This one via Greg Wilson. LiveCycle team member Gary Gilchrist and longtime LiveCycle partner Avoka are both blogging.

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.

The pre-release of LiveCycle ES Update 1 is available. To gain access to the pre-release, fill in this form.

Fellow Adobe evangelist Greg Wilson has posted an excellent 14 minute video introducing LiveCycle ES. This is one of the best high-level technical introductions to LiveCycle that I have seen, and is highly recommended.

James Ward and I will be in Bangalore, India, later this month, and will both be presenting at the Adobe RIA Architect Summit 2008, a free full day event dedicated to Flex, AIR, Data Services, ColdFusion, and more. Registration is now open.

Dr. Dobb's has announced the winners of the 18th annual Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards, and ColdFusion 8 won in the Web Development category! Yeah! Other Adobe winners are Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (Productivity Winner in Enterprise Tools category), Adobe Device Central CS3 (Productivity Winner in Mobile Development Tools category), and Adobe Captivate 3 (Productivity Winner in Utilities category).

Tom Jordahl has announced that he'll be presenting a Connect session tomorrow on BlazeDS to The Online ColdFusion Meetup Group. He'll cover exactly what you get in BlazeDS and how it relates to LiveCycle Data Services, and will detail some of the reasons why you might want to use these server technologies. He will also explain how ColdFusion developers can take advantage of BlazeDS in their applications.

David Rutter works with both ColdFusion and LiveCycle, and he started blogging last month. David recently posted blog entries on how to use Acrobat Reader Extensions with ColdFusion, and how to enable Acrobat Shared Review.

With the big announcement of the release of open source BlazeDS on Labs, ColdFusion users have been trying to figure out which option is better for them - the full LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) which is included with ColdFusion 8, or the new open source BlazeDS option.

BlazeDS is, for the most part, a subset of the full LCDS. It supports remoting and messaging, and it can be used with ColdFusion. And it's free. However, BlazeDS does not support data management (including the data synchronization functionality) which is one of the most appealing aspects of LCDS for ColdFusion users.

ColdFusion 8 can be installed with an embedded LCDS engine. If a license is provided then it is a full LCDS implementation, otherwise it is LCDS Express which has a single CPU license restriction.

So, should ColdFusion users stick with the integrated LCDS or use the new open-source BlazeDS?

If all you need is messaging (the ability to push from ColdFusion to the client), then BlazeDS may be a better option, if for no other reason than there is no license to worry about. But, if data management is important then LCDS is the better option.

BlazeDS is an open source Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Flex and AIR applications. Previously these were only available as part of LiveCycle Data Services, and today we announced that BlazeDS will be released under the LGPL v3, and along with it we'll also be releasing the specification for AMF (on which Remoting is built). BlazeDS is now on Labs, and Christophe Coenraets has posted lots of details.

NATO has announced that it will be using Flex and LiveCycle Data Services to create a system that will "reduce the time it takes crew members to prepare for flights. Once airborne, pilots will also benefit from the swift relay of data from 80 different sources - from emergency flight routes to information on their local environment." (Story on BusinessWire and computing.co.uk).