Andrew Powell

This friday, Flash Camp Orlando will be one of two launch events for Adobe.  There will be big news regarding the Flash Platform announced at the event as well as free software including CS4 Master Collection and FlexBuilder.  If you're interested in attending, head over to www.flashcamporlando.com and sign up today.

In addition to the Adobe announcements there will be great sessions on AIR, Flex, and UX.  

You can walk in to the event, but if you sign up today, your seat will be guaranteed!

Flash (Flex) Camp Orlando is this Friday, May 29th.  If you've been reluctant to sign up, I've got some things that may motivate you:

• There will be a big announcement from Adobe.  Think of this as a launch event.... *wink wink*
• We will be giving away a free copy of CS4 Master Collection
• We will be giving away multiple copies of FlexBuilder
• Lots of swag, this is a launch event, after all

The past couple of weeks have been pretty busy within the Merapi core, but all the work has paid off.  Merapi is finally open-source and available on GoogleCode.  The architecture has really changed over the past year, but the core functionality has stayed the same.  It's more of a change in how we get messages to the bridge than across the bridge.  Regardless though, after a year of forcing you to take our word for what it's doing, you can now go get the code and see yourself.

http://merapi.googlecode.com/
http://merapi-examples.googlecode.com/
http://groups.google.com/group/merapi-project

At some point I will go over some of the changes that are coming to the Java side, but the short, short version is that we're going to be integrating tightly with Spring and leveraging some of the powerful DI that Spring gives us to make the Bridge dynamically configurable.  More on that to come later though.  Go over to GoogleCode, join the group and let us know what you think!

Here are the slides from my presentation this week at 360Flex.  I should have the updated samples into the SVN repository later this week.

http://static.infoaccelerator.net/files/FlexServerLib.pdf

There has been some confusion as to what FlashCamp Orlando really is.  FlashCamp is the new name that Adobe wishes to use for the events formerly known as FlexCamps.  The content that you can expect for FlashCamp Orlando covers:

• UX
• AIR
• BlazeDS
• Flash Catalyst
• Flex

A lot of people think that BlazeDS (and LCDS, for that matter) is a server.  They think it's something that you can deploy, like ColdFusion, and write apps on it.  Not quite, the case, but not too far off either.

BlazeDS is not a server.

Let's say that again, so you understand it.  BlazeDS is not a server.

BlazeDS is a set of servlets and listeners that you can add to your J2EE web application to access your service layer via the AMF protocol.  You don't deploy BlazeDS on its own unless you want to do purely messaging.  90% of deployments are done as part of a larger web project.  BlazeDS is simply another tool that you can use to expose your services to AMF clients (not just Flex).  

Further proof that BlazeDS exists as part of the J2EE ecosystem came late last year when SpringSource announced Spring/BlazeDS Integration.  This virtually removed the MessageBrokerServlet from the equation, routing messages through Spring's MVC architecture instead.  BlazeDS, the guts of it at least, was still responsible for the leg work in processing the AMF requests, but the easy integration into the Spring Framework really made it apparent that BlazeDS is not a server.

Lastly, BlazeDS is easy to incorporate into ColdFusion.  ColdFusion is, at it's roots, a J2EE web app.  BlazeDS is just another piece you can integrate into the web app to enable access to Java and CFC services via AMF.

Any questions?