In my opinion this is THE biggest announcement that I’ve heard from Adobe since the release Flex 2 in the Summer of 2006. This is bigger than open sourcing Flex. This is bigger than AIR.  Here’s the news: Adobe is open sourcing AMF protocol and messaging under LGPL V3.  Christophe Coenraets, a Senior Flex Evangelist from Adobe, told me about this new free product called BlazeDS.

While many people are using Flex for creating cool widgets that can make your Web page prettier, enterprise Flex developers have to deal with such boring things as bringing data to the client. And they want to do this as fast as possible. AMF3 protocol allows your Web application to send the data over the wire at lease 10 times faster than a regular HTTP.

Basically, Adobe extracted the libraries that supported AMF protocol from LiveCycle Data Services ES and gave it to us for free. On top of that, BlazeDS introduces a new channel for messaging: DHTTPStreaming that will support messaging on top of HTTP.  In this mode the Web browser keeps the connection open. RTMP protocol will not be open sourced at this time.

Like the news? I know. And here's something for dessert.  Adobe is publishing a full specification of the AMF3 protocol, which will allow anyone to implement Flex remoting for any server-side programming language.

Based on my experience, the price tag of LCDS licenses was too hefty for many small and mid-size businesses. They'd love to have faster communication with POJO , but purchasing just the communication piece was not available. Now you'll get it for free.