Adobe is now offering developers subscribed to the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program access to their own virtual instance of LiveCycle ES through LiveCycle ES Developer Express. LiveCycle ES Developer Express provides a pre-configured, virtualized installation of LiveCycle ES Solution Components in a self-contained development environment. LiveCycle ES Developer Express is hosted on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). AEDP members can test, build, store and develop their applications in a cloud-base environment where all LiveCycle ES applications are pre-configured and running. The Adobe Enterprise Developer Program will offer a minimum of 10 hours of runtime per month, with additional hours to be available separately.

What is cloud computing and why is it important?

The term cloud computing, as used by some commentators, refers to the use of scalable, real-time, Internet-based information technology services and resources. This somewhat nebulous concept incorporates software as a service (SaaS), utility computing, Web 2.0 and other recent technology trends. The common theme stresses reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of users, without them needing knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. An often-quoted example is Google Apps, which provides common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on Google servers.

The cloud element of cloud computing derives from a metaphor used for the Internet, from the way it is often depicted in computer network diagrams, and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.

How do Adobe and Amazon fit into the equation?

Adobe and Amazon have similar goals. They both want to gain more share of the enterprise market. Amazon needs to convince the enterprise that its version of the cloud is capable of supporting the demands of enterprise applications. On the other hand Adobe wants to convince the developers who already use AWS that LiveCycle is the platform of choice for the enterprise.

What is Adobe LiveCycle?

Adobe’s LiveCycle Enterprise Suite is a J2EE-based server software product used to build applications that automate a broad range of business processes for enterprises and government agencies.

LiveCycle combines technologies for data capture, information assurance, document output, content services, and process management to deliver solutions such as account opening, services and benefits enrollment, correspondence management, request for proposal processes, and other manual based workflows.

What are Amazon Webservices?

Since early 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has provided companies of all sizes with an infrastructure web services platform in the cloud. With AWS you can requisition compute power, storage, and other services–gaining access to a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services as your business demands them. With AWS you have the flexibility to choose whichever development platform or programming model makes the most sense for the problems you’re trying to solve. You pay only for what you use, with no up-front expenses or long-term commitments, making AWS a cost-effective way to deliver applications to customers and clients.

How do they fit together?

Essentially, Adobe has put a Red Hat JBoss J2EE stack on AWS and deployed LiveCycle on the stack. Adobe state that this platform is purely for prototyping, developing and testing applications, rather than production environments, but that is likely to change.

The future

Deploying LiveCycle on AWS has wider implications, not only for Adobe products. By setting up a J2EE stack on AWS it makes it possible to deploy any Java-based application; yes that does mean one developed in Adobe’s ColdFusion or indeed its chief rival, Railo.

It is clear that RIAs offer the potential to fundamentally change the user experience and in doing so, yield significant business benefits. However, in order for RIAs to be widely employed, and for more companies to receive these kinds of returns, technologies to build RIAs will need to appeal to a wider range of developers. The ability to cost effectively create rich, engaging user experiences that support corporate objectives and reach a broader developer audience without sacrificing development productivity require a new generation of RIA tools. These tools are being developed by a large number of organisations with Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Sun leading the way with the AIR/Flash/Flex combination, Silverlight, Gears, Quicktime and JavaFX respectively.

The new generation of RIA tools being developed by the likes of Adobe and Microsoft must do the following to allow developers to truely harness the power of RIAs in the commercial environment:

1. Allow developers to write applications using familiar development models to utilise and extend their current skills without requiring them to adopt entirely new or different skills
2. Use standard and standards-based technologies
3. Use industry specific programming models and patterns
4. Use and/or leverage the existing IT infrastructure through wrap and reuse rather than rip and replace
5. Provide pervasive, familiar programming models and an expressive user interface across platforms and devices; and
6. Allow developers to create a solution that delivers scalable, secure, high performance solutions that are bandwidth efficient

These new RIA tools will need to provide the features that enhance IT developer’s abilities to be more creative and to accomplish RIA development with the same or less effort than the tools they use to create other types of applications. What is required are the tools that can help developers achieve these objectives without relying on only HTML or other scripting languages, or having to learn a completely new development approach.

Two vendors which have the technology and capaibility to fully deliver Rich Internet Applications are Adobe and Microsoft. With Microsoft’s Silverlight and XAML, developing rich internet applications to run on Windows platforms will progress at a fast rate. In turn, Adobe has had a head start with the aquisition of Macromedia and the subsequent addition of Flash and Flex to its product offering. Flash and its relative ubiquity across platforms and devices ensures that RIA development and production will be accessible to a large user base and as such puts Adobe at a distinct advantage over Microsoft.

We are in a period of expanding opportunity for Internet and intranet applications. The growth in adoption and usage of the Internet has acted as a driver behind technology spending, spawned such terms as Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Web Services, and enterprise integration trends that seek to combine back-office infrastructures with new front-office applications and the Internet.

Integral to this is the need to communicate better with employees, customers, suppliers, and partners. Intranet applications, including enterprise information portals and employee facing applications, are increasingly depended upon to share information across a company, while outwardly focused extranet applications seek to more tightly bind networks of partners, suppliers and customers and make communication, business transactions and support easier.

A key reason Web applications cannot represent these types of complexity is because of the limitations of HTML pages. The Internet grew up on the notion of a network of loosely coupled, unintelligent clients that communicate with increasingly intelligent servers by sending requests for pages. The emergence of Rich Internet Applications (RIA‘s) has served to blur the distinction between the desktop and the Web and has resulted in smart, powerful and dynamic user interfaces. RIA‘s seek to combine the best of the desktop, Web and communication technologies.

As one would expect, the driving forces behind Rich Internet Applications are the big guns in the technology and Web industry; namely Adobe, Google and Microsoft. Each company has produced their own RIA platforms:

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA‘s.

Applications can be built using the following technologies:

• Flash / Flex / ActionScript
• HTML / JavaScript / CSS / AJAX
• Combination of these technologies
• PDF can be leveraged with any application

Adobe Integrated Runtime can be found at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Google Gears

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.

Google Gears consists of three modules that address the core challenges in making web applications work offline.

• LocalServer Cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally
• Database Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• WorkerPool Make your web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously

Google Gears can be found at http://gears.google.com

Micrsoft Silverlight

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

Microsoft Silverlight can be found at http://silverlight.net

Frameworks can help promote good development practices, standards, and a sound foundation for creating an application.

In this article I list a number of these frameworks, but I will leave you to compare them, and decide which you may want to adopt.

Fusebox

An Historically Strong Framework

Fusebox is a popular framework for building ColdFusion and PHP web applications. “Fuseboxers” find that the framework releases them from much of the drudgery of writing applications and enables them to focus their efforts on creating great, customer-focused software.

Fusebox provides a small set of ‘core’ files and large amount of structure which is helpful to developers. It emphasizes separation of presentation from logic and uses a readily understandable vocabulary for modeling websites, namely circuits, fuses and switches.

http://www.fusebox.org

Mach-II

Mach II is a web-application framework developed by Hal Helms and Ben Edwards that evolved out of a desire to create a framework that specifically addressed maintenance issues using an OO style. Mach II is based on an Implicit Invocation Architecture and directly supports the MVC design pattern.

http://www.mach-ii.com

Model-Glue

Model-Glue helps you build Object-Oriented ColdFusion applications based on the Model View Controller pattern. It’s designed to be easy to use and play well with others, like Tartan.

http://www.model-glue.com

onTap

The onTap framework is an Open Source Framework for quickly developing powerful web applications using Adobe’s ColdFusion application server. The framework itself bears a marked resemblance to the recently buzzy Ruby on Rails.

http://www.fusiontap.com

TheHUB

TheHUB, like other application development frameworks, utilizes the notion of a central hub template that all requests for the application pass through. That cental hub is the point or place within the application that the processing of all code hinges upon. The code simply checks for a query string and then reads the parameters passed to handle template loading and screen rendering.

http://www.codesweeper.com

Tartan

Tartan is a command-driven service framework for ColdFusion. It was built to help produce the service layer within a larger application architecture which relies on strict separation or layering of functionality.

All access to the underlying business logic is controlled by public services which are available locally as CFCs and remotly via Flash Remoting and SOAP web services. A service can be composed of any number of commands, each of which implements a discreet operation within the application. These contain the core logic for the application. Commands can communicate with databases via DAOs, manipulate values received from the client, execute other commands and even communicate with services available on other remote servers.

At the center of Tartan are 6 Core classes : LocalServiceProxy, LocalService, Command, DAO, ValueObject and ExceptionHandler. They provide most of the functionality of the framework, and must be extended by the application developer.

http://www.tartanframework.org

ColdSpring

ColdSpring is a framework for CFCs (ColdFusion Components).

ColdSpring’s core focus is to make the configuration and dependencies of your CFCs easier to manage. ColdSpring uses the “inversion-of-control” pattern to “wire” your CFCs together. Inversion-of-control provides many advantages over traditional approaches to assembling your application’s model. Also part of ColdSpring is the first Aspect-Oriented-Programming (AOP) framework for CFCs.

http://www.coldspringframework.org

UPDATE: Since creating this blog post many years ago, two more frameworks have been released that require an honourable mention.

ColdBox

My New Framework of Choice

ColdBox is an event-driven conventions based ColdFusion Framework. It provides you with a set of reusable code and tools that you can use to increase your productivity, and it provides you with a development standard when working in a team environment. It makes use of an MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern and an extensive array of patterns for its operations such as Factories, Helpers, Workers, etc. And since it is based on CFCs it does not rely on an XML dialect.

NB. ColdBox also takes advantage of ColdSpring or Lightwire.

http://www.coldboxframework.com

Lightwire

Lightwire is a very lightweight Direct Injection (DI)/Inversion of Control (IoC) engine for directly injecting dependencies into singletons and transient business object. The framework is optimised to create transient objects as well as singletons and allows for programmatic as well as XML configuration. It is the lightweight framework for people who’d like to put more logic in their beans and less in their service layer.

http://lightwire.riaforge.org

Bryan Kaiser & Michael Haynie talk about a lot of news.

Links:

• Open letter to the Adobe dev community
• Using atomic init() calls with CFCs
• Technote – Graphing service on J2EE not available
• Article 1 of 3 on test driven development
• Web application security cheatsheet
• Short review of CF7′s features
• SQL formatters
• Nice set of free icons
• Changing styles of your web services
• Connecting ColdFusion to Visual FoxPro
• foXpose, a firefox extension that thumbnails your tabs
• Tab Preview, another firefox tab thumbnail extension
• Sun’s whitepaper on Java tuning
• Data Manager CFC
• Digitalbackcountry.com

All access to the underlying business logic is controlled by public services which are available locally as CFCs and remotely via Flash Remoting and SOAP web services. A service can be composed of any number of commands, each of which implements a discreet operation within the application. These contain the core logic for the application. Commands can communicate with databases via DAOs, manipulate values received from the client, execute other commands and even communicate with services available on other remote servers.

At the center of Tartan are 6 Core classes : LocalServiceProxy, LocalService, Command, DAO, ValueObject and ExceptionHandler. They provide most of the functionality of the framework, and must be extended by the application developer.

Overview and Explanation

The driving need behind Tartan was a production application that needed to transfer data between 5 different databases and 3 different applications. There was a complex set of DAO classes and a faade class that provided access. Each fa ade class had a single public method called “execute” that would simply take arguments and return a result.

This concept worked well, but obviously had its limitations. So Tartan was created to be able to quickly and easily add new commands to services, and new services to the system.

Tartan is described as a “command-driven service framework.” What does that mean? In this context a “service” is a set of commands that have commonality, and a “command” is a method that executes any number of other methods and returns a result. It’s that simple. A service such as “televisionViewer” could include a command such as “getListings” which would, based on locality data provided either by a config file or a method argument, check local listings and return a collection of data regarding current television listings.

To further explain the concept of “commands,” we could offer that method a second argument such as “returnType” and return the listings as an array of structures, a CF query object, or an XML file. By adding commands from granular to broad, we can incorporate them into sequences. For instance, if we wanted to offer the findMyShow command, we could have it first execute getListings, then parse the resulting data and determine if our show is on soon or not.

By doing this carefully and with some planning, we develop a very simple interface between our application and any persistant storage mechanism and/or business objects, with the ability to filter, alter, or convert our results before they’re returned to the caller. If we start with granular and move to broad commands, we maintain the flexibility and encapsulation of an OO design, but gain the convenience and natural-thinking appeal of procedural programming.