| Tool | RTMP | HTTP Channels | Java Remoting | Audio/Video | Scalability | Licensing | Author |
| BlazeDS | No | Yes | Yes | No | Average | Free | Adobe |
| GraniteDS | No | Yes | Yes | No | Average | Free | Franck Wolff |
| LCDS | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | High | License | Adobe |
| Red5 | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | ? | Free | Red5 |
| Quick Summary follows… |
BlazeDS – http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/blazeds/BlazeDS/
- Can scale to few hundred simultaneous connections.
- Clustering is supported.
- Automatic fall-back of channels is supported.
- No support for NIO (used for supporting a large number of user threads, with a limited pool of server threads) – depends on Web Application Servers servlet thread pool to serve requests.
GraniteDS – http://www.graniteds.org
- Has Granite Channels (http based). eg: Gravity Channel: similar to long polling of Blaze-DS. Used for data push
- The primary goal of this project is to provide a framework for Flex 2+/EJB 3/Seam/Spring/Guice/POJO application development with full AMF3/RemoteObject benefits
- No support for Servlet 3.0 (async) yet – it is in future roadmap i.e No support for NIO (used for supporting a large number of user threads, with a limited pool of threads) – depends on Web Application Servers servlet thread pool to serve requests.
LCDS – http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/dataservices/
- Is the big daddy of Blaze-DS. In addition to all Blaze-DS functionality, it supports RTMP, and can serve a very large number of simultaneous requests (in the order of few thousands), which it achieves by its own NIO implementation i.e it internally uses a small number of threads to serve a very large number of requests (user threads).
- Can be used in production, for free, on a single-cpu machine. For multiple cpu machines you need to buy license.
Red5 – http://osflash.org/red5
- Supports Audio/Video streaming. Uses RTMP protocol.
- Is probably the only popular free audio/video streaming tool.
- Can be deployed as a web-application.
