Today Adobe announced LiveCycle ES2, with some major new features:
- Mosaic – RIA portal
- Cloud deployment on Amazon EC2
- LC ES Collaboration Service (formerly CoCoMo and Flash Collaboration Service)
- Flash Builder 4 and LCDS integration
Mosaic looks really interesting, especially if you already have a number of Flex applications. With Mosaic you can now manage all these in one user interface, and they can be configured to expose business logic. I had a look at the product earlier this year, and it was really interesting to see how easy it was to create a unified application front-end with minimal effort.
From early 2010 it will be possible to get a hosted LC ES2 service in the Amazon Cloud, this should really help on getting projects set up quickly. Leveraging some of the PDF functionality and the collaboration services that easily could be a benefit to a lot of project which only need some of the functionality LC ES2 gives. The collaboration services seems to offer a lot of functionality which is previously not that easy to get; VoIP, Chat, Whiteboarding and live file sharing to mention some.
And last but not least – Data Modeling, the new integration in Flash Builder is very promising, and it is almost like working with Ruby On Rails 
, at least when it comes to productivity. Not sure how easy it will be to use this for larger scale projects, but so far I haven’t seen anything significant that could let us down.