Granite Data Services

I love Life Cycle Data Services. As a developer, IMHO, I think it is worth its weight in gold. However, I do get customers that want to do remoting with it :-( So...since HTTPService and WebService are first class citizens in Flex, I recommend that they SOAP enable their server side services, or come up with some kind of XML representation and XML over HTTP since XML is a native type in AS3. But the serialization/deserializtion is costly, and it would be great if we can use the flash native binary format (AMF) to transfer objects around. Thus enters Granite. Quoting from the introduction "Granite Data Services (GDS) is a free, open source (LGPL'd), alternative to Adobe® LiveCycle® (Flex™ 2) Data Services for J2EE application servers. It is not, however, a drop-in replacement: you won't be able to simply deploy a Flex 2 Data Services application into a Granite Data Services server without modifications. The main goal of this project is to provide a framework for Flex 2/EJB3/Spring/Pojo application development with full AMF3/RemoteObject benefits."
So, if you are a java server side programmer, try it out. In addition, if you use Spring to manage your POJOs, then client side RemoteObjects can have a destination that is bound to a spring bean.