ColdFusion

This year I was part of the advisory board for the RIA track of CF.Objective(). I was also invited to speak. For the record, I didn’t submit or vote for my session. :) Even though it must have become a little difficult to manage all the people in the board (3 members per track), it allowed for democratic voting of topics and wider variety. It was pretty amazing to see how people’s interests lined up. 

cf.Objective() was a great conference, thank you to the organizers and speakers! I was not able to attend to as many sessions as I wanted, but just being able to talk at the lounge with super-smart people was worth enough (Chris Scott, Maxim Porges, Brian Rinaldi, Andy Powell, and many others). I had the feeling that anyone I would talk to would have something interesting to say or something I could learn from. I haven’t had that feeling for a long time, and it was great.

I think my session went pretty well, thank you all for attending. I had been preparing for the presentation for a few months, and thanks to Sean Corfield, who asked for drafts, seconds drafts, release candidates and final versions of the slides, I had the general flow of the talk long ago. There were, as always, last minute changes, particularly because we added features to Mate and changed the names of all the framework tags the week before cf.Objective!

After over two years of working on Mango, I have released version 1.0. This version has the features that I considered to be the most important, so having been tested by many people, I decided that is was robust enough to remove the "beta" adjective from it.

We're pleased to announce the formation of 2 new user groups in Orange County, CA (aka "The OC").  They are the OC Flex User Group and the OC ColdFusion User Group.  For those not familiar with the OC, there is a high concentration of technology companies and high-tech industry and research here, that has earned the area the title of the "Silicon Coast".  The area does get overlooked sometimes because we are sandwiched between our much larger neighbors, Los Angeles and San Diego, so it's nice to have user groups serving our very active local developer community here.

A couple of months ago, we posted an updated version of a Hello World Flex example. We have created the same example, but using the Cairngorm framework. It still uses Remoting and ColdFusion. It is simple, but I think that by being so simple, it is easier to follow than a full-fledge application. It shows most of the pieces that make up a Cairngorm application, such as the ModelLocator to store the data and the state of the application, the controller, the command, the services and the delegate.

Disclaimer: We do not usually use Cairngorm, so this is only our interpretation of how a Cairngorm app would look like (we use Mate for our Flex development).

View example
Download the source

The more ColdFusion unit tests I needed to run, the more I wanted to have a nice interface where I could only see errors or failing tests, and that it would allow me to selectively run tests. That is why I created cfcUnit Runner, a Flex application to run cfcUnit tests. I believe it could also used to run CFUnit tests, but CFUnit will need to implement a service façade that Flex can use.  You can read more in the project's page and use the forums and bug tracker of RiaForge. I have a live demo where you can see it running and I also made a short movie that shows all the features.

Live application (Flash Player 9 required). View source on right click enabled

Recorded demo

Download Application

Source (Flex 2)

When we submitted our Flex-ColdFusion example to IFBIN, Flex was in an early beta, which means that the example doesn't work with the final release.

Our Flex "My To-Do List"  tutorial has been published in the June issue of the ColdFusion Developer's Journal (and we made the front page!). It can be read online and the source can be found at the project page.

Although simple, we tried to be as complete as possible for "your first Flex app". It shows how to use the CF wizards, use events, create custom components and use the RemoteObject tag to send and retrieve data from the server.

The winners of the Flex Developer Derby contest have been announced last week. We are happy to say that our Home Locator was selected as the winner of the Product configurators/self-service guided applications category. There were many good entries, which are no longer shown at Adobe Labs. I think they will post them all at Adobe again when they get updated to Flex's final release. You can view the winning entries of the six categories in this article: Announcing the Flex Developer Derby Winners.

Update: Actually, the entries are still there, just not linked from the main page: Flex developer entries

Thanks to everyone that attended our session. We hope you enjoyed our fighting on stage :) and you found the topic interesting. We think that Flex is an amazing product that speeds up the RIA development a lot.

As we promised, you can view the slides at CFUnited 2006 presentation. We also have the source code of our To-do list application for download (you can download or view the source). We forgot to say that the To-do list will be also published on CFDJ as a step-by-step tutorial. We will post the link to that when they publish it.

We've finally arrived to DC!

Today, we will be presenting Flex 2 and ColdFusion integration. It is an introductory session, so if you are wondering what Flex 2 is and how to integrate with ColdFusion, we hope to see you there.

Flex 2.0 and ColdFusion Integration

In this session, ColdFusion developers will learn how it's not CF or Flex, but rather how Flex and ColdFusion integrate to create RIAs. In "traditional" applications, CF connects to external systems, processes business logic, and builds an HTML presentation layer. In an RIA, CF still connects to external systems and processes business logic while Flex is used to construct a richer presentation layer delivered by the Flash Player. In this session, you'll see how the two technologies integrate and get a first taste of Flex development. You'll learn next steps for orienting yourself to Flex and common gotchas encountered by CF developers new to Flex. While previous experience with Flex is not necessary, knowledge of ColdFusion components will be helpful for this session.

We submitted two entries for the Flex Developer Derby, which, for some reason, are not yet posted at Adobe Labs.

Home Locator is a complete revamp of our Real Estate sample application. We changed the functionality and included a Yahoo! Map that shows the property location. We actually didn't use much of the old code and we focused much more on the usability and look and feel of the application. We spent an incredible amount of time during the design, not even doing actual code. Most of the hurdles we encountered were due to Yahoo! maps not wanting to behave and bugs in the Flex framework, specially when we wanted to skin the application, going away from the default halo (or whatever is called now) look. At the end, we are happy with the outcome. Before you ask, no, we are not planning to give the source away, at least not for now. We are, however, going to post the source for the original Real Estate application for the Beta 3 release.

We have no hopes of winning anything with the other application, My to-do list, since it does not compare to the other entries. It is really a very simple application, and it was developed as part of an article for the ColdFusion Developer Journal. So you can expect to see a step-by-step tutorial based on it and the complete source for download soon.