J2EE Stack On AWS

Basically, what Adobe has done is put a Red Hat JBoss J2EE stack on AWS and deployed LiveCycle on the stack. This will make the prototyping, developing, and testing cycle a lot easier and should bring a lot more developers to the Adobe LiveCycle platform.

The type of applications that are typically developed on LiveCycle are write-intensive and transactional; in other words, not the type that AWS is best suited for. When I asked the Adobe team about this, they said that the announcement was about using AWS as a development and testing platform, not necesarily as a deployment platform.

So Adobe is taking this step by step, usually a wise move in the enterprise space.

Why LiveCycle?

For those who don't know LiveCycle, here are my Cliffs Notes:

1. It has been around for 5 years (so you really should know about it by now!). We looked at it in detail when Update 1 was announced back in June of last year.
2. It performs Business Process Management (BPM): you know, all those sign-offs that have to happen before someone gets paid.
3. It leverages AIR and Flex to give you rich Internet and mobile features. Adobe shows this to some effect with a demo featuring an insurance claims process for a car accident; the kind with those diagrams of where on the road the accident happened and gory pictures of a banged-up Prius.

Our Take

Dynamic BPM, in which processes need to adapt quickly to the real world, is a big deal. Adobe sure understands documents, and BPM, in the end, is all about documents. Putting LiveCycle on AWS will make the prototyping, development, and testing cycle quicker and enable more developers to quickly start working with the platform and making money.

What do you think? Do you use LiveCycle? Will you look at it now that it is on AWS?