Flexpert to the rescue » ColdFusion Builder

CFUGBE event aftermath – Meet the ColdFusion team

Steven Peeters — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:47:13 +0000

On May 26th we held our second ColdFusion User Group event in Belgium. This time we had the nice apportunity to have some international speakers come over, because they were in the area after all after being at SOTR2010.

We started off with Ben Nadel who talked about session management and component lifecycles in ColdFusion. I learned tons of new stuff that I (as a beginning ColdFusion developer) wasn’t even aware of. Stuff like how ColdFusion pages are constructed and when the session scope becomes available. This can be very useful to implements some extra security checks and such. Thanks Ben!

Then we let Ray Camden take the stage. (Well, it wasn’t really a stage, but you know what I mean, right?.) He had some interesting stuff to talk about as well. He showed us some really cool stuff you could do with the snippets panel. But then I was wondering how the hell you start writing your own snippets. And just as I was thinking that, Ray actually explained how it works. So now I’m definitely going to be digging into that as well (assuming I can find the extra time of course).

After a well-deserved short break Terry Ryan talked and demoed a bit more about Flash Catalyst. This was probably quite interesting for most people in the room, but I had seen this a thousand times before, so for me that was not really the highlight of the evening, unfortunately. Sorry about that, Terry.

Since we were running a bit late by then, he had to hurry up and gain some time, because as a last treat we had our “meet the team” session with Claude Englebert, Terry Ryan and Alison Huselid. As usual here in Belgium, there were some difficulties getting the conversation started. We’re all quiet and shy here in Belgium, you know… But after a few hesitations we got something going on, with most of the questions regarding pricing (which I had anticipated).

Although it was a great event, I was a bit disappointed by the number of attendees. Lots of people registered, but too few actually showed up. All of you who didn’t show up, you deserve a spanking! You’d better be there next time. Yes, that’s right. We are already working on our next event, so keep an eye out for it and make sure you don’t miss it, ’cause it’s going to be a technical session this time with lots fo jaw-dropping stuff.

It’s D-day: Adobe releases Flex 4 SDK, Flash Builder 4, ColdFusion Builder and Flash Platform Services for Social Network Integration

Steven Peeters — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:48:57 +0000

Yes! This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for so long. After a long series of beta and prerelease versions, the new Flex 4 SDK has been officially released. And of course, this release is also accompanied with the release of Flash Builder 4. This is the new version of Flex Builder (for those of you who live on another planet and haven’t heard of it yet) and it contains a lot of great new and improved features:

Data/Services panel to allow a very easy connection with different kinds of back end technologies such as ColdFusion, Java, PHP and HTTP services.
Automatic Data Transfer Object (Value Object) creation based on the return types of the services
Drag & drop attachment of data to visual components
Enhanced refactoring support
Code generation of getters and setters
Network traffic monitoring
Enhanced memory profiling support
…

I’ve been working with the prerelease versions for quite some time now and I must say I’m pretty found of the new features they’ve put in there. In short, this is one release you want to upgrade to as soon as possible. So, go ahead and point your browser to http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/ and download the latest version.

As second important release is ColdFusion Builder. In the early days you had ColdFusion Studio, but other than that, there was no real specific ColdFusion IDE available. So developers had to work with Dreamweaver and open source Eclipse plug-ins such as CFEclipse. But now, there is finally another new and improved ColdFusion IDE available and it’s called ColdFusion Builder. It is also based on Eclipse, which means that you can either install it as a stand-alone version or as a plug-in on top of your existing Eclipse installation. That means that you can also write your own extensions for ColdFusion Builder to help you (and other developers) write code a lot easier. You can have extensions for code snippets, templates, query generation etc. You even have an extension to help you write your own extensions!

This is similar to what you can do with Flash Builder as well, so if you’re a Flex developer and you also use ColdFusion as back end technology, you might be better off integrating both development environments into the same IDE. That can save you a lot of time not having to switch tools all the time. Just go ahead and download it at http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/.

The last release of today is the Flash Platform Services for Social Network Integration. Wow, now that’s a term to remember. But what the hell does it mean? Well for starters it means that Adobe is making life simple for people who want to connect their Flash applications to social networks. The Social service has the following benefits:

One API connects your application with multiple social networks
The service adapts to social network changes so you don’t need to recompile your application
Multiple pricing plans available

The social service consists of three parts:

A simple ActionScript 3 API, which can be implemented in Flash or Flex and aggregates the different social network APIs, including Facebook Connect
Plug-and-play widgets that use the social API for login, share, invite, select friends and other commands
Dashboard analytics for reviewing and optimizing your social performance

Now, what does all that mean? Well, it means that you no longer have to worry about the ever changing Facebook or Twitter APIs, because the Social services will take care of the for you. You just write your code against the Social services API and the changes in the network services such as Facebook or Twitter are being monitored by Adobe and Gigya to make sure your applications don’t break when a new API is released. If you want to know more about this, you can always look at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/services/social/.

So, I must say that today is a very big day in my professional life, since I’m working with both Flex and ColdFusion. From now on, life as a Flex developer is going to be a lot easier…

Interview with Ben Forta on March 9, 2010

Steven Peeters — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:26:24 +0000

On March 9, 2010, Ben Forta was in Liege, Belgium to do a very nice session on ColdFusion and ColdFusion Builder. In his session he talked about the nifty features of ColdFusion Builder, which will be released very soon now. Another subject that was touched was of course the fact that ColdFusion and Flex/Flash are continuously growing closer together, which is something I’m very exited about.

A part of the ColdFusion User Group Belgium, I was lucky to be granted a personal interview with him about what ColdFusion will bring in the future and what the benefits are of using this technology. You can find the entire interview in the video below.