Hang on a sec...
in giving Mark an answer, he's been landed with more jargon. Mark, I'm nowhere near the expert that Tom or others here are on this subject ... ... and there are some good blog posts around (and the Adobe site itself) with decent detail on all of it ... but... I work at a university and they're forever going on about collaboration, whether it's research partners, academics or student teams. I'm hunting for a project to put this into practice... (in a nutshell) both remoting and webservices follow the typical request/response. so any sync'ing of data needs polling so the clients can find out if server has new changes. but FlexDataServices (or LiveCycle DS now-a-days) has a handle back to each client from the server so it can push events/notifications telling the clients that the server's data has changed. this gives a pretty powerful hub-type configuration where one client commits updates on the server which can be sent back to all the other clients in a heartbeat. however, this is NOT peer-to-peer collaboration. the server is definitely in the middle of it all, receiving and broadcasting to subscribers. Which is OK if the data/documents/whatever is to be persisted and managed on the server. Keep in mind, that sort of technology isn't cheap - not compared to webservices... I'm no expert on all of this and I've got my own issues trying to work out how flex can do true peer-to-peer collaboration (no FDS). I'm also unsure what the upgrade path will be with our FlashMediaServers (FMS) while I wait for ColdFusion8 (and it's reported LCDS and FMS integration). but I do hope that's helped somewhat. Others can chime in with much better replies. this is just something quick to help lift the fog. what sort of collaboration do you need to do?
