We've finally arrived to DC!

Today, we will be presenting Flex 2 and ColdFusion integration. It is an introductory session, so if you are wondering what Flex 2 is and how to integrate with ColdFusion, we hope to see you there.

Flex 2.0 and ColdFusion Integration

In this session, ColdFusion developers will learn how it's not CF or Flex, but rather how Flex and ColdFusion integrate to create RIAs. In "traditional" applications, CF connects to external systems, processes business logic, and builds an HTML presentation layer. In an RIA, CF still connects to external systems and processes business logic while Flex is used to construct a richer presentation layer delivered by the Flash Player. In this session, you'll see how the two technologies integrate and get a first taste of Flex development. You'll learn next steps for orienting yourself to Flex and common gotchas encountered by CF developers new to Flex. While previous experience with Flex is not necessary, knowledge of ColdFusion components will be helpful for this session.

We submitted two entries for the Flex Developer Derby, which, for some reason, are not yet posted at Adobe Labs.

Home Locator is a complete revamp of our Real Estate sample application. We changed the functionality and included a Yahoo! Map that shows the property location. We actually didn't use much of the old code and we focused much more on the usability and look and feel of the application. We spent an incredible amount of time during the design, not even doing actual code. Most of the hurdles we encountered were due to Yahoo! maps not wanting to behave and bugs in the Flex framework, specially when we wanted to skin the application, going away from the default halo (or whatever is called now) look. At the end, we are happy with the outcome. Before you ask, no, we are not planning to give the source away, at least not for now. We are, however, going to post the source for the original Real Estate application for the Beta 3 release.

We have no hopes of winning anything with the other application, My to-do list, since it does not compare to the other entries. It is really a very simple application, and it was developed as part of an article for the ColdFusion Developer Journal. So you can expect to see a step-by-step tutorial based on it and the complete source for download soon.

I will present Mango and its accompanying paper at the UROP Symposium at the University of California, Irvine this Saturday May 13. By looking at the frappr map, I don't think there are many CF developers around here in Orange County, but you don't have to be a developer to attend since everybody is invited.

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Adobe just released a new ColdFusion MX 7 Updater that works with Flex 2 (beta 3). This updater also fixes the EOLAS problem. We've received a lot of questions about this issue and the answer is: don't worry, Adobe will care of it.

Also, I highly recommend that you start playing with the new Flex2 (beta 3). It rocks :)

More info on Damon's blog.

I updated the Real Estate example to make it work with the beta 2. I also made the code simpler and took out some classes from the service package. Now, I'm using plain RemoteObject.

If you are wondering why we don't post lately, we can tell you that we are very busy but doing a lot of things to improve this blog. I hope that soon we'll have a new version up and running.

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