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https://store.beamjive.com/products_offbeat.php

Following the success of their Flash MX2004 component sets, including charting, UI and control suites, the Finnish software group, Beam Jive Consulting, have ventured into new territory, turning their expertise towards server technologies and released the Offbeat Server.

Essentially, this is a Java XML Socket Server and as such, offers developers streamlined connectivity between your data source, Java backend and presentation layer via an XML based communication protocol. Simply put, it provides the ability to slash the overhead of bandwith heavy server polling in favour of live updates as and when the data is available and does this in a very plug-and-play manner.

The most common uses for this technology would be multi-user chat, live message boards or real-time system/device monitoring applications, but the server also makes for a good base for many other types of data driven projects.

“The response times are very fast when there is no latency of creating the connection for each request. A typical round-trip time (send request -> process request -> receive response) for an Offbeat request is only a few milliseconds. The fastest round-trip times in the tests were as small as one millisecond. This means that the client may send up to 1000 requests in one second.
(depends on the hardware and the application design).”

The Server itself has also been designed with ease of use in mind, handling database connection pooling, object pooling, internal logging, error handling and application variables to mention a few of its many features. The Java Client libraries are also available in addition to the Flash Component and comprehensive manuals, separated into Flash and Java development make excellent reference and give step by step instructions to getting connected and exchanging data with the server.

A healthy starter selection of sample applications greets you upon installation (full source included) and the Offbeat MX 2004 Client Component makes is extremely simple to connect, send and receive data and monitor connections to the Offbeat Server though Flash. As with Flash’s LoadVars object, the client allows for multiple variables to be sent concurrently, allowing you to collect all the data to be sent and sending the object as a whole. In reply, an XML object is received, containing the response, the data accessible via Flash’s standard XML object methods.

While bearing in mind your connection limitations (listed above), it is important to note that it is possible to run multiple applications simultaneously – a real benefit for any solutions providers looking to offer the server as a service.