Accessibility
Chris Coenraets

Christophe Coenraets

Adobe

Table of Contents

Created:
25 Feb 2008
User Level:
Intermediate
Products:
LiveCycle

Getting started with BlazeDS

BlazeDS is a set of data services that significantly simplify the development of data-driven Rich Internet Applications, and dramatically improve the performance of their data access operations. In addition, BlazeDS enables the creation of a new breed of real-time data push and collaborative applications. BlazeDS is deployed as a set of JAR files as part of your Web application running in your Java EE application server or servlet container.

BlazeDS consists of three key services:

  • The Remoting Service allows your Flex application to directly invoke methods of Java objects deployed in your application server.
  • The Message Service provides a publish/subscribe infrastructure that allows your Flex application to publish messages and subscribe to a messaging destination, enabling the development of real-time data push and collaborative applications.
  • The Proxy Service allows your Flex application to make cross-domain service requests in a secure and controlled manner. In other words, it allows your Flex application to access a service available on a different domain than the domain from where the application was downloaded (without having to deploy a crossdomain.xml policy file on the target domain).

In this Getting Started tutorial, you will learn how to:

  • Set up your BlazeDS environment
  • Build a messaging application
  • Build a remoting application.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Adobe Flex Builder 3.0

BlazeDS Turnkey Server

Java Development Kit (1.5 or later)

Eclipse

About the author

Christophe Coenraets is a Technical Evangelist for Adobe where he focuses on rich Internet applications and enterprise integration. He has been working on Flex since the early days of the product in 2003. In his previous role at Macromedia, Christophe worked on JRun, the company's J2EE application server. Before joining Macromedia, Christophe was managing Java and Internet applications evangelism at Sybase. Christophe has been a regular speaker at conferences worldwide for the last 15 years. He blogs at http://coenraets.org.