Videos on LCDS 3

The weekend is closing in (well, I am Europe based), and what better way to spend some quality (family) time than watching your favorite movie? Just in case you’re out of good movies, or the sequels are not up to the original I have for you 9 movies featuring LiveCycle Data Services 3: Fiber overview, Flex 4 demo application, Data Model Annotations, Fiber Filters, Styles, Message Throttling, etc.

You can see the videos here.

July 24, 2009 | Filed Under LCDS, LiveCycle Data Services | Leave a Comment

Adobe User Group Nederland: Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder event

Tomorrow, June 3rd, Adobe User Group Nederland has organized a Flash Event in Amsterdam. I will do a session on Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst. You can find more here.

Every time I travel to the Netherlands it has something special for me. I did the first presentation as a Platform Evangelist in the Netherlands :)

See you tomorrow!

LATER UPDATE: you can grab the PDFs for my presentations from here: Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder.

June 2, 2009 | Filed Under Conferences, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, LCDS | 2 Comments

Boot Camps: Introduction to Adobe AIR, and LiveCycle DS / BlazeDS

We’ve seen high demand for our two Boot Camps we’ll have as part of the Adobe Developer Day event on May 19th in Bucharest, Romania. Because the space we have limits the number of persons we can accept, we had to turn down a lot of people.

Because we hate to turn down people, I found a solution. We will do in the next months these Boot Camps in Bucharest (Adobe’s office), and for the people who can’t attend in person, we’ll do it online using Acrobat Connect. As a reminder these events are free.

What do you have to do? Just send me an email(s) with the one of the following session names a the subject to mihai dot corlan at adobe dot com:

These are the sessions we’ll do in our office, in Romanian

Boot Camp Introduction to AIR [RO]
Boot Camp BlazeDS/LCDS [RO]

These are the sessions we’ll do online in Romanian:

Online Boot Camp Introduction to AIR [RO]
Online Boot Camp BlazeDS/LCDS [RO]

These are the sessions we’ll do online in English:

Online Boot Camp Introduction to AIR [EN]
Online Boot Camp BlazeDS/LCDS [EN]

We are working to set up a system to sign up to these events online. For now, just send me the emails. We will notify you about the dates by email!

May 6, 2009 | Filed Under AIR, BlazeDS, Conferences, Flex Builder, Java, LCDS | 2 Comments

Adobe TV segment: Generate a Flex/J2EE Database Application

Another segment has been released on Adobe TV, this time on how to generate a Flex and J2EE Database Application. I was a little bit sleepy and tired after three and a half days of MAX :D. I show how to create such applications using the data wizard, or LiveCycle Data Services and SQL Assembler. Enjoy!

March 2, 2009 | Filed Under Flex, Flex Builder, Java, LCDS, LiveCycle Data Services, Video | 7 Comments

LiveCycle Data Services 2.6 – new features

As you probably know, LCDS 2.6 was released last month. If you are not sure what new features it brings, or you want a more detailed description of them, you can look to my friend, Cornel Creanga, Blog posts here and here.

August 19, 2008 | Filed Under LCDS, LiveCycle Data Services | Leave a Comment

What has been happening lately in the Adobe RIA space

So, what has been going on over the last few weeks in the Adobe RIA space? Actually a lot of things. And I think with all these developments, we will have a great MAX this year. And remember, there is much more news to come (remember Thermo and Gumbo, just to give an example).

LiveCycle Data Services ES 2.6

LCDS 2.6 version was released on 8th July. What’s new: improved server performance and scalability, alignment with Flex 3 and Flex Builder 3, Data Management improvements (paging, offline, subtype support, Hibernate support). You can read release information here.

Flex 4 SDK (code named “Gumbo”)

On 14th July Flex team published information about the next version of Flex 4 (code named “Gumbo”). As you probably already know, Gumbo has three main themes: Design in Mind, Developer Productivity and Framework Evolution. You can see a 14 minutes presentation on Gumbo here, or you could watch Ely Greenfield discuss developer/designer improvements, and here are more details on the themes. You can download nightly builds of the Flex SDK from here: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4.

Flash Player 10 beta 2

On 2nd July, the Flash Player 10 beta 2 was released on Adobe labs. It targets all three platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux and it has new features (custom filters and effects, 3D effects, new text engine, visual performance improvements, and enhanced sound API just to name some of them) and bug fixes.

Acrobat Reader 9

This version brings some interesting features: it has native Flash support (you can display SWF and FLV inside of an Acrobat document), it can use services from acrobat.com. With Acrobat Reader, you also get Adobe AIR (you need the runtime in order to use acrobat.com services – you can create PDF files online, edit with others, upload and share PDF). And of course it has better performance (improved launch time) and security (with support for 256-bit AES encryption and new digital signature functionality). And by the way, on 2nd July PDF became the latest ISO standard, you can read an article here on this subject.

Adobe Media Player 1.1

A new version of the AMP was launched last week. The welcome screen is redesigned and there are a lot of changes under the hood. I plan to do an interview this week with a couple of engineers from the AMP team, so stay tuned.

flex.org

flex.org has a new layout that should give a better user experience.

I guess the best way to see presentations and demos on all these products and on many more, is to come to Adobe MAX 2008 – either in San Francisco, in Milan, or in Tokyo :D.

July 28, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Flex, LCDS, Others | Leave a Comment

LiveCycle Data Services ES Express and LiveCycle Data Services ES Single-CPU License

This spring at Flex360 in Milan, I presented a session about working with data in Flex Builder 3, and I was asked a lot about LCDS versus BlazeDS. When I asked questions about the use case, I found that most of the time the only reason to use BlazeDS instead of LCDS, was that BlazeDS is Open Source and thus free. Months later, I had a deja vu experience in Holland. It seems that very few people know that there used to be LiveCycle Data Services ES Express (for LCDS 2.5) and there is a LiveCycle Data Services ES Single-CPU License (for LCDS 2.51). This license, basically lets you use the full version of LCDS in production with this limitation: you have to deploy the LCDS on a machine with a single CPU (a multi-core CPU is counted as a single CPU) and a single application.

So, if you need the LCDS features and you can work within the license terms, then go and enjoy LCDS for free. I can think of a lot of applications built for small and medium intranets (CMS, mini ERPs and so on) that probably can be run successfully on a machine with a single CPU. And if the application grows over time, probably your client grew as well, and now they can afford to buy a license for multiple CPUs (they had the chance to test the technology and see its value gives and what problems it solves).

You can find more about the license here (click on “What happened to LiveCycle Data Services ES Express” for example) and this is a great post that explains the LCDS and BlazeDS products and licenses.

July 8, 2008 | Filed Under BlazeDS, LCDS, LiveCycle Data Services | 1 Comment

SQLAssembler: create a Flex and Java application with LCDS (LiveCycle Data Services) without server side code

LCDS 2.5 brought a new assembler, SQLAssembler. SQLAssembler lets you connect your Flex client to your database. Usually, when you read/write data with LCDS, you create your own Java adapter to handle these operations. With SQLAssembler, instead of writing the Java code for accessing the database, you configure access to the database and write the SQL for read/write/delete directly into the data-management-config.xml file (this is a configuration file used by Flex data services). Basically, you write some simple XML with some SQL for each operation, and you don’t need to write a single line of Java. But, you get a full CRUD application, with all the benefits of Flex Data Services: collaboration, conflict resolution, paging. If you need for some operations to use stored procedure instead of SQL statements, there is no problem as SQLAssemberl has support for them.

Why should you use SQLAssembler?

I will not try to fool you. Probably it isn’t good for complex applications, where you have a lot of business logic on your server. But, it could come in very handy when you need to create a simple application, maybe a quick prototype for example. And the best thing is that if, for some reason, you decide that you need a custom assembler or HibernateAssembler instead of SQLAssembler, there should be little to change in the Flex client code, if anything at all. And, as you will see in this article, I can use this assembler to create a full CRUD application for one-to-many relationship database setup.

Prerequisites

In order to be able to follow this article and to try the attached project, you need to have: Flex Builder 3, WTP (Web Tool Project) installed in Flex Builder, and LCDS 2.5 or newer. If you don’t have Flex Builder, you can download a trial from here; if you don’t have WTP installed, then check my article here; finally if you don’t have LCDS, you can download it from here. I use a combined Flex and Java project with LCDS. I have explained this kind of setup here. Finally you need to have Tomcat 5.5 installed (I created my project using Tomcat as a server for WTP deployment).

You can download the project from here (it is a pretty big download, so be patient) and you can import it in Flex Builder, using the Import Flex Builder wizard.

Finally, in the root of the project, there is a database.sql file you can use it to create the database. In my project, I used MySQL as a database server.

Database structure

The database structure is very simple: two tables, one for storing the authors and one for storing the books. One author can have as many books as needed:

Application description

I want to create a Flex application that lets me edit these two tables (full CRUD). I want to be able to choose an author, and see what books he wrote. This is the layout of the application (I know it isn’t a beautiful one, but that’s not the point of this article :D ).

July 8, 2008 | Filed Under BlazeDS, Flex, LCDS, LiveCycle Data Services, Tutorials | 26 Comments

Flex and AIR Cookbook

In case you didn’t know about these two great resources, I think it is time to take a look: Flex Cookbook and AIR Cookbook. Here you can learn or share with others: solutions, tips and tricks, hacks and more. Starting today, I have two “recipes” over there!

June 26, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Flex, Flex Builder, LCDS | 1 Comment

MAX 2008 North America website

MAX 2008 website was launched: http://max.adobe.com/na/experience/. It is a really cool site, made entirely in Flash, you can click on the background and play around (solve puzzles, discover who built them). Or you can just browse for information and register.

June 25, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Flex, Flex Builder, LCDS, Others | Leave a Comment