Thoughts, ideas, tips, musings, and pontifications (not necessarily in that order) by Ben Forta ...
NOTE: This is my personal blog, and the opinions and statements voiced here are my own.
LiveCycle Data Services 2.6 is now in public beta. The update includes better support for Flex 3, support for AIR offline storage and data management, improved performance, and more. And yes, it can be used with ColdFusion. You can get LCDS 2.6 beta from Labs.
I read a blog some time ago that mentioned that one of the biggest drawbacks of this server is that it does not track the clients "individually". In other words, you cannot use this free version to build a IM app where it will know which client to send the message to - it will broadcast it to all cleints. Is this the same now or has this changed?
Rick, The message service keeps track of individual clients. You can get that information at the server-side using MessageService.getSubscriberIds(). You can definitely build an IM client with either BlazeDS or LCDS. There are several approaches to do this: you could use subtopics (i.e. one subtopic for each one-to-one chat conversation), or the selector attribute of the consumer object. Something like: consumer.selector = "userId='" + userId +”’”. I recently posted some collaboration examples on my blog at http://coenraets.org. There is also an older chat example here: http://coenraets.org/blog/2006/10/building-collabo...
It was the BlazeDS that I had read about that had that limitation - not the paid version of LiveCycle Data Services. That must have been misinformation on the blog that I came across. I think that if there are decent examples out there on using BlazeDS with AJAX, that would be a powerful kick-start for the product.
1. I've been working with ColdFusion XMPP Event Gateway and ejabberd (known to probably be the most scalable open source IM server on the market today based on actual site implementations). With BlazeDS, is there any telling right now how it would compare to an IM server like ejabberd with concurrent user sessions / # messages per second, etc.
2. Do you know of any available pure AJAX implementations of BlazeDS?
Rick, BlazeDS and LCDS support a variety of channels: HTTP Streaming, long polling, polling etc. and also NIO channels and RTMP in LCDS only. Performance is going to vary significantly based on the channel you use. We are in the process of running benchmarks and should be able to communicate more specific numbers in the near future. In terms of Ajax support, both BlazeDS and LCDS come with an Ajax client library. Christophe
The message service keeps track of individual clients. You can get that information at the server-side using MessageService.getSubscriberIds(). You can definitely build an IM client with either BlazeDS or LCDS. There are several approaches to do this: you could use subtopics (i.e. one subtopic for each one-to-one chat conversation), or the selector attribute of the consumer object. Something like: consumer.selector = "userId='" + userId +”’”. I recently posted some collaboration examples on my blog at http://coenraets.org. There is also an older chat example here: http://coenraets.org/blog/2006/10/building-collabo...
Christophe
It was the BlazeDS that I had read about that had that limitation - not the paid version of LiveCycle Data Services. That must have been misinformation on the blog that I came across. I think that if there are decent examples out there on using BlazeDS with AJAX, that would be a powerful kick-start for the product.
1. I've been working with ColdFusion XMPP Event Gateway and ejabberd (known to probably be the most scalable open source IM server on the market today based on actual site implementations). With BlazeDS, is there any telling right now how it would compare to an IM server like ejabberd with concurrent user sessions / # messages per second, etc.
2. Do you know of any available pure AJAX implementations of BlazeDS?
BlazeDS and LCDS support a variety of channels: HTTP Streaming, long polling, polling etc. and also NIO channels and RTMP in LCDS only. Performance is going to vary significantly based on the channel you use. We are in the process of running benchmarks and should be able to communicate more specific numbers in the near future. In terms of Ajax support, both BlazeDS and LCDS come with an Ajax client library.
Christophe
Much appreciated. Thanks for taking the time out. I cant wait for the benchmarks!