Welcome to my blog!

What is LiveCycle?

Since most of my work involves crafting solutions based on LiveCycle, I figure my first post will be a short summary of what it is.

LiveCycle is a set of J2EE based document services from Adobe. It's all about a PDF. Services around a PDF that is. There are 8 products each provide a very specific functionality. For e.g., LiveCycle Forms allows templates created in LiveCycle Designer (WYSIWYG form design tool), to be rendered as HTML, PDF, PDF Form, for Print, etc, as well as merging / prepopulating the forms with XML data. LiveCycle Forms (known as Form Server in its previous live), also has the capabilities of extracting XML data out from a PDF based form. Policy Server allows PDF document (in the latest release, also word and excel documents) to be protected with a digital certificate, such that only authorized personnels are allowed to have access to its content. There's too much to go through in one post, but one of the way to think about LiveCycle is providing various capabilities for a PDF document on the server side while leveraging the performance, scalability and security of the J2EE platform.

For those who are interested, the LiveCycle Server lineup are as follows:

LiveCycle Forms
LiveCycle Reader Extensions
LiveCycle Policy Server
LiveCycle Security Server
LiveCycle Workflow Server
LiveCycle PDF Generator
LiveCycle Assembler
LiveCycle Forms Manager

My coming posts will include some detail dive in of the LiveCycle server stacks, and how it's used in the market place. As well as some of my thoughts around flex, apollo, and pretty much anything else I can think of.

Oh yeah, for the lawyers, whatever is expressed in my blog are my thoughts only, and do not represent views of any company I am associated with.

Thanks for reading!

David in Vancouver