Recently in LiveCycle ES Category

Adobe recently planted the seed for improved cooperation within the scattered LiveCycle community. In an effort to leverage the social web to combine our collective efforts to get the word out about LiveCycle and build up buzz and a shared base of common knowledge from which we can all benefit.

This "seed", as I call it, is LiveCycle Café, a social AIR app that provides all the tools to start sharing and gaining knowledge on the power of LiveCycle, leveraging Adobe corporate documentation, forums, live chat and various community contributions via a built-in RSS reader. The premise is that beginners and experts alike from across the globe (is that a contradiction?) will use it to connect with each other. LiveCycle is a very powerful but large set of tools, so gaining access to the many experts who are out there toiling in obscurity (some of them are toiling a few cubes away from me, here at 4Point) is a great asset. As we well know, we can only succeed by standing on the shoulders of giants, so having instant access to the cream of the LiveCycle crop can do nothing but make us better at what we do.

After the success of Tour de Flex (which just recently celebrated its 5,000,000th sample viewed) the fine folks at Adobe have released Tour de Livecycle, a one stop shop for discovering the many, many facets of the Livecycle Enterprise Suite. Hopefully this initiative will help put this powerful yet underrated offering from Adobe onto people's radar screens.

There's no point in me going into what Livecycle is, but suffice it to say that any self-respecting enterprise Flex developer owes it to him/herself to seriously consider gaining some Livecycle-related experience. "There be gold in them thar skills."

As documented in the PDFOpenParameter Guide, it is possible to influence the display of PDFs you are opening on the command-line or through a URL using parameters. I found this to be a very cool bit of info. By appending certain parameters using the "#" character, you can have a good amount of control over the display of the PDF document. No fancy programming required.

Scenario 1: Search Results

Let's say that you are providing full-text search functionality for a set of PDF documents (as we are for a current project using a LiveCycle ECM Connector). You can pass the search terms into the PDF reader upon opening the file, making the Reader run a full-text search within the document. It's very cool.

e.g. Searching for "PDF" and "document" in the above PDF using the "search" parameter gives this:

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/acrobat/PDFOpenParameters.pdf#search="PDF document"

Scenario 2: Hiding the tool-bar

It's self-explanatory: top toolbar begone!

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/acrobat/PDFOpenParameters.pdf#toolbar=0

There are many other parameters to try out, so get to it!

"Sandbox in the Sky"... sounds like a Miyazaki movie, but it isn't. It's one phrase aptly used to describe a new project underway at Adobe and made possible with help from Amazon Web Services.

The two tech giants have partnered in creating a new "cloud-ish" LiveCycle ES development environment for use by members of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program. This tool promises to allow developers to gain access to fully-configured LiveCycle development environments with the click of a button (must be a very big button).

The service is called "Adobe LiveCycle ES Developer Express" and leverages Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" (aka EC2), as well as Amazon's S3 (aka "Simple Storage Solution") data service offering.

I haven't yet seen this running, so I can't comment on the performance or how reasonable it is to use, but kudos to Adobe and Amazon for being so ambitious. I can just imagine how many integration headaches they've had to go through to get this going... especially considering how much of a steaming load of grief LiveCycle can sometimes be to get running locally with anything but a vanilla configuration.

Check out the press release here.