There has been a bit of confusion around which one of Adobe's collaborative platforms offers or will offer certain features. In particular many people have asked if a developer always needs to rely on a hosted service such as Stratus or Lifecycle Collaboration Service (aka AFCS aka Cocomo) when wanting to use the new RTMFP protocol which will deliver (partly is delivering already) new and exciting features to the Flash Player.
To clear thing up, Kevin Towes, FMS Product Manager at Adobe, just posted the following information to the FlashMedia List:
STRATUS - this will always be ahead of the curve, providing a way to help us roll out new features that are in Flash player, before we can have a server offering. The service is and will remain as a free non-commercial service from Adobe. This service is not FMS, and has no ability for Server side scripting, or customization.
AFCS/LIVECYCLE COLLABORATION SERVICE - this will be a commercial option for customers interested in building a business that includes RTMFP. We introduced a pricing model, and it has support for the features found inside Stratus 1.0 (supporting Flash player 10.0). Key advantage with this service is the framework, which is an option for developers to get started, and leverage RTMFP to RTMP failover technology. You still will not have access to server side scripting, but there are lots of APIs in the framework to get you going. The goal for this service is to provide developers an option to bring this technology into your solution.
FLASH MEDIA SERVER - we have not announced any new version of FMS yet that will support RTMFP. We did hint yesterday that we'll be updating FMS3.5 to version 3.5.3 later this year to support the new FP 10.1 features - and in a future version after that release - FMS may be one of your options to host a local service to build your own P2P applications - including introductions, and supporting server side programming.
Thanks Kevin, I think this clears things up somewhat.
#1 by ekameleon on 10/7/09 - 9:33 PM
Yes ! the difference is important but...
...STRATUS is a beta free-non commercial service from Adobe but we can't use this solution for the moment...
The stratus solution is only in the labs of Adobe and we can't develop a full commercial solution with it.
For me the STRATUS features are very good but it's really important to find this features in the next versions of FMS...
FMS is for me the better solution to create server side Flash Platform applications but for the moment this core engine is very old : JS1.5 only, bad performances when we use really the SSAS with class, OOP implementations, etc.
The problem is the "time" !
When Stratus will be final ? When FMS SSAS can use AS3 or minimum JS1.7/8 ??
I develop with Flash Media Server from the start (Flash Communication Server 1.0) and I develop a full opensource SSAS framework with W3C event model, ADT library, MVC via FrontController, etc.
But for the moment to develop a full multi-tier architecture server side it's very difficult !
Example :
AMF class mapping with only named function... for me it's really important to implement a full server side language based ActionScript 3
...
Understand the difference between STRATUS / AFCS / FMS is not difficult for me .. but i don't understand why FMS can be better and rest the same years after years ? :)
EKA+ :)
#2 by Ncu on 10/8/09 - 11:04 AM
Just as screen sharing and sound echo cancellation is restricted to some other Adobe services.
NEAT!
#3 by Ncu on 10/8/09 - 11:05 AM
#4 by Stefan on 10/8/09 - 11:53 AM
#5 by Ncu on 10/8/09 - 12:03 PM
#6 by Fang Chang on 10/8/09 - 7:15 PM
#7 by Jay Charles on 10/10/09 - 2:47 PM
For me it's not a matter of feeling slighted that so many good features are kept by Adobe for their services, but rather a limiting factor in the types of applications I can offer those clients. If they need apps that would require the functionality Adobe is keeping exclusive, those clients will go with a different technology.