Updated Flex Builder for Linux Available on Adobe Labs - Nov 25

Source: InsideRIA by Andrew Trice

New knowledge exchange for Flex/Flash/AIR developers - Nov 24

Source: InsideRIA by Yakov Fain

QOW: Call for Topics, What do you want from InsideRIA? - Nov 23

Source: InsideRIA by Rich Tretola

Metadata and the Flash Platform - Nov 23

Source: InsideRIA by Russ Ferguson

Are Coders Nice? - Nov 22

Source: InsideRIA by Amy Blankenship

ORM for AIR Presentation Notes from RIA Unleashed - Nov 13

Source: DavidTucker.net by David Tucker

First, I would be remiss if I didn’t say that Brian Rinaldi put on a great event in Boston! Unfortunately I missed the keynote and morning sessions because I had to do some client work, but everything seemed well organized. I was also greatly impressed with the attendees at my session. They asked some great questions – and gave some good feedback.

Slides, Code Samples, and Resources

This particular session doesn’t have a great deal of slides – but, if they are helpful, I have included them here:

• Slides: ORM for AIR – PDF (953 kb)

I also presented two sample FlexORM applications. The first example uses a single VO with no complex relationships. The second uses some complex relationships to demonstrate how FlexORM stores data across tables. These two applications were created for a series I did in the Adobe Edge newsletter (which I will link to below). Only the first of these articles has been published yet (as of 11/13/09):

• Article: Object Relational Mapping for the AIR Developer
• Source Code: Both FlexORM Examples – ZIP (1.46 mb)

I am actually not releasing the code for the example with the CF9 AIR ORM just yet. I am still working on the primary key generation part of the ‘wrapper’ I referred to. I will let you guys know (here on the blog) when everything is ready. You can speed up the process for voting for the following bug: http://cfbugs.adobe.com/cfbugreport/flexbugui/cfbugtracker/main.html#bugId=80681.

The Current State of Flex Frameworks - Oct 13

Source: DavidTucker.net by David Tucker

At most of the conferences I attend – people come up to me to discuss Cairngorm. Many of them have learned from my tutorials. I am glad that the videos have been helpful to so many (and the daily views still astound me). However, these videos were created by me over two years ago (almost to the day). In reality, a lot has happened in the last two years – and I want to give more insight into my current frameworks choices.

First Generation Flex Frameworks

First, I want to state that the Flex landscape has evolved a great deal in the last two years. In reality, Cairngorm was an attempt to take design patterns from other languages and make them fit well into Flex. For the most part it succeeded, but it didn’t solve all of the problems (and in reality – it created a few more). With that stated, we generally refer to Cairngorm as a first-generation Flex framework.

I could go into further detail here – but, at this point I’ll move ahead.

Second Generation Flex Frameworks

Since then, several frameworks have been created that were written specifically for Flex – and specifically to solve the problems that occur in Flex development. These frameworks were crafted by Flex developers (as opposed to Java developers who started to work in Flex). Because of this, these frameworks solve problems in a way that makes sense for Flex. My two favorite examples of second generation frameworks (and the two I use on projects currently) are Swiz and Mate.

These two frameworks solve problems in different ways, but they both work well. One of my Universal Mind colleagues, Darron Schall, recently posted some slides that give a comparison of the two frameworks. These slides can hopefully assist those of you evaluating these two frameworks so that you can understand the strengths and weaknesses of each option. Darron is also the first person I heard use the first/second generation framework terminology.

How Do I Learn?

Learning a new framework can be daunting (especially if you haven’t worked with a framework before). I think this is reason my Cairngorm videos were so popular. Because of this, I am starting the process of producing a similar video series for Swiz. I am extremely busy – so, I cannot predict when these will be completed. However, I am going to start working on the code examples this week (that is the easy part – the videos and the articles take a good deal of time). That being said – if you have specific items you want me to address – let me know.

I don’t have any plans to develop a video series for Mate yet – but, we’ll see how things go with the Swiz series. One of the reasons I am covering Swiz first – is that the Mate project has great documentation (which makes it easier for new developers to jump into it). The Swiz team is currently working on their documentation – and hopefully this series can be a part of that.

But What About Cairngorm 3?

Undoubtedly, many developers feel that they are expected to migrate to Cairngorm 3 as it is the ‘official’ framework. I would advise against this, mainly because of the architecture it implements. In reality, it is a collection of techniques taken from other frameworks – and yet again, it doesn’t solve all of the problems that Flex developers will encounter.

Development rate and development communities are also extremely important when it comes to a framework. The other established frameworks (such as Mate and Swiz) are further along in development, and have some great plans for the future. Both Mate and Swiz also have vibrant development communities which are eager to assist developers. I think the Adobe Consulting team has shown that Cairngorm development will be slow and official support will be non-existent.

Summary

I want to be clear on one thing – if you (and your team) know Cairngorm, there is no immediate need to stop using Cairngorm. It still serves as a great framework for teams. I would advise teams to NOT work with the new Cairngorm 3 framework (which in reality is just a collection of techniques taken from other frameworks). I would recommend that as your teams investigate new techniques – that you move toward Swiz and Mate (second-generation Flex frameworks).

Additional Frameworks

In reality, these aren’t the only second generation Flex frameworks. I have chosen Mate and Swiz for a specific reason – but, if you want to investigate the other options, you can check out the following frameworks:

• PureMVC
• RobotLegs
• Parsley

Colorado Growth Model and the Max Awards - Sep 30

Source: DavidTucker.net by David Tucker

This year one of the projects I worked on at Universal Mind, the Colorado Growth Model is a Max Awards finalist. This application is really ground-breaking in the way that it connects parents directly to their school’s performance data. A parent can very easily use the application and see how their child’s middle school compares against charter schools in Denver, or how the nearest elementary school compares with other elementary schools in the district. The possibilities are almost endless.

I have provided a preview of the application below as well as a link where you can go to vote for this application in the 2009 Adobe Max Awards directly. Vote early – and you can vote as many times as you’d like (this year Adobe has said that there is no limit on voting!).

[UPDATE: Thanks to all who voted. While this application didn't win - it was truly an honor to be among the finalists. I am always amazed at the great applications that the Adobe development community comes up with.]

Video Sample

Colorado Growth Model from David Tucker on Vimeo.

Come Learn about CF9 with Flex and AIR at Adobe Max 2009 - Sep 24

Source: DavidTucker.net by David Tucker

I must admit that my session is going to be pretty awesome. While some people get to speak for an hour – or maybe an hour and a half, I will be speaking for 8 hours (with some breaks of course). I will be presenting on Building ColdFusion Powered Flex and AIR Applications (see all of the labs here). While the preconference sessions are an extra cost ($595), you get an entire day of training from some amazing developers. If you look around at rates for a one-day training, you will see that this is a huge bargain. Normal sessions give you a taste of certain functionality, but at a preconference lab you can really learn it and take it back to your job.

In my session you can be sure that I will be covering:

• Utilizing the new Data-Centric Development Features in Flash Builder 4 (with ColdFusion)
• Working with the Proxy ActionScript classes that were introduced in ColdFusion 9
• Configuring and Using the ColdFusion 9 AIR Offline Sync functionality
• Working with ColdFusion Builder and configuring it to work with your development server
• Defining a Complex Domain Model using the new Hibernate ORM Support in ColdFusion 9
• Using the Hibernate ORM and its ColdFusion Builder Extension to create remote CRUD services
• Creating new Script-style CFC’s (with annotations)

All in all – you won’t want to miss this session! If you have any questions – feel free to leave a comment!

Quick CF9 Remoting Tip - Aug 20

Source: DavidTucker.net by David Tucker

I was working with a CF9 + Flex 4 example last night. This was a new installation of CF9 - and I hadn't tweaked any of the remoting settings at all (more on that in a bit). I was setting up a data paging example - and noticed that the Flex application was going crazy. From the network monitor I noticed that it was making continuous calls - and eventually caused the application to hang. After further analysis in the network monitor, I determined that Flex was receiving the objects back from ColdFusion - but they didn't contain any data. I hadn't seen this issue before.

After rummaging through the remoting config files, I discovered the issue. My bean CFC was using ColdFusion 9's new implicit getters/setters. To get this to work properly, you have to change a setting in the remoting config( specifically in services-config.xml):

1. <use-accessors>true</use-accessors>
2. <use-implicit-accessors>true</use-implicit-accessors>

By setting use-implicit-accessors to true, ColdFusion then uses the new implicit getters and setters in CF9 for your remoting calls. With that quick fix (and a restart) everything was working perfectly.