Live Help / Call Center Application with Flex and BlazeDS
I recently posted a number of examples (Yahoo Maps Collaboration and Collaborative Data Entry) showing how to use the BlazeDS / LCDS Message Service to build collaborative applications. In this post, I’m extending the Collaborative Forms application to provide an example of a more complete and real life “Live Help / Call Center” application.
Collaborative Data Entry with Flex and BlazeDS
After Yahoo Maps collaboration, here is another example of enabling collaboration in a Flex application using the publish/subscribe messaging infrastructure of BlazeDS.
This example demonstrates “collaborative forms” (or “collaborative data entry”). Users in different locations can fill in forms “together” in a real-time and in-context collaboration session: changes made by one user are automatically reflected in the other users application.
Yahoo Maps Collaboration using Flex and BlazeDS
Two years ago, I wrote a simple Google Maps collaboration example. The Flex application listened to Google Maps events to synchronize maps between different users. It also added nice collaboration features such as videoconferencing and a collaborative whiteboard overlaid on top of the map. In addition to demonstrating the real-time messaging capabilities of Flex, this application also illustrated Flex/Ajax integration using External Interface.
Two recent events prompted me to revisit this sample:
- Yahoo recently released an ActionScript 3 API for Yahoo Maps.
- Adobe recently released the Remoting and Messaging features of LiveCycle Data Services as an Open Source project named BlazeDS.
So, I updated the sample to work with the Yahoo Maps ActionScript API and BlazeDS (or LCDS). No need to communicate between Ajax and Flex in this version since the rendering of the map is entirely done within the Flex application.
