Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 55. The Message Service

The Message Service component of LiveCycle Data Services makes it easy to build Flex applications that consume or produce messages. These messages are simply packets of data containing anything of interest to an application. For example, a stock market prices application might consume messages containing the latest stock prices, while a chat feature built into an application could produce and consume chat messages while users converse with one another.

Message Service Overview

This chapter covers the Message Service in detail. It begins by explaining the basic workings of the technology, and then explains how to use the main client and server-side features before diving into three sample applications. The first of these is a chat client that consumes and produces messages, and supports multiple chat rooms; the second is a live stock prices client that uses the LCDS Java APIs to push pricing messages out from the server; the third demonstrates Java Message Service (JMS) integration and the PDF document generation capabilities of LCDS.

Message Service Technology Explained

This section explains the basic workings of the Message Service in preparation for learning how to use the client- and server-side features to build real messaging applications. Figure 55-1 shows the main components of such an application.

Publish and Subscribe

Flex and AIR clients can both interact with the Flex Message Service, first by publishing (or sending) messages to a Message Service ...