Realtime ColdFusion Blog Notifications with Adobe Wave

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Realtime ColdFusion Blog Notifications with Adobe Wave

Receive real time notifications for updates on the blog aggregator ColdFusionBloggers.org with Adobe Wave. Just navigate to the ColdFusionBloggers website and click the badge in the lower right for Get alerts with Adobe Wave. Built on Adobe AIR, you can now use Adobe Wave as a single application to receive all your notifications in one place. Adobe Wave runs as a desktop application that sits in a corner of your screen.

The ColdFusion Bloggers website is created and maintained by the ubiquitous, prolific, and super nice guy Ray Camden, ColdFusion Jedi Master. Ray was among the very first to utilize Adobe Wave for the benefit of the ColdFusion community of developers.

Interview: John Shapiro about Adobe Wave

Interview: John Shapiro about Adobe Wave - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

Anyone remember Macromedia Central?

posted on 23 July, 2009 at 9:54 PM.
ColdFusion, Blogging, Adobe | Comments (11)

Comments

I should point out - this is NOT working now. I'm NOT pleased with some of the quirkiness of the API. I should just remove the badge - but I'm hoping I can correct it this weekend.

comment by Raymond Camden, posted at 7/24/09 11:42 AM

How does this differ from... subscribing through RSS?

Doesn't AIR uses http pulling? Not like we can get RTMP working through firewall and things.

comment by Henry Ho, posted at 7/24/09 2:20 PM

Adobe Wave is a more immediate notification system. RSS readers are an infrequent pull of data. When subscribing to Adobe Wave in ColdFusion Bloggers for example, when a new blog entry is detected by that blog aggregator site it will immediately send out a notice to any Wave clients that are open and running on the audience's desktops. So you would use it for RSS feeds for which you want instant updates. I haven't full explored the Wave information on Adobe, but I believe it can be used for purposes other than RSS feeds. It should be possible to use Adobe Wave on any business or personal website where you want to transmit information to your customers or audience, whether its a blog entry, new product availability, or perhaps a workshop waiting list.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 7/24/09 2:47 PM

As just a quick update:

If you do subscribe to CFB, you will be getting lots of tests. Sorry. I've got the code working in a test template on the server. It works perfectly. But the SAME exact code called from within cfthread (when processing the RSS stuff) is giving me a bad result. :(

comment by Raymond Camden, posted at 7/24/09 2:53 PM

This is pretty cool... I'd not heard of Adobe Wave before. So is this being targeted as a 'competitor' to RSS?

I'm going to have a play with the API this weekend.

comment by Web Design Lancaster, posted at 7/24/09 3:48 PM

I believe it can be used for any purpose for which you have an online audience, customer base, or network for which they want to have immediate access to breaking information from you. A local television news channel would be a good example where they could publish news alerts and subscribers would get it without any delay. RSS notification is just one use.

Another thing I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect that it uses LCDS behind the scenes. LiveCycle Datas Services is Adobe's product which uses either the RTMP or AMF protocol for transmitting (pushing) notifications (or any data) to all end clients that are actively listening. So if you have Adobe Wave open, you are constantly connected to the Adobe Wave Server.

When, in this case, ColdFusion bloggers gets a new blog update, it calls the Adobe Wave API and notifies it of the new entry. The Adobe Wave Server in turn broadcasts that out to all the people running Adobe Wave and have subscribed to CF bloggers. At least I think that's what they're doing.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 7/24/09 4:07 PM

RTMP is almost impossible though internet, intranet maybe. That means it'll resolve to use polling (same as RSS reader). Sorry, I'm still not convinced it is 'cool' yet.

comment by Henry Ho, posted at 7/24/09 4:32 PM

Here's another screenshot I took that shows a network trace of Adobe Wave. As I suspected, it is using LCDS over RTMP.

http://www.talkingtree.com/images/adobe_wave_rtmp_...

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 7/24/09 4:49 PM

I jumped the gun on the LCDS part. The screenshot definitely shows Adobe Wave using the RTMP protocol, but I overlooked the info field which indicates that its Flash Communication Server (shown as macromedia-fcs). Typically FCS is used for streaming media like audio and video, so I don't understand why Wave would use FCS rather than LCDS which is for pushing non-media type data.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 7/24/09 5:25 PM

WOOT! I got it working. Believe it or not, my code was trying to send a link value with a - in front. Adobe Wave's API rejected it as an invalid URL. -sigh-

comment by Raymond Camden, posted at 7/25/09 6:01 PM

Thanks for the update Ray.

Henry, your questions are better answered by someone from the Adobe Wave team. As it currently is there's not a huge advantage over RSS feed readers other than the immediacy of notification and that Wave is not limited in usage to an RSS reader and has many other applications.

One reason that it uses Flash Communication Server with RTMP may be that the product will be developed to include streaming media, in addition to the text notificaiton that it currently displays. Real time streaming media is definitely in a quantum leap up over RSS readers.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 7/25/09 7:43 PM

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