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Philly CFUG Notes - Adam Lehman on CF8, Flex and BlazeDS

Posted On June 3, 2008 12:59 PM By Phil in BlazeDS,Flex,CFUG,ColdFusion

Last Thursday, Adam Lehman, Product Evangelist for Adobe, came to speak to the Philly CFUG about Flex, ColdFusion, and BlazeDS. I'll be honest, I still don't get the BlazeDS product and/or it's uses. This confusion could be from the fact I don't use Flex everyday and don't have a real paradigm I can relate the uses of the various LiveCycle products to. Anyways, Adam did show a few slides that show the differences between the products. What follows are my notes on the presentation itself.

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Flex Builder 3 Requirements

Posted On February 26, 2008 3:46 PM By Phil in Flex,CFUG,ColdFusion

Our illustrious Philly CFUG leader, Steve Rittler posted a response to a member's question on the requirements for installing and using Flex Builder from a CF developer's perspective. It's a good overview of the minimal requirements. Check it out.

A Good Night!

Posted On February 26, 2008 1:12 PM By Phil in Flash,AIR,Flex,CFUG,ColdFusion

Last night, the 3 local Philly user groups threw a release party for Flex 3 and AIR 1.0. A big thanks to the guys at Independence Hall for hosting the event. IndyHall is a coworking organization that rents space in a building in Old City to those work work from home, telecommute or just want to get out of the stuff office.

The event itself was a good networking event with pizza, soda, and Red Bull for all. A short video of the AIR team was shown, narrated by Kevin Lynch. After that, a demo was down connecting the Wii remote with Flash, pretty cool stuff. After that, two copies of Flex Builder were given away, one version 2 with charting and the other version 3 Professional, many t-shirts (apparently Steve will be giving these away forever), and bunch of the eBoy AIR Launch Posters, of which I won one. Now the question is where to put it in the house

Anyways, thanks to all who made last night possible and I look forward to future meetings of the Flash, Flex, and ColdFusion user groups in Philly and some more cross group networking events!

onAIR Philly Bus Stop Today!!

Posted On August 22, 2007 8:25 AM By Phil in Flash,Adobe,Flex,CFUG,AIR,ColdFusion

Today the onAIR Bus Tour stops in Philly. I hope to see everyone there from the Flash, Flex, and ColdFusion user groups to represent the Adobe community in Philly.

PFPAUG Meeting Review: Flex/Flash Large Scale Applications

Posted On June 1, 2007 7:40 AM By Phil in Flex,Flash

Last night, I attended the Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group (PFPAUG) meeting held at Comcast Interactive Media's (CIM) headquarters in Center City Philadelphia. The presentation was on "Flex/Flash Large Scale Applications" by Arpit Mathur. There were plenty of giveaways, with the most coveted being the 3 iPod Shuffles, 30GB iPod Video and either a CS3 Premium Web or Digital edition. It was interesting to attend a meeting about Flex that wasn't geared to ColdFusion developers. I've seen about 3 such presentations in the past, but this one was different from the rest. The title or the presentating was a little misleading as I felt the talk centered more around what Flex is, how it differs in development from Flash and why CIM has chosen it as a development platform. In fact, the outline for the presentation was:

• Introduction to Comcast Interactive Media
• ActionScript2 (AS2) vs. ActionScript3 (AS3)
• CIM Applicatin: Fan
• Why Choose Flex
• Understanding Flex
• Flex Workflow

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Holy Beta Programs Batman!

Posted On January 24, 2007 6:39 AM By Phil in Flex,ColdFusion

Wow, the last 2-3 days have seen a flury of activity with sign-ups for the Beta program for CF 8/Scorpio and Flex 3. Ok, so Flex 3 isn't really a sign-up for Beta, but it is first or second floor like entrance into the next version of Flex. And this doesn't even count the whole thing going on a number of different blogs with the mysetrious image.

Flex 2 and ColdFusion Roadshow

Posted On September 27, 2006 6:18 AM By Phil in Flex

I attended the Flex 2 and ColdFusion MX 7 Roadshow yesterday in NYC. I was somewhat worried that what was coverred would be too basic, but it was free, so I figured I could risk it. Besides, every time I hear Ben Forta talk I learn something new, even if I think I have a firm grasp on the topic. Yesterday was no different. Ben started off talking about Flex in general as well as the various components and did a very good job of differentiating what Flex Data Services are for and how may/may not need them for your applications. After that, Ben ran through the application wizard to build an Art/Artist CRUD application, the one that seems to be done at every Flex talk.

After a short break, Ben then demonstrated the Flex Phone Store. After running through the 15 minute demo, Ben then said we'll start the item by scratch. After doing some basic layout stuff with Panels, he then used a component I had never really thought of: Tile. This allows for the laying out of data in grid like fashion except you can use any renderer you want. So Ben went on showing how to use this tag and creating a Flex component to render the Phone images. Then he did something I didn't know could be done, he created a State within a Flex component. I didn't know this was possilbe. This makes the rendering of a component that much easier as well as allowing for better organization of code. I always thought, because I hadn't seen it before, that States were to be used on the main application file only. Obviously, that isn't the case.

So, while I'm sure many Flex developers probably knew about these items, my point to this entry is as follows: Don't assume a seminar, class, etc., is too basic for you because many times you will learn something new. I'm glad I went to the seminar yesterday since I did pick up something new and am even more excited to try things in Flex than I was before knowing there are even more components out there I have yet to discover. 

Chaging the Flex RDS Setting

Posted On August 18, 2006 6:59 AM By Phil in Flex

Well, I'm sure this is in the Flex documentation somewhere, but I couldn't find it. While I was going through June's CFDJ, I had trouble getting the RDS CFC generation to work because of Flex's default install. To change the RDS location or to add locations:

• Click Window > Preferences
• Select RDS Configuration on left side of Preferences Box
• Select localhost
• Edit accordingly and to the Test Connection

This frustrated me for about 15 minutes while going through the article. Note to Adobe, perhaps you should make this an installation dialog box? This way I don't have to run around figuring stuff out mid-project.

Adobe Developer Week

Posted On May 22, 2006 12:26 PM By Phil in Adobe,Flex,ColdFusion

Adobe is having a series of 1-hour seminars the week of June 12-16. There are a number of seminars on Flex, RIAs, and ColdFusion. I have signed up for the Building Killer Desktop RIAs, Building ColdFusion Powered Flex Applications, and ColdFusion and Model-Glue. I'm excited for the Model-Glue one as Joe Rinehart will be given a quick preview of version 2.0, Unity, during the course of the seminar.

Flex 2 and ColdFusion

Posted On October 25, 2005 4:29 PM By Phil in Flex,ColdFusion

Just prior to MAX this year, Macromedia announced the release of Flex 2 Alpha and the creation of Macromedia Labs. Tim Buntel, the ColdFusion Product Manager at Macromedia, posted a great spot on why ColdFusion developers should be interested in and look forward to working with Flex 2. I also like his history of RIAs as far as Macromedia's products go. After reading it and the comments, there are 2 primary questions I have:
1. What does happen to Flash Forms? Should I spend all sorts of time learning about them and the new function type that allows me to write my own ActionScript?
2. As some of the comments from Tim's blog ask, what about having to register the components. I don't, as of right now, have that spare room to put the raised floor in for my servers, so I use shared hosting environments. My hosting provider is great, but that would suck to have them edit XML files for components and what happens if my component is named the same as another persons (um, User.cfc anyone?)?
Regardless, I'm going to install the CF Adapter on my laptop tonight and start playing around with it on some sample apps, mabye some past book examples or projects I worked on in the past, and see how it goes.