Daniel R.

Ryan Steward

Three trends being focused on right now:
Rich Internet Application which Adobe have been doing for a long time.
Cloud Computing is coming to the forefront. Have your data available anywhere. SoA is becoming the norm. Clean separation between front-end and back-end.
Desktop and Devices making the experience available everywhere.

All rolled into contextual applications. Applications where and how your users want them.

finetune.com example of contextual applications. Explore with the traditional browser, then use desktop specific application, iPhone version, and Wii specific version.

Take advantage of device specific features.
Move data and state between contexts.

New runtime support:

Flash Player 10.1 geared for smart phones. Approximate 60% memory reduction with no code changes. Better battery performance.

AIR 2.0 extending ability to leverage native code. Native installer and application support.

Code an application in Flash CS5 and run it natively on iPhone.

New tooling support:

Flash Catalyst is all about designer having more control over UI without touching Flex.

Flex 4 is all about separating logic and look. Components based on states and skinParts.

Demo of Flash Catalyst.

Adam Lehman

New IDE for ColdFusion development called ColdFusion Builder also Eclipse based. CFML support for: code assist, insight, debugging, and ORM insight. Also have code assist for: HTML, DOM, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX (jQuery, ExtJS, etc.), and SQL. Code snippets, log viewer, AIR 2.0 Support. IDE can be extended through CFML extensions. CFScript allows tag-less components. Additional ORM support for CFCs based on Hibernate with CFML languages but still have access to low level settings. Expanded access to ColdFusion services for PDF, charting, document services, etc. all exposed through a SOAP & AMF interface with granular security control.

New CF SWC that will give AS3 / MXML libraries for accessing these functions like: , , , etc. Flash Remoting is 9 times faster in the latest versions. Now has full BlazeDS integration.

ColdFusion 9 has many PDF enhancements. Headers, footers, optimize, extract text and images, and converting Word to PDF. Has support for working with spreadsheets.

Demo of ColdFusion.

Ryan Steward

New Flash Builder adds data centric design features, better refactoring, performance optimizations, network monitor, and many others.

Demo of Flash Builder.

For people at the conference you have access to AIR 2.0 bits.

Tags: air coldfusion flash flex iphone riaunleashedboston2009

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Flex for ColdFusion Developers
Mike Nimer, Digital Primates

What is Flex, presentation is CF application stack. CF connects to everything. Flex Data Services ship with Cold Fusion (BlazeDS RPC and Messaging wrapped with LCDS' Data Management).

How to connect a Flex application: RPC using HTTP, AMF, RTMP (no server required). Flash remoting requires server side piece like CF that translates protocol to CFC. Flex messaging can push message to all clients through an event gateway.

Need: CF 7.0.2 or 8. CFEclipse as an IDE. Flex Builder IDE. CF plug-ins for Flex Buidler (optional but you really want them) many wizards. Can also have separate LCDS but not needed as it is already part of CF.

Hybrid application, HTML and Flash. Full application, takes over entire page. Desktop application, using AIR with CF server.

Break out of page model and switch to event model. Small self contained components. Application around widget decides what to do with events. Properties in events out (rule of thumb for components).

Only writing CFC no need for CFMs. Binding to data grid the call service.method.lastResult. Can also use bindings if needed.

Any data type in CF can be set back. Can use either array, structs, queries or strongly types entities like User, Products, and other CFCs. CFC instance on server and AS class in Flex. Public only properties. Easy if you get it right. CF case insensitive and not typed. AS is case sensitive and typed. CFProperty used for WSDL generation and Documentation generation. Also used to specify contract between CFC and AS (uses case defined in CFC and property type). CFC also specifies alias (optional but really required for Flex). AS object uses RemoteAlias meta-data. Have to mark a cffunction method with access="remote" to be called by Flex.

CF by default runs as a service. Turn that off and run it from the command line. cfdump is a handy tag and you can see the output in the CF console. Can also turn on Flex logging to see the traffic. Very handy for debugging. ServiceCapture is a network tool or Charles. For a Flex debugging on server, primarily look at body property for requests and responses.

With the CF administrator you can turn on very detailed debugging that is returned to the client. Flex supports browser cookies. Need to specify services config when you compile the Flex application. With server config you can control what the client is allowed to do. Flex can only request CFCs under web root. Flex remoting adapter configuration can change how CFCs and methods are found, secure by default but you can open them up, force certain casing type.

Session and client variables are supposed in Flex. Can't persistent CFC to Flex Session.

Tour de Flex (Released at MAX)

Tags: coldfusion flex flexcampboston2008 lcds

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 5:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rough draft notes

Tom Jordahl is talking about Using ColdFusion with LifeCycle Data Services.

Why Data Services?

Powerful back end. Talk to ColdFusion. CFML to manage complex data.

LCDS with CF 8 installed by default.

Messaging: Publish & Subscribe, asynchronous communication, message header and body (can contain complex types CF components or ActionScript types), CF can both produce and consume.

Why messaging?
Real-time notification to your Flex application.
Triger long running server side processes
Notify multiple clients at once

messaging-config.xml contains the data along with reasonable defaults.

Easy to have CF both handle and publish messages that will be broadcast to all clients that are listening.

Client can do HTTP pooling to get around RTMP firewall restrictions.

Data Management

Distributed data management, data replication and synchronization, able to manage large data, nested data one-to-one or one-to-many, has some occasionally connected clients.

All clients that are looking at data will get notifications based on updates that are made. The changes are batched up.

Why Data Management?
Easily synchronization data between clients with conflict detection, data replication, and performance optimization (such as data paging and lazy loading).

Assemblers manage the data. Can be written as ColdFusion Components or Java, leverage Hibernate. Four main mehtods: Fill, Get, Sync, Count.

CF 8 extension for Eclipse are freely available. Gives you RDS (Remote Development Service). Includes query builder. Automated creation of ColdFusion Components and ActionScript classes related to database object management including the Assembler.

Special CF channels: cf-polling-amf (work around firewalls), cf-rtmp (off by default).

Possible to have existing Java or CF applications notify clients of data changes using new Event Gateway.

Able to configure that certain data pieces don't trigger changes being published as a way to optimize changes.

JSP tag to compile MXML applications on the server available on Labs.

All data transmitted via binary AMF3 protocol.

www.adobe.com/go/lcds_devguide
www.adobe.com/go/lcds_javadoc

Tags: coldfusion flex flexcampboston2007 lcds

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)