, I'm reading so much stuff online but can't find any reliable data or examples. Also what about that BlazeDS? Is that sufficient for what I need to do?

Now you say I should use Flex, and I don't disagree, but I've never written a line of Flex code... So there is a learning curve. Can any of this be done with JavaScript/Ajax? Like can I push data to a client through AJAX somehow without having to create a Flex app or is Flex pretty much the only way to go?

Further more, I don't even know how to trigger the message for sending. What determines that new scores have come in and should be sent out to clients?