6.1. BlazeDS Versus LCDS

Prior to Adobe’s BlazeDS, Flex developers who wanted to use the AMF protocol to speed up the data communication between Flex and the server side of their application had to select one of the third-party libraries, such as Open AMF, WebORB, or GraniteDS. The release of the open source BlazeDS, however, brought a lot more than just support of AMF. You can think of BlazeDS as a scaled-down version of LCDS. As opposed to LCDS, BlazeDS doesn’t support RTMP protocol, Data Management Services, or PDF generation, and has limited scalability. But even with these limitations, its AMF support, ability to communicate with Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs), and support of messaging via integration with the Java Messaging Protocol make BlazeDS a highly competitive player in the world of RIA. These features alone make it a good choice for architecting RIA data communication compared to any AJAX library or a package that just implements the AMF protocol.

Figure 6-1 provides a capsule comparison of BlazeDS and LiveCycle functions. The items shown in regular type represent the features available only in LCDS. The features of BlazeDS are in bold.