A month ago I wrote a blog titled “The RoadMap for Adobe LCDS 3”.  I was so naïve suggesting cutting the prices for LCDS licenses!

The inexpensive ($6K per CPU) departmental license is discontinued. LCDS Express edition is gone.

Get ready to pay around $30K per CPU for Enterprise LCDS 3 license.  It’s really sad that Adobe marketing is killing a great product created by their own software engineers.

After reading the chain of comments to the blog of Anil Channappa, LCDS and BlazeDS project manager,  I got a feeling that Adobe does everything to ensure that our open source Clear Toolkit with BlazeDS will become even more popular.

Clear Data Builder (the flagship piece of Clear Toolkit) generates both Flex and Java code from POJO or SQL, supports data sync between different users (yep, with ChangeObjects under the hood), does the server side data push over AMF, knows how to deal with master-detail (hierarchical) collections, supports transactions, has smart  DataForm and Validator components.  We also know how to make BlazeDS scale to support many concurrent users.

Almost forgot, we have generators for AS3 classes from their Java peers and a generator of ANT build scripts from your Flex Builder projects.

Do you know the cost of Clear Toolkit per CPU? You got it. It's zero dollars, euros, rubles and rupees.

At the time of this writing Clear Toolkit doesn't support Model-Driven development...Read my lips.

If there is a customer who wants to hire us and shell a little bit of cash for R & D, we can add a support of RTMP too (shared copyright only).

Adobe also stopped offering commercial support of BlazeDS. Well, you know where to go for this.

Some companies have short memories. When Flex own by Macromedia, was server-side only and priced at $15K, nobody knew about this product. After the merger in late 2005, Adobe did a really smart move by moving this great tool to the client side with reasonably priced Flex Builder.  Now, it looks like Adobe re-hired those old Macromedia salesmen. Big mistake.Huge.

I’d like to use this opportunity and invite Flex developers living in Europe to attend our Advanced Flex Master Class in Brussels, Belgium on March 1 and 2, 2010. We still have a couple of seats available.