With the Xuland Flex-based social networking application I’ve been working on for the past eight months, I decided to switch things up on the back-end, most notably in the services layer where I’ve been using ColdFusion 9 for my data-access objects.

ColdFusion has been a perfect fit for Flex since I had used the software quite extensively for much of my programming career. However, as I prepare Xuland for go-live (August 13th – which also coincides with the Adobe MAX Awards deadline for entry date), I realized that without a license for the software I would be restricted to shared hosting services – a solution that would not work in the long-run, especially if Xuland were to suddenly gain popularity.

As I considered dedicated or “cloud” hosting, I would have to either buy an $8,000 ColdFusion license (umm, no) or switch to an alternative. BlueDragon piqued my interest, but it unfortunately does not yet support AMF. Without the ability to remote, my application would launch already dead in the water.

Another alternative, completely unknown to me before today, is Railo (pronounced “Rhylo” after a fictitious alien dog in Star Trek).

“Railo is a free, open-source alternative for ColdFusion application development.” It currently supports the AMF3 format (whereas in the last version it only supported AMF0) and comes shipped with its own application server and servlet engine (Caucho Resin). In fact, the Express versions can be downloaded, configured for Flex and launched within minutes. The best part is it’s completely FREE.

I’ve since switched from ColdFusion to Railo and with hardly any tweaking, Xuland was running against Railo executing the same CFC’s I had already written for ColdFusion 9. After starting the Railo service locally the first time, it automatically created the necessary Flex remoting-config and services-config XML files needed in the WEB-INF directory. Remoting worked perfectly, and I dare say it seems a bit faster (I have not run any benchmarks quite yet, however).

If you’re looking for a solution similar to this, definitely consider Railo as it works as well as ColdFusion without the sheer cost.

Today, Adobe launched a nationwide advertising campaign promoting “choice” and criticizing those (read: Apple) that try to control it.

In addition to the ad campaign, a new web page was added to Adobe’s website: http://www.adobe.com/choice/?sdid=GXRUX, which discusses the Open Screen Project, and includes a Flash fact sheet (no doubt, from Adobe product manager Mike Chambers), and a message from Adobe’s founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke.

This is undoubtedly in response to Steve Job’s memo published on Apple’s website, http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ back on April 29th. The letter, which publicly blasts Flash as being a closed, proprietary technology that is no longer relevant or in “touch” with today’s mobile devices has received a massive response from the Adobe community and today from Adobe, itself.

Read other posts about this subject:

Mashable: http://mashable.com/2010/05/13/adobe-responds-flash/

NY Times: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/next-round-in-the-adobe-apple-fight/

InfoWorld has published a four-point “peace plan” aimed at reducing collateral damage from the current Apple vs Adobe war.

The article discusses the history between the two companies, outlines a compromise and allows readers to vote on the proposal.

http://www.infoworld.com/print/122878

I didn’t get a chance to read this article back in February by ColdFusion-mastermind Jeremy Allaire, but it’s a good one nevertheless and still very relevant for those of us in the Flash community.

Give it a try:
The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps

Haha “My fingers… are so much thicker than I remembered…”

In case anyone’s interested, the latest FFDM has been released.

Getting your hands on the PDF here:
http://download.ffdmag.com/en/ffdmag_03_2010.pdf

Sometimes I feel like a big dummy, especially when I spend a couple of hours trying to programmatically create an auto-resizeable TextArea in Flex 4.

There are several Flex 3 examples out there, some that call invalidateSize() and others that use methods in the mx_internal namespace for dynamically determining how many lines of text are displaying and resizing the component that way.

Nothing was working for me until I realized that Flex 4 has this functionality built right in! Of course…*bangs head on desk*.

The Spark version of the TextArea class has a “heightInLines” property which you can use to specify the height in lines (imagine that!?) of the component when not explicitly setting a “height” in pixels or a percentage. It turns out that you can set this property to NaN (or “Not A Number”), which then causes the component to resize itself automatically as the number of lines of text changes. Genius!

Remember, explicitly setting a height will prevent this action from working so use “minHeight” and “minWidth” instead to set the default starting size of the TextArea:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<s:Application 
	xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" 
	xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark">
 
	<s:TextArea 
		id="resizeableTextArea"
		heightInLines="{NaN}"
		minHeight="50"/>
 
</s:Application>

Enjoy!

Not much else I can add…I’ve been working daily with Flex 4 for the past six months and I think it’s a major step forward in RIA.

Here’s the official announcement:

http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/archives/2010/03/flex_4_sdk_and_flash_builder_4.html

Working with a Beta anything can be frustrating at times ( read: a LOT of times). The Swiz Framework and Flash Builder 4 Beta have been no exception.

The latest issue I’ve stumbled upon was so frustrating I had to blog about it: the content assist (or code-hinting) in Flash Builder just seems to not work for some packages – most notably, the Flash packages.

After trying many different things, I finally discovered a message in the Adobe forums:

“The latest builds of SDK 4.0 have been updated in preparation for including playerglobal.swc for Flash Player 10.1. Flash Builder Beta 2 can not find playerglobal.swc due to the addition of the {targetPlayerMinorVersion} variable found in the flex-config.xml file.

Jason San Jose
Quality Engineer, Flash Builder”

There are a couple of instances of {targetPlayerMinorVersion} in the flex-config so remember to remove both.

My flash packages now show up again in the content-assist context menu and all is right with the world

I had trouble locating the Flex 4 Beta Language Reference online today, although I had a location bookmarked (http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Flex/4.0/langref/), it no longer appears to work.

Figuring other folks may have a similar problem, I got a hold of the latest language reference (4.1.0.14883) and uploaded it to eonflex:

http://www.eonflex.com/flex/4.1/langref/package-summary.html

Here is the link to the Adobe Flex 4 LiveDocs also:

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Flex/4.0/UsingSDK/index.html

I’ll update it as much as possible until Adobe publishes the reference permanently on their own.

Enjoy!

My little Flex 4, Swiz and ColdFusion powered social networking experiment, Xuland, now has a Facebook “fan” page for anyone that’s uses that site (eh…what’s that site again…”facebook??”):

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Xuland/302813766356

I’ll periodically post updates (generally non-technical), screenshots and whatever else I can to keep anyone interested up-to-date. I think it’s a brilliant idea for a site, the design/UI is easy & clean and I think everyone’s going to like it.

A lot.

I was in the process of writing up a PowerPoint that discussed Flex 4 States, Styling & Skinning and merely wanted to add an example states SWF to the document (rather than switch out of PowerPoint during the presentation and over to a browser to view the example) and much to my dismay found out it wasn’t that easy!

After trying to figure it out myself through the tool, I eventually had to resort to several Google searches for my answer. I landed on this page tucked away deep in Microsoft’s Support libraries: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291875, which reads:

PowerPoint 2007
Make sure that the Flash Player is installed on the computer. Then, follow these steps:

1. In PowerPoint, display in normal view the slide on which you want to play the animation.
2. Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click PowerPoint Options.
3. Click Popular, and then click to select the Show Developer tab in the Ribbon check box under Top options for working with PowerPoint, and then click OK.
4. On the Developer tab, click More Controls in the Controls group.
5. In the list of controls, click Shockwave Flash Object, click OK, and then drag on the slide to draw the control.
6. Resize the control by dragging the sizing handles.
7. Right-click the Shockwave Flash Object, and then click Properties.
8. On the Alphabetic tab, click the Movie property.
9. In the value column (the blank cell next to Movie), type the full drive path, including the file name (for example, C\:MyFile.swf) or uniform resource locator (URL) to the Flash file that you want to play.

Make sure you resize the control to the visual layout of the embedded SWF (otherwise you’ll see some oddly colored “whitespace” around the SWF).

Anyway, I tried these steps and was successful. Hopefully this also saves someone else some time

Today I officially start coding a new Flex project. This isn’t associated with 24 Hour Fitness at all. It’s more or less a personal side project that, if I’m lucky, could actually turn into something at best. At worst, it would still be a great learning experience.

Our applications at 24 Hour Fitness are built on Flex 3 and Cairngorm (with a few tweaks). Although this has worked out just fine in the end, the roadmap to a finished product with Cairngorm was wrought with struggles.

We came up with a couple of different ways for a Cairngorm Command class to notify the View after execution. We originally had tried to decouple our components as much as possible by dispatching custom events to the parents, which in turn would dispatch a Cairngorm event to trigger some service call. This amounted to a lot of extra code and wiring that just made our applications more difficult to maintain.

We’ve moved off most of the logic contained in our Views to Commands, but there’s still more to go. Now we have hundreds of Commands, and many views that string together to support several different flows to our Application.

Needless to say, I’ve been looking for an easier alternative to Cairngorm and I’m willing to give a new framework a try.

“Swiz represents best practices learned from the top RIA developers at some of the best consulting firms in the industry, enabling Swiz to be simple, lightweight, and extremely productive.”

Sounds good to me! Thus, my new project – a Flex-based social networking site hopefully much different that anything else out there in Facebook-land, will be comprised of the following technologies and frameworks:

Flex 4 (currently in Beta 2)
Swiz Framework
ColdFusion 9
BlazeDS
MySQL 5 (or SQL Server 2008)

I went with ColdFusion primarily because I’ve worked with it quite a bit before and as a bonus, ColdFusion 9 comes bundled with BlazeDS! This combination, for me, provides the fastest route possible in achieving a finished product.

I’ll keep a running log here of my hurdles in creating this project and I’m excited to begin the adventure!

I work for 24 Hour Fitness as a lead Flex analyst (“evangelist” I like to think) and recently a position has opened up for a Senior-level Flex developer.

We’re looking for someone with serious chops but we’re also not building any missile-defence applications so I invite anyone with intermediate to advanced level experience with Adobe Flex to apply. It’s a permanent-hire position, near the beach in northern San Diego county and a free gym membership comes with the package, of course!

If you’re interested, have excellent communicative abilities, and are comfortable in a team environment leading a hefty Flex project, feel free to contact me directly or apply through HotJobs: http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/job-J90XJB4407X

Thanks and good luck!

I want so desperately to visit Adobe MAX 2009 this year and unfortunately my company has put a freeze on the training budget for a while.

If anyone knows of a way to get me in (without holding open a “backdoor” like you used to do in movie theaters), then let me know!

Yesterday Adobe announced the release of three public betas:

Flash Catalyst http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/ .. Flex 4 Framework (codenamed “Gumbo”) http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex4sdk/ .. Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder) – about 285Mb http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs_flashbuilder4

They previewed much of Flash Catalyst at 360Flex, San Jose and at Adobe MAX, San Francisco last year. In general, the design community is very excited about the possibility of blurring the lines between designer and developer. According to the Adobe AIR Team blog, Flash Catalyst is the “new interaction design tool for rapidly building application user interfaces without coding”.

I think it’s amazing! See for yourself with several Flash Catalyst demo’s on Adobe TV:

http://tv.adobe.com/#se+Flash%20Catalyst

I think applications are complex enough without having to worry whether browser add-ons, plug-ins, toolbars or any other factors (like ServiceCapture) might be affecting our end-user experiences, testing, etc.

One way to dumb all that down to mitigate those effects might be to open up your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser in “safe mode”. Safe mode disables all add-ons and active-x controls from initializing on startup.

To Open Internet Explorer in Safe Mode:

Click Start –> All Programs –> Accessories –> System Tools –> Internet Explorer (No Add-ons)

To Open Firefox in Safe Mode:

Click Start –> All Programs –> Mozilla Firefox –> Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode)

I found that you have to have all Firefox windows closed before opening up a new window in safe mode (not so in I.E.). But, once you do, you’ll see a preferences window open up where you can fine-tune your Firefox safe-mode settings:

Microsoft unveiled Internet Explorer 8 at its MIX09 Web Developer conference in Las Vegas yesterday.

You can download the latest (and greatest?) version here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx

The company bills Internet Explorer 8 as more secure and easier to use than its predecessor, IE7. In Microsoft’s words, the new browser “blocks two to four times more malware attacks than other browsers; cuts down on the time it takes to complete common tasks on the Web such as searching, mapping and sharing, including navigating 15 of the 20 top worldwide sites; and blurs the lines between the services they use daily and the browser used to access the Internet.”

An “Instant Search Box” will enable search from sites including The New York Times, Amazon.com and Wikipedia.

The browser will come automatically packaged with unlaunched Windows 7.

Cocomo has now switched from it’s internal codename (after “Common Collaboration Model”) to the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service. This comes as Adobe prepares to offer their hailed Platform as a Service commercially. Read the full article here: http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/2009/02/cocomo_is_now_adobe_flash_coll_1.html

Or, go directly to the new Adobe Flash Collaboration Service landing page:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/afcs/

iTunes has lots of podcasts available, including software video how-to’s. Now you can get your fill of Flex tutorials (and everything else Adobe) now that the Adobe Developer Connection has been added to the list. See for yourself!

Adobe Developer Connection on iTunes