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ADOBE LIVECYCLE ES TECHNOLOGY SUMMARY

Composed of foundation technology, development tools, and solution components, Adobe® LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite software is an integrated J2EE server solution that provides everything you need to create customer engagement applications. And because LiveCycle ES is J2EE compatible and runs on industry-standard operating systems and Java™ application servers, you can easily integrate LiveCycle ES applications with your existing IT environment.

Foundation

Adobe LiveCycle ES Foundation

Adobe LiveCycle ES Foundation software provides the underlying server capabilities that enable the deployment, execution, and management of LiveCycle ES solution components. Included with the purchase of any LiveCycle ES solution component, LiveCycle ES Foundation consists of:

Service container
Foundation services
Administration tools
Central repository

Use LiveCycle ES Foundation to deploy short-lived processes that combine a number of solution components. For example, you can create a PDF form, apply a security policy to it, certify the document, and finally enable the form for basic form fill-in and import/export of data using Adobe Reader® software. A short-lived process can be reused in other processes once it has been created. It can also be invoked by a number of different mechanisms. For developers, a process can be invoked through a Java API, web services, and Microsoft .NET. LiveCycle software supports the WS-I Basic Profile 1.1 standard and has tested interoperability with .NET and the web services stacks supported by the major application server vendors as well as that found within the Sun™ Java Software Development Kit (SDK). LiveCycle ES also allows developers of Adobe Flex™ software using ActionScript™ to directly invoke processes (as well as solution components) through Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES software. Other common forms of invocation include watched folders and e-mail.

Service container

The service container provides the common runtime environment to support all solution components and associated services. It provides an event framework that enables business events to be defined. LiveCycle ES supports a number of different event types, such as asynchronous events, exception events, and timer events. Events can be raised or received within processes or linked to external events on a messaging bus through integration with Java Message Service (JMS).

Foundation services

LiveCycle ES Foundation has a number of out-of-box services that allow integration with common IT infrastructures. Common services include:

Query a user directory through LDAP
Invoke web services
Read/write data to a relational database through SQL queries
Send/receive e-mail through common standards such as SMTP, POP3, and IMAP
Send/receive messages over a JMS queue
Read/write files from a file system or using FTP protocol

Administration tools

To simplify the management of your LiveCycle deployment, LiveCycle ES Foundation includes:

LiveCycle Configuration Manager
LiveCycle Administration Console

LiveCycle Configuration Manager is used to configure and deploy solution components, including applying service packs and emergency patches.

LiveCycle Administration Console is a web-based portal used by systems administrators to manage the deployment and configuration of LiveCycle ES applications, configure users and groups and their associated permissions, and configure and fine-tune the server settings such as port numbers and log files. LiveCycle Administration Console also provides the ability to manage each solution component, such as configuring polices for Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management ES software and reassigning tasks as part of Adobe LiveCycle Process Management ES software.

Central repository

When you deploy an application, all of the information goes in the LiveCycle ES Foundation central repository, and all of the systems in a single or clustered J2EE system get their components from the repository. This greatly simplifies application deployment and enables many time-saving capabilities, such as form fragment libraries for reuse, auditing for management, and versioning for structured development and deployment. The ability to move archives (groups of related assets that can be packaged together) eliminates many manual tasks. And by relating assets in the repository, these applications can be exported and transferred to other LiveCycle systems.

Tools

Related products

Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES

Included in every LiveCycle ES installation and embedded within LiveCycle Workbench ES, Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES software provides robust and intuitive tools for creating interactive forms and documents.

Adobe Flex Builder 2

You can easily integrate Adobe Flex Builder™ 2 software (sold separately) with the LiveCycle Workbench ES environment as well. Using Flex Builder, you can develop your own RIAs or create custom additions to forms created in LiveCycle Designer ES and viewed with Adobe Flash® Player software .

Adobe LiveCycle ES Workbench ES

Included in every LiveCycle ES installation, Adobe LiveCycle Workbench ES software is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) that allows developers, designers, and business analysts to work together collaboratively.

Form and document design

Form authors and developers use LiveCycle Workbench ES — which embeds LiveCycle Designer ES — to create PDF, SWF, and HTML interactive forms and documents of record in electronic or print formats.

Process design

Business analysts and process developers use LiveCycle Workbench ES to design business processes used in customer engagement applications.

Learn more about LiveCycle Workbench ES

UI Technologies

User interface technologies leveraged by LiveCycle ES

Flex and Flash

A rich Internet application is a web experience that is engaging, interactive, lightweight, and flexible. RIAs combine the richness of a desktop application with the broad reach of traditional web applications. The technology platform of choice for building and deploying RIAs is award-winning Flex software — a cross-platform, open source framework for creating RIAs.

Enterprise developers can use Flex to create RIAs that are personalized, interactive, multimedia-rich, and run identically in all major browsers and operating systems — all factors that enhance the user experience, leading to greater productivity and overall satisfaction for end users. And because Flex RIAs run on Flash Player, they can reach the broadest possible audience of customers, partners, and employees.

The Flex programming model is both powerful and elegant: a combination of an XML declarative language, to lay out the user interface of the application, and ActionScript, an ECMAScript-compliant programming language. Leveraging a powerful, Eclipse-based design and development tool, an extensive visual component library, and a modern, cross-platform, open source client application framework, Flex delivers stunning, high-performance applications.

LiveCycle ES leverages Flex to provide a unified developer experience for creating customer engagement applications — applications that revolutionize the user experience. Designers and developers can use Flex to create rich, interactive components that can be used by LiveCycle form designers to extend the functionality of form guides to further enhance user interaction and productivity. Leveraging the rich Flex component library, these components can include charts, data grids, and Flash animations — as well as custom components that harness the power of LiveCycle Data Services ES, such as click-to-chat, live help, or real-time data streaming.

Developers can also use Flex to customize Adobe LiveCycle Workspace ES software, the intuitive Flex based application that lets end users initiate and participate in forms-based business processes through a web browser. This customization helps ensure that the LiveCycle Workspace ES interface is branded appropriately and meets the specific and unique business requirements of your organization. LiveCycle Workspace ES also integrates with LiveCycle Data Services ES to automatically synchronize data with the LiveCycle server.

PDF and XML

Portable Document Format (PDF) is the de facto standard for the reliable and more secure distribution and exchange of electronic documents and forms around the world. It is a universal file format that preserves the fonts, images, graphics, and layout of any source document, regardless of the application and platform used to create it. As a published file format specification, PDF is available to anyone who wants to develop tools to create, view, or manipulate PDF documents. It is recognized by industries and governments around the world, and versions of it have been established as open standards, including PDF/A, PDF/X, and PDF/E. Businesses and governments benefit from the ubiquity, pervasiveness, and fidelity of the PDF platform because free Adobe Reader lets them view content-rich PDF files.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose markup language that supports a wide variety of applications and is used extensively to facilitate the sharing of data across different information systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet.

Adobe LiveCycle ES combines PDF and XML standards to capture information for integration with your existing enterprise infrastructure and to dynamically generate personalized documents using data from those same back-end systems. A key mechanism for delivering this capability is XML Forms Architecture (XFA), which combines the data and capabilities of XML with rich presentation capabilities for multichannel delivery, including PDF. LiveCycle Designer ES enables the creation of dynamic XFA form or document templates, supports XML data and schema bindings, enhances document security with template designs for digital signatures, and enables compliance with government accessibility requirements for online forms. With LiveCycle Designer ES and XFA, your organization can extend existing investments in XML technologies, applications, and development expertise by enabling anyone with Adobe Reader to participate in more secure, interactive data capture processes that extend your enterprise.

HTML and Ajax

LiveCycle ES embraces the use of HTML and Ajax at every level of the platform, including clients, programming models, server technologies, and tooling. For example:

Form authors and developers can create static or dynamic forms that can be rendered using a number of client technologies, including HTML.
LiveCycle Designer ES supports XML templates for forms and documents that can be merged with business data and rendered as HTML using Adobe LiveCycle Forms ES software.
Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator ES software lets you generate PDF documents from many different file formats, including HTML.
Adobe LiveCycle Digital Signatures ES software provides the ability to digitally sign and certify an HTML page.

HTML and Ajax clients can easily consume LiveCycle ES services. Ajax Data Services, available with LiveCycle Data Services ES, brings synchronous publish/subscribe messaging, cross-domain data access, advanced data management, and offline data access to Ajax-style applications. The Flex-Ajax Bridge exposes a Flex application or component to scripting in a web browser to make ActionScript classes available to JavaScript without any additional coding. This makes it easy to incrementally integrate Flash and powerful components and applications built with the Flex framework, as well as vector graphics, audio, video, and charting into Ajax-style applications. Also, LiveCycle ES allows developers to combine the strengths of Ajax and Flex to deliver rich user experiences.