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Flex Camp Boston 2007: Flex and ColdFusion: Mysteries Revealed!

Rough draft notes

Matt Woodward is talking about Flex and ColdFusion: Mysteries Revealed!

mattwoodward.com/blog

For ColdFusion people why use Flex: Very powerful. Simple. Big wow factor. Fun new technology. Don't limit yourself.

Sample photo gallery application, uses custom Flex components, ActionScript, and Events. ColdFusion back end that with RemoteFacade and DB layer.

Flex Builder needs to see ColdFusion's WEB-INF/flex directory.

Forget about request/response when dealing with Flex development. It's all event-driven and much more stateless. Events can be announced at any time. Request to server can be made but the response will come back at some undetermined time.

Business logic should not care who is talking to it. Can get input from anyone. Allows either ColdFusion or Flex to act as front-end. Facade isolates what Flex is talking about.

ColdFusion Components (CFC) and ActionScript (AS) can be translated between if done right. Must have mirrored properties. Have AS define "[RemoteClass(alias="path.to.cfc")]" and CFC define "<cfcomponent alias="path.to.cfc"/>". To return a collection use "<cffunction returntype="path.to.cfc[]"/>". Has good performance for most applications with reasonably sized collections.

Custom Events let you include your own custom data in the Event.

Accessibility questions about Flex? Doesn't have to worry about them. Member of the audience finds Flex easier to make accessible then HTML sites.

Will be posting sample code to his blog.

Where to do error handling? Has person making the call handle what to do if there is an error. Flex can handle ColdFusion error since it gets the error back.

Tags: coldfusion flex flexcampboston2007