Professional BlazeDS: Creating Rich Internet Applications with Flex® and Java®

6.7. Advanced Extensions to BlazeDS Data Push

Although BlazeDS supports data pushing through its streaming and polling channels, its readiness as an enterprise-grade data pushing solution is suspect. The commercial alternative to BlazeDS, LifeCycle Data Services (LCDS) does not suffer from this problem though. LCDS has a direct scalable connectivity option in RTMP, which is an acronym for Real Time Messaging Protocol. RTMP is a proprietary protocol that is capable of high-performance data pushing and streaming. Earlier this year, Adobe announced that it would open the RTMP specification to the community. Until that happens and subsequently an implementation for RTMP becomes available for BlazeDS, from a scalability and reliability perspective, data push options in BlazeDS look weak.

So, your choices are to either go with LCDS or bring the robust Comet and NIO options into BlazeDS's fold. Going with LCDS is a commercial decision, since the product is licensed and the license fee is not inexpensive. Going with Comet requires the creation of new endpoints and plumbing changes in the core BlazeDS message broker and its artifacts. In this section, I will explain how one can incorporate Comet and NIO into BlazeDS. First, though, let me define these terms for you.

Comet, as a term, was proposed by Alex Russell of the Dojo project (www.dojotoolkit.org) in a blog post titled "Comet: Low Latency Data for the Browser." You can access Alex's blog post on Comet at http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/2006/03/comet-low-latency-data-for-the-browser/ ...