Fresh from the Lab: LiveCycle Data Services

Some of you may have noticed that there's a new product on labs.adobe.com called LiveCycle Data Services 2.5. Formerly known as Flex Data Services, the new moniker denotes the push by Adobe to get developers to see the potential for integration between their products.

Never heard of LiveCycle? You're not alone. Most developers familiar with Adobe's products know little about this emerging product line. In a nutshell, LiveCycle is a set of enterprise server-side products which facilitate business processes and workflows for medium and large organizations. LCDS is not the full LiveCycle server, but a smaller distribution containing a subset LiveCycle's functionality. Why should you, a Flex or ColdFusion developer, care? Because the front end to these services can be PDF files (traditional LiveCycle), HTML or, you guessed it, Flex & Apollo.

So LiveCycle Data Services will continue to offer all the features of FDS, but also include additional gems such as PDF generation on the server side.

If you're interested in digging a bit deeper into LiveCycle, a preview of the latest release, called LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 8, is available at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/espreview/.

There's a lot of new stuff to learn between these two products. If you have any questions, I'll try to answer them for you here or in a separate post.