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I am currently using BlazeDS and covet the features of LCDS, but am never going to ask my customers to pay the $$$. Therefore I am considering starting to build these capabilities myself, using third party tools (dpHibernate?) or switching to GraniteDS.

Since, we are coming up on the two year anniversary of the last time this question was asked, I thought I'd ask it again.

Since that time, Spring-Flex has added Hibernate serialization support to BlazeDS to avoid lazy init exceptions. There is also a new BlazeDS configuration option to serialize read-only properties.

On the other hand, the Tide capability of GraniteDS seems to be maturing.

Plus the servlet 3.0 spec has been out for a while and maybe the additional support for NIO makes a difference for those who need push-type messaging.

So what's the latest?

Community
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Dave
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  • I never compared the BlazeDS to GraniteDS, so can't comment on that. But, if you consider alternatives, WebORB seems to be viable solution and more cost effective than LiveCycle. What features do you wish you had, but didn't? – JeffryHouser Dec 17 '10 at 00:13
  • I really wish I had the data services stuff. The ability to automatically handle lazy loads on the client, syncing modifications with the server, and super-fast, super-scalable push notifications. I really liked the GraniteDS GAS3 code generator and modified it to work with BlazeDS...and it got me think about completely jumping to Granite to get the benefits of Tide, et al. – Dave Dec 17 '10 at 02:27
  • BlazeDS doesn't actually handle any lazy init exceptions. The latest Spring BlazeDS does this. But it's not BlazeDS alone. – James Ward Dec 17 '10 at 06:28
  • @James - You are, of course, correct. Since I've used Spring-Flex from the beginning, I forgot to give credit where it was due. I've updated the question to reflect this. – Dave Dec 17 '10 at 13:47

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As of today (February 29, 2012), the GraniteDS community is still very active, the product evolves with new features on a regular basis and you can get developer and production support if you run into technical issues (see here) or just want a kind of insurance for critical deployements.

GraniteDS' messaging is based on asynchronous servlets, it is mature (introduced late 2007), proven in demanding production environments and much more scalable than the BlazeDS messaging stack (based on classical servlets).

Franck Wolff
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I've never used GraniteDS in production, but in my opinion it will always have more goodies than BlazeDS..unless some company will decide to make money from BlazeDS, like adding features, offering paid support & professional services. I think that Farata Systems is doing that but probably they are doing custom development for various clients..and not adding features into the mainline.

So probably from a productivity point of view GraniteDS can be a good choice - before choosing it I will double check if the community is quite active, if you receive answers to your technical question on their forums and most important if it's easy to understand the GraniteDS source code in case you run into technical difficulties.

Related to messaging I assume that if you wish a professional solution you will not choose niether BlazeDS not GraniteDS - there are dedicated solutions on the market. If not both should be ok (BlazeDS has a little bit more options from what I know).

By professional solutions I mean LCDS, Lightstreamer, Kaazing (and probably more). Some important features from LCDS which are not included BlazeDS: reliable messaging, message throttling, the ability to deploy the solution in architectures where DMZ is a must (http://www.lightstreamer.com/architecture.htm), the ability to connect also to non Flex clients (HTML).

Cornel Creanga
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Actually we (Farata Systems) continue improving our open source offering that works nicely BlazeDS. The latest version (4.2) of our tool called Clear Data Builder can generate CRUD applications in minutes based on Hibernate or POJOs. We hooked up Spring framework too - all BlazeDS client's requests are processed by Spring's DispatcherServlet.

Here's the Wiki Page http://cleartoolkit.com/dokuwiki/doku.php. There are screencasts and a workshop at the bottom of the main Wiki page that takes you step-by-step through the BlazeDS with Hibernate process and you'll also see how easy it is to connect the Spring Security module. We support data synchronization, hierarchical data collections, transactional updates, pagination, and more.

Apparently, we need to make more noise to make this nice (and free) product more popular :)

Yakov Fain
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