CF Widgets == Small Rich Internet Applications

With the release of flash 6, we started hearing about the benefits of the RIAs, the marvels of a web application without refreshing, the "one page" interfaces, etc. By the time version 7 was released, Flex and Lazlo (ok, Lazlo was first) began to show the advantages of developing a RIA without the flash IDE. Now we have NeoSwiff (in beta), Xamlon (in Beta), Ajax (in JavaScript), xul (from Mozilla foundation), etc.

On the other hand, there exists the cool concept of a widget, a mini-application that sits on the desktop. Apple will introduce widgets with Dashboard when it releases Tiger in a few days. But this is not something new, Konfabulator (which works on Mac and PC) and others have previously implemented them. But widgets are not limited to the desktop, a small RIA can also be called a widget: etrade made a good one in flash 6, xamlon made a calculator and Lazlo made a weather app. In this way, the concept of a RIA and a widget are related.

With the introduction of Flash Forms, ColdFusion now gets into the party. Flash forms’ primary goal is to enhance regular html forms, that is why they are called rich forms (and not rich internet applications). However, we can create small internet app or widgets with them. I called them small because they have limitations and we cannot make big applications with them.

I’ve made two CFwidgets that are built with cfforms only. The first one is CF Weather. It uses a cfc to pull the data from weather.com. You can add your zip code or your city and it will remember your information in a cookie.

The other one is CF Calculator, a simple app, but very easy to extend to handle other functions such as square root.

View CF Weather in action.
View CF Calculator.
Download the weather.
Download the calculator.