Adobe announced this week plans to release the source code of BlazeDS, a high-performance data and messaging framework based on Adobe LiveCycle Data Services that enables communication between Flex applications and backend web servers. The source code will be available from Adobe Labs early next year and will be distributed under the permissive LGPL v3 license.
Adobe has also published documentation (PDF) for the Action Message Format (AMF) binary data protocol, the underlying format used for BlazeDS communication services. AMF dates back to 2001 when it was first introduced in Flash Player 6 and was overhauled for Flash Player 9 when Adobe moved to its new ActionScript virtual machine. AMF is primarily designed to facilitate binary serialization of ActionScript objects and types. The best way to describe it would be to say that it's like the ActionScript equivalent of JSON, but in binary instead of plain text.
