AMF is an open protocol, and various vendors offer their implementations. Your RIA may or may not use Java on the server side, and you may consider the following alternatives to BlazeDS, which are available as open source projects or offered by third-party vendors:
- WebORB
This family of products by the Midnight Coders includes implementations of AMF for Java, .NET, Ruby on Rails, and PHP. WebORB offers the best reliability and performance for these platforms, and it is free. Its .NET stack is the most impressive one, as it offers full-featured messaging, RTMP support, data push, and the best .NET integration. The Java stack of WebORB is similar to the BlazeDS offering; it also uses Red5 for RTMP/multimedia integration.
- RubyAMF
- AMFPHP
- PyAMF
- Granite Data Services
Granite Data Services (GDS) is a free open source package that offers functionality similar to LCDS. It caters to developers who use Flex and AMF to communicate with server-side POJOs and such Java technologies and frameworks as Enterprise JavaBeans 3 (EJB3), Seam, Spring, and Guice. It also features Comet-like data communications with AMF, as well as Tide, a framework that positions itself as an alternative to Cairngorm, combined with the Data Management Services offered by LCDS.
- Red5
An open source Flash server, Red5 supports RTMP and AMF remoting and streaming of audio and video. Red5 is written in Java and can be installed on any platform that supports Java. Even though typically Red5 is considered to be an alternative to Flash Media Server, you may also start using it as an alternative to BlazeDS. You can use either a standalone version of Red5, or deploy it in the Java servlet container as a web application archive (WAR) file. (At the time of this writing, Red5 has not been officially released and is at version 0.9 Final.)