More on ColdFusion/Flex integration.

Just want to add this (from my post on July 11th)...
Here's the documentation from Adobe on the integration of ColdFusion 7.0.2 with Flex:

• ColdFusion / Flex integration refference
• ColdFusion 7.0.2 release notes

Flex 2: Events Made Easy

I've put together a quick and easy example how to define custom events that will be dispatched from a Flex component. Its pretty easy really... This example just contains 2 custom components. One component is created with MXML and the other is created with ActionScript. Both extend the mx.controls.Button class. When the button is clicked, each dispatches a "customevent" type event.

Here's the example:



And here's how it is done...
For a component to dispatch an event, the event has to be declared within the component.

• In MXML:
  
  <mx:Metadata>>[Event("customevent")]</mx:Metadata>


• In ActionScript:
  
  [Event(name="customevent", type="flash.events.Event")]

In order to dipatch my "customevent" type of event, the component (internally) just needs to create an event and dispatch it:

this.dispatchEvent( new Event("customevent") );

Now that you have the custom event defined, you can add a listener to it straight from you mxml declaraion. Just add actionscript to the customevent event that we just created:

<ExampleMXMLComponent id="MXMLcomp" customevent="Alert.show(event.target.toString());" x="10" top="10"/>

If you want to pass data back and forth using this event, you could simply extend the event class, then create & dispatch the custom event type instead of a standard flash.events.Event;.

View the source for this example.
Download the source for this example.

ColdFusion + Flex = RIA Made Easy

It was nice to have a week long vacation, but now I'm back and ready for more!

Today, Keun Lee and I attended an Adobe seminar for ColdFusion and Flex integration. Ben Forta, senior technical evangelist for adobe, spoke on using ColdFusion and Flex together to quickly and easily develop RIA applications.

Ben didn't reveal any new Flex techniques that will wow any seasoned Flex developers, but definitely had some great information on how ColdFusion interacts with Flex 2.0. For those of you that don't know: ColdFusion is Adobe's server-side processing technology. It is *primarily* a markup language (CFML) and allows for quick, easy and clean development of dynamic web applications.

Now, lets get down to some of the new features:

• For starters, there has been a new updater for ColdFusion 7 released. This includes updates to ColdFusion's Flash Remoting, the FDS adapter, and new messaging gateways. All of which are designed to help integration with Flex 2 as a client side interface. The updates for Flash Remoting include handling of complex object types and more optimized processing. The FDS adapter allows for easier integration with Flex Data Services. The new messaging gateway allows for better interaction with Flex applications (and allows for pushing data to the Flex 2 client).



• The ColdFusion Extensions for Flex Builder have some great features for developing ColdFusion-Flex based RIAs. The ColdFusion Extensions include ColdFusion RDS (Remote Development Services) integration, which allows you to view server resources from withing Flex builder. This allows you to view the server file system, manage server data sources, and even assemble and execute SQL statements from within the Flex Builder IDE.
  
  The ColdFusion extensions for Flex builder also include a number of wizards to auto generate code based on your database and/or ColdFusion components. It includes wizards that allow you to:
  
  
  
  • Auto-Generate ColdFusion Components based off of your database tables.
  • Auto-Generate ActionScript classes based off of your CFCs.
  • Auto-Generate complete Flex forms for CRUD functionality, based off of your database tables and/or existing CFCs.

All of these features are only available if you are running ColdFusion MX 7 update 2 (or later) as a server-side technology.

You can also install the CFEclipse plugin for eclipse within Flex Builder to enable code hinting and syntax highlighting for ColdFusion.

In my opinion, ColdFusion is the easiest and most efficient server side processing technology around. Many will argue with that... but they cannot change my mind. Ben made the point that: on average, ColdFusion applications take 12 lines of code for every 100 lines of code in JAVA based applications for identical functionality and identical performance.