Adobe have released an update to LiveCycle Data Services and a new release of BlazeDS. Both  have been made available for download and the updated docs have been posted.

New since LiveCycle Data Services 3.0:

Alignment with Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4
The LiveCycle Data Services 3.1 supports the released versions of Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4.

Extensibility and increased flexibility for model-driven development
The ability to generate and customize model-driven application code is much improved in LiveCycle Data Services 3.1. In addition to generating and customizing client-side ActionScript code and model-driven forms, you can generate and customize server-side Java code. You can also extract and customize the code generation templates for the generated client-side and server-side code.

The Modeler provides new user interface features for code generation. You can choose the types of code to generate, which code generation templates to extract, and where to save the generated code and templates.

For more information, see “Model-driven applications” in the “Using LiveCycle Data Services” guide.

Improved offline data management support
LiveCycle Data Services 3.1 provides major improvements in offline data management support, including:

* Offline queries using SQLite in AIR clients
* Encryption of local data in SQLite
* Model-driven development of offline applications

For more information, see “Occasionally connected clients” and “Model-driven applications” in the “Using LiveCycle Data Services” guide.

Wider platform support
LiveCycle Data Services 3.1 provides support for additional platforms. For more information, see the LiveCycle Data Services product page on the Adobe website.

Many fixed issues
Many fixed bugs and usability issues from LiveCycle Data Services 3.0 and earlier releases.

Where are the bits?

Check out the LiveCycle Data Services ES3 product page on Adobe.com:
http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/dataservices

Get the LiveCycle Data Services 3.1 bits here:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=livecycle_dataservices

Get the LiveCycle Data Services 3.1 Application Modeler Plug-in for FlashBuilder 4 here:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=lc_app_model

Get the BlazeDS 4 bits here:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=lc_blazeds

LiveCycle Data Services 3.1 / BlazeDS documentation:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/9.0/lc_ds_list.html

David Harris from the Auckland ColdFusion User Group has organised a User Group meeting that coincides with my visit to Auckland this week. This means I’ll be able to show off some of the new Adobe tools!

The meeting is being held at the Auckland Media Design School and I’ll be first showing the new Flash Catalyst beta, the upcoming improvements in Flash Builder (was Flex Builder) & ColdFusion and even a quick look at the new LiveCycle Data Services beta.

The feedback on these new products has been very positive,  so come see what the fuss is about, share a beer (David assures me that there will be at least one!), and network with other Designers & Developers.

Register here: http://nzroadshow.eventbrite.com/

Over the last 2 weeks I travelled around Australia & New Zealand with the team from BEA to meet up with a whole bunch of architects and developers. We covered Auckland, Wellington, Sydney, Canberra & Melbourne (I missed Brisbane) and met quite a few people as BEA showed off their latest SOA capabilities and I showed how easy it is to extend existing backend systems out to the internet using Flash as the client.

In my demonstration I used Doug McCune’s CoverFlow component as example how Flex / Flash can be used to create any type of experience that your creative mind can imagine.

From a data integration perspective, I also gave a brief overview of how LiveCycle Data Services can be used by taking advantage of Flex Remoting, effectively bringing my methods defined in POJOs sitting on my app server all the way to my client, without wrapping in SOAP and unwrapping.

You can watch the Connect recording here;
http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p12413445/

If you feel like having a play with Flex and/or LiveCycle, check out these links;
Flex.org – Great Flex info
Flex Builder product page
LiveCycle Data Services product page
Adobe Devnet

or check out another walkthrough on the BEA Dev2Dev site here: http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2008/04/enterprise-ria-flex-weblogic-server.html