Midnight Coders releases the WebORB Presentation Server - a development platform for connecting AJAX and Flash clients with .NET applications. Supported clients include JavaScript and Flash, while server-side support includes any J2EE-compliant server, Microsoft.NET environment, ColdFusion Components, as well as any XML web service.

WebORB is available in two implementations: Java and .NET; both implementations contain the same feature sets. With a dynamic and extensible framework, WebORB manages server-side component lifetime events such as activation, session management, and deactivation. It also includes such unique features as inspection of .NET classes and XML Web Services, argument type adaptation, multiple activation modes, custom object serializers, a management console, security, call browser, and a message server.

In addition to the Rich Client System, WebORB supports Macromedia's Action Message Format (AMF) and can be used to handle Flash Remoting calls. Because WebORB does not require changes on the Flash Remoting client side, any existing Flash MX Remoting client can use WebORB transparently while also observing a noticeable boost in performance and simplified implementation approach on the server-side.

Product features include:

- Rich Client System. A client side library simplifying rich client development and to enable client/server connectivity Rich Client System (http://www.themidnightcoders.com/rcs/index.htm). The Rich Client System provides a simple one-line API to bind to and invoke any method on any .NET object or XML Web Service.

- Supports synchronous and asynchronous method invocations

- Does not require any modifications to server-side code, no need for custom method attributes, special signatures or argument types or design-time stub generation.

- Synchronous invocations return data from the same invocation (no callback needed). Asynchronous invocations rely on a callback to deliver return value or exception.

- Any server side method can be invoked synchronously or asynchronously.

- Client application can request special activation modes for the server objects. As a result, objects can easily become stateful without any special programming

- Provides a special API for handling database query results - server code can return DataSets or DataTables and the client presents it as a special RecordSet JavaScript object. The object provides a way to retrieve column names as well as row data

- Data paging support. Client applications can retrieve data in pages and streamline user experience.

- Supports all server-side argument types and return value types - primitives, strings, complex types, arrays, native .net collections, remote references

- There are 2 editions available: Standard (free) and Professional (commercial license)

For more information visit http://www.themidnightcoders.com.