Tom Jordahl's musings

I normally don't pass on these kinds on things, but this one could be very nice.

The Adobe Enterprise Developer Program is sponsoring a FREE full week RIA training session in San Francisco April 25-29.  They will be presenting an in-depth curriculum including the Flash Builder 4 Crash Course, Data Services Data-Driven Development (that's the stuff I work on!), LiveCycle Collaboration Service, and LiveCycle Mosaic ES2.

This seems like a pretty nice deal and you can't beat the price - FREE!

For more information or to register: http://adobe.ly/eRIASanFran

Wow, its been three months since my last posting. I wish I could say that I have been using twitter to express all my thoughts to the web, but I don't use twitter so that wont work. :-)

Anyway, we are on the cusp of releasing LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) 3.0 which has some really exciting improvements in how you can create Flex applications that use the LCDS Data Management functionality. I could wax poetic for a few hundred words, or you could watch Christophe Coenraets excellant MAX 2009 session on model driven development. He really shows off why this is such a giant leap forward in productivity and usability.

Dean Harmon and I did a very successful (I think, and the evaluations seem to agree) hands-on session about this same topic, but the hands-on sessions were not recorded.

You can get the "almost final" LCDS 3.0 bits on Adobe Labs right now and give this stuff a try.

Scott Evans, a lead engineer on the FlexBulder team, has started a new blog - Getting and Setting that will be for public discussion of new FlexBuilder 4 IDE features. I am really excited by some of the "IDE Maturity" features that I've seen on the drawing boards for the next FlexBuilder. As an avid InteilliJ IDEA user for my Java development, my tumultuous affair with builder has been a tough ride. I am drooling over most of the improvements that I see coming.

He starts out with his lead post asking about how you use Actionscript "getters" and "setters". Do you use a special prefix for your class member variables? Do you create functions as a matter of course? Or only when you actually need them? Post a comment and let Scott know.

I also encourage you to check out Tim Buntel's $100 test posting asking for feedback on what feature you think are worth investing our resources in. He has recently posted an update on the results, which, I pointed out to Scott, valued the getter/setter generation very high on the list. Of course improving the MXML compiler speed was at the top of many folks lists.

Christophe has posted another really neat demo application that shows BlazeDS collaboration with an application that uses Messaging to allow more than one person to fill out a form at the same time. Not exactly practical in the real world, but a good example if the power of BlazeDS.

Check out this great sample application posted by Christophe Coenraets, complete with instructions and source code, showing a really nice mashup of Yahoo Maps, Flex and BlazeDS.

The first meeting of the Boston area Flex users group is tomorrow (Tuesday April 8th) at 7:00pm in the Adobe offices in Newton, MA. You can get details at http://www.bostonfug.org/ and to RSVP for the even you should go here.

Pete Farland will be speaking about the open source Flex SDK at the first meeting. I have a dentist appointment that night, so I wont be there, but if you are using Flex and live around Boston, this ought to be worth your time.

There was a question over on the BlazeDS forums about weather Flex 2 would work with BlazeDS. The answer is most definitely YES. You can use Flex 2.0.1 hotfix 2 or Flex 3 with BlazeDS 3. Jon Rose also blogged about this question back in January.

Jon was getting a message:

“Destination ’simple-topic’ requires FlexClient support which was introduced in version 2.5. Please recompile the client application with an updated client framework.”

The “2.5″ in the message that refers to LiveCycle Data Services 2.5, which was shipped requiring a hotfix (#2) for the Flex compiler/SDK.

The AMF3 protocol did not change. The remoting and proxy services interoperate without issue between Flex 2 and BlazeDS.

However, the messaging and data management service implementations on the server required several core changes in channel/endpoint handshaking and in how messages are queued and routed to subscribers that are not backwards compatible with clients compiled against the ORIGINAL Flex 2 client library. This is a low level incompatibility, so previous messaging and data management code doesn’t need to be altered or edited in any way. You just need to recompile your app against the hotfixed Flex 2 or Flex 3 SDK.

Thanks for Seth Hodgson for the details about what changed (it predates me moving over to Data Services).

Check out the new 30 On Air site for some fun videos answering the questions
Why AIR? Why Flash Player? Why Flash? Why Flex? Why Coldfusion? Why AJAX? Why LiveCycle? Why Dreamweaver?

You can upload your own video also, just tag it on YouTube with the "30onair" tag. I like the rocking guitar solo video, but maybe I have been playing too much Guitar hero.

I will be giving a talk at Flex Camp Boston next month (December 7) on ColdFusion and Flex integration. This is a great opportunity for Flex developers in the Boston area to come and hear some Flex experts talk about advanced Flex topics like Data Services, AIR and Flex 3.

Registration is only $10. That is ten dollars and includes all speakers, free parking and lunch. This is an externally organized event, however Adobe is sponsoring the shindig and there will be some giveaways.

Space is limited so register now!

Sam Farmer blogs about some neat new features of ColdFusion 8 with the integrated LiveCycle Data Services (formerly Flex Data Services) install.

Be careful with the mxml JSP tag - it can really slow down your server!

Flex 2.0 released a public Beta on Adobe Labs yesteraday. In addition to refreshing Flex Builder 2.0 and the Flex framework, this Beta also includes the Flex Enterprise Services (FES), which is the service piece of Flex 2.

Along with this is the "ColdFusion/Flex Connectivity" beta, which includes two interesting pieces for ColdFusion developers

1. The Flash Remoting Update. This is an update to the Alpha released last year (formerly called "the CF Adapter") that allows you to use the new Flash Remoting functionality with Flex Builder 2.0 and CFMX. The sweet thing here is that you can map CFC objects on the server to ActionScript objects on the client seemlessly. These are called "Value Objects".

2. The Flex Messaging Gateway. This is the piece that I wrote that uses the Flex 2.0 Messaging system to allow ColdFusion MX 7 to Publish/Subscribe messages to/from a flex application. I think this is pretty cool - you can use SendGatewayMessage() to send a message that multiple Flex clients will receive. And vise-versa.

Anyway, check it out up on Labs and let me know whay you think!