Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced plans to release source code for its remoting and messaging technologies under a new open source product named BlazeDS.

Now, developers can connect to back-end distributed data, as well as push data in real-time to Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR applications, for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences. Previously available only as part of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES, the technologies included in BlazeDS, along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification, are being contributed to open source under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL v3), and are available immediately as public betas on Adobe Labs.

With BlazeDS, developers can add data connectivity to RIAs for real-time collaboration and data-push capabilities, including guided self-service, live help, performance monitoring, and incident tracking. Also, developers can connect rich clients to existing server applications, including Java and Adobe ColdFusion components.

The commercial version of the product, LiveCycle Data Services ES, includes enterprise class capabilities.

"The combination of BlazeDS with Flex and Adobe AIR helps reduce the time it takes for developers to build responsive and highly innovative RIAs that deliver rich, dynamic, branded content and applications across all major browsers and operating systems," said David Mendels, senior vice president, Business Productivity Business Unit at Adobe. "Contributing these technologies, including the AMF specification, to the open source community opens them up for other non-Java backends, helping to rapidly advance this important RIA feature set."

BlazeDS and the AMF binary data protocol specification are supported by Adobe Flash Player. The public beta versions are available immediately as free downloads from labs.adobe.com.