ColdFusion Muse

Webmaniacs Live - Ben Forta Keynote, Monday

I'm here at Webmaniacs soaking in knowledge from various CF luminaries. This morning, a harried but erudite Ben Forta gave us a very thin sketch of Centaur (the upcoming CF 9) and an overview of the under utilized but extremely powerful Live Cycle Data Services (LCDS - and no, it's not a denomination). I don't suppose I ever grasped the nuances between remote object calls from flex (flash remoting and "flexgateway") and integration with data services.

I always knew that the "express" version of LCDS was limited to a single processor. But I had assumed (wrongly as it turned out) that LCDS was really the new label for the venerable old "flash remoting" - meaning the translation engine for AMF3 requests. What I had not realized was that the ES version allows for messaging and data synchronization services "out of the box" without a 10 thousand dollar license upgrade. While the processor limitation is significant in some cases where the load is expected to be heavy, in many cases it is a tolerable condition. Consider, for example, a typical intranet application. Even with a few hundred users a single dual or quad core processor would no doubt be enough to handle expected load.

Of course it's also possible that I missed some important cost aspect of ES - or that not all the features are enabled on CF standard and require enterprise. That gives me a bit more digging to do. Perhaps I'll look up Ben Forta and ask him for some clarification. The problem is that his face glows so brightly I have to shield my eyes (See Exodus 34).