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BlazeDS Message Service is a simple publisher-subscriber model. The service configuration could be boiled down to two parts: channels and destinations. In networking terms, destination is the message hub and channel is the transport protocol.

BlazeDS does not support RTMP and the default channel type is client-polling. This has created a lot of confusion over whether BlazeDS support real-time messaging. The short answer is “yes, it does”. In fact, BlazeDS has a full spectrum of channel types ranging from simple polling, to near-real-time polling, to real-time streaming. This article will explore the different channels types in BlazeDS. It should also be applicable to LiveCycle DS.
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Curious about BlazeDS but don’t know where to start? BlazeDS comes with good documentations to guide you through installation. This tutorial series picks up where the BlazeDS documentations left off. We will cover the three BlazeDS key services end-to-end,

• BlazeDS Proxy Service – Having trouble with Flash cross domain policy? Use the BlazeDS Proxy Service to tunnel Flex RPC calls through your own server
• BlazeDS Remote Object Service – This is the bread n’ butter of BlazeDS. It enables you to make RPC calls to your custom Java objects. It’s also a necessity if your application is heavy on data
• BlazeDS Messaging Service – The Message Service has to be the coolest and most under-used feature. I’ve seen a lot of Flex solutions out there that could benefit from the Messaging Service. Check out if it’s the right solution for you.

Confused about the BlazeDS and LiveCycle DS licensing terms? Greg Wilson has an excellent article that compares the product offerings.

This article is applicable to LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle DS Express, and BlazeDS.

Remote Object Service, one of the keys services in LiveCycle DS and BlazeDS, enables Flex applications make remote procedure calls to the Java server via the AMF3 protocol.

AMF3 is architected similar to SOAP, but magnitudes faster because it’s a pure binary protocol. If your Flex application loads large amounts of data, and speed/bandwidth is a priority, you should consider leveraging the Remote Object Service.

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This article is applicable to LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle DS Express, and BlazeDS.

Message Service is one of the key features in LiveCycle DS and BlazeDS. It enables Flex clients to communicate in your enterprise infrastructure with zero-coding on the server side.

Based on the publisher-subscriber model, the Message Service acts as a message router for both Flex and JMS-enabled clients. This article shows you how to leverage the Message Service in your Flex applications.

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This article is applicable to LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle DS Express, and BlazeDS.

Flash Player Cross Domain Policy

Flash player has cross domain security restriction that prevents Flex applications from retrieving data from remote servers. At runtime, when a network request is made from your Flex application, may it be HTTP or SOAP, the Flash player examines the cross domain policy file on the remote server before the data could be retrieved.

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This tutorial shows you how to leverage the Flex field validation feature in your input driven application. Flex has a set of Validator classes which can be used to validation data entries. The Validator class is the base for all other validator classes. The complete list of validators cover the following,

• Credit card validation
• Date validation
• Email address validation
• Number validation
• Phone number validation
• Social security validation
• String validation
• Zip code validation
• Regular expression validation

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The Flex Builder is based on Eclipse, which has a significantly longer start up time compare to Visual Studio. Here are six tips that could help grease up your Flex IDE,

• Cap the maximum number of open editors. Go to Window -> Preference -> General -> Editors and select “Close editors automatically”
• Close all editors on exit. Go to Window -> Preferences -> Editors. Select “Close all editors on exit”.
• Close unused projects. Go to the Flex Navigator pane on the left. Right click on unused projects and select “Close Project”
• Disable code folding. Go to Window -> Preference -> Flex -> Editor. Uncheck “Code folding”.
• Raise the Java memory cap. Find either eclipse.ini (plugin install) or flexbuilder.ini (standalone install). Raise the -Xms and -Xmx parameters depending on how much physical memory you have.
• Get the Eclipse memory monitoring tool from Junginger, http://www.junginger.biz/eclipse/freemem.html

Flex let’s you build a kick ass UI every quickly. The Flash runtime creates a nice little sandbox so you don’t have to worry about tweaking your code for different browsers. The downside of this is that the Flash sandbox is completely opaque to the browser. If you have a Flex based photo album viewer, for example, and you want to show you friend a particular image in that album viewer. A regular user’s first instinct is to copy and send the URL, and we all know what’s going to happen next. Fortunately, deep linking in Flex is not difficult. This tutorial will show you how. 

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If you are interested in Flex deep linking, search engine optimization, and integration with Google Analytics, come to the Ottawa Flex user group this Wednesday evening. My presentation is built around SWFObject and SWFAddress, so it’s applicable to both Flex 2 and Flex 3 developers. As usual, there will be a lot of live coding and hands on demo, very few slides. Cheers! 

• Time: May 7th, 7pm 
• Location: 343 Preston St., Ottawa, ON