I just wanted to give you a brief update on the Beta2 progress.
Amongst various bug fixes, Beta2 will contain a number of new and
very exciting features:

Security: Starting with Beta2, one will be able to secure any
resource in FlashORB. This includes system level resources (FlashORB
servlet, dispatchers, invokers, inspectors, console, etc) as well as
individual services and their methods. When securing a resource, you
can grant and/or reject access to/from the users in particular role
or if they access the server from a specific IP address or within a
group of IP addresses. Security can be configured via FlashORB XML
configuration file or using the management console.

The management console is a very exciting flash-based application.
Naturally it uses Flash Remoting to communicate with FlashORB to
retrieve or update information. Above all, the most interesting
feature of the console is "call tracing". Call tracing is the server-
side invocation debugger. It listens for the invocations and notifies
mangement console about it. In the console one can see very detailed
information about all the on-going invocations. You can apply
multiple filters and search for specific invocations.

We have made a great progress with the XML Socket Server. The code
will be distributed under the LGPL license and also will be included
with FlashORB. The code name for the project is FLAX. This feature is
a traditional implementation of Flash XML socket server. It
implements a number of message exchange scenarios: broadcast,
singlecast, point-to-point, publish and subscribe. For example, we
use FLAX to automatically push invocation data to management console.
FLAX will come with a number of client-side scrips that will
tremendously simplify client communication with server.

There is a number of improvements with XML support in FlashORB. Beta2
will include integration with the most popular XML parsers. This
integration will allow Flash client to pass ActionScript XML object
into a method invocation and FlashORB will automatically adapt it to
the appropriate Document implementation (DOM, EXML, JDOM, etc). The
same is true for returning an XML document from a method call.

Beta2 will be a very exciting release for us. It should be available
fairly soon.

cheers,
Joe