Adobe is open sourcing the remoting and messaging technologies in its commercial LiveCycle Data Services ES - Adobe's route to the Internet - as a new product called BlazeDS.

The widgetry, along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification, is being sent into the wild under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL v3), making Adobe the first major company to use the little-used new license.

Public betas are out at labs.adobe.com.

Adobe says that with BlazeDS developers can add data connectivity to RIAs for real-time collaboration and data-push capabilities that enable better decision-making and more engaging user experiences like guided self-service, live help, performance monitoring and incident tracking. They can also connect rich clients to existing server applications, including Java and Adobe ColdFusion components.

Adobe will offer LiveCycle Data Services, Community Edition as a subscription that includes certified builds of BlazeDS and access to Adobe enterprise support resources along with developer support, product warranty and infringement indemnity.

Pricing has been deferred until the general release of BlazeDS in early 2008.

The commercial version of the product, LiveCycle Data Services ES, includes enterprise-class capabilities for building advanced customer engagement applications that require massive messaging scalability, advanced client/server data synchronization, conflict detection/resolution, offline data management services for newfangled AIR applications and RIA-to-PDF generation.

According to David Mendels, senior vice-president of Adobe's Business Productivity Business Unit, "Contributing these technologies, including the AMF specification, to the open source community opens them up for other non-Java back-ends, helping to rapidly advance this important RIA feature set."

A spokesman for AMFPHP, the open source Flash remoting gateway for PHP, sees it as a "huge step forward" toward standardizing all the open source projects and technologies that offer remoting and messaging for Flash and Flex client applications and providing the basis of a common programming model to extend the reach of RIA developers across different server technologies compatibly and consistently.

Like the open source Adobe Flex, announced in April, BlazeDS source code, builds and licensing will be hosted by Adobe. The company is promising an open planning process that includes the publication of specifications for review and comment by the community. Contribution to the BlazeDS technologies, it says, will be encouraged initially through the public bug database, including feature requests and a community voting system. In time, Adobe plans to promote external contributors to "committer" status, so they can contribute code to the source tree.

BlazeDS and the AMF binary data protocol spec are supported by Adobe Flash Player, which Adobe figures is installed on more than 98% of all Internet-connected desktops.

Adobe also has new beta versions of AIR, Flex Builder 3 and Flex 3. They are also available as free downloads at labs.adobe.com.

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