Brian Kotek's put up a really, really impressive 30onair video showing how a single CFC, with no translation or special frameworks, can be used with HTML, ext grid, JSON, AMF, XML and SOAP.
"Don't you wish your language could do that?"
0 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 3:07 PM - Categories: See Also
I wasn't sure I could blog this, as I didn't know it was being publicly promoted. I'll be speaking tomorrow at Carahsoft's "The Future of Applications The Adobe Platform: ColdFusion 8, Flex 3 and AIR" seminar. It's a "complimentary seminar designed specifically for public sector IT professionals and developers" where Adobe, myself, and others will be showing off ColdFusion and RIA technologies.
If you're in the DC Metro and would like to attend, Carahsoft's site has the details. (Note - The details list me as being affiliated with Booz | Allen | Hamilton. I am not a BAH employee, but will be discussing applications we developed together.)
0 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 10:22 AM - Categories: Conferences and Speaking Engagements
Over the past year, I've spent a good deal of my time reconciling what designers create with what Flex provides. One of the items I run into most frequently is the need for a seriously custom tooltip: images, formatted fonts, etc.
Until today, my approach matched many others, handling the toolTipCreate event and setting the tooltip to use manually. This got a bit repetitive, so I've wrapped up the logic in a CustomToolTip class (attached to this blog entry, download it here) that makes it a declarative process.
You simply state the component creating the tooltip (the "source") and what class to use (not instance, but class!) as a ToolTip (the "renderer"):
When the button is moused over, a new instance of com.myapp.SomeToolTip will be created.
If your renderer class implements ICustomToolTip (in the attached .zip), it'll have the source's instance set into its "source" property. This allows you to place a custom tooltip on something like an itemRenderer and access its underlying "data" property.
6 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 7:30 AM - Categories: Flex
How cool is this? It looks like Adobe's taking their Open Source stance pretty seriously. If you want to get your hands on BlazeDS or the Flex 3 SDK, they're using straight-up Subversion repositories that you can directly access!
For example, I'd like to look into why circular references are such a bear to serialize / resolve. Now, I can geek to my heart's content looking at the serialization code directly in the repo!
1 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 8:38 AM - Categories: Flex
Odd for me to say something positive about Silverlight. I tried 1.0, and sort of gave up. After reading Scott Guthrie's blog entry about Silverlight 2.0, I might have to give it another shot - I like C#, but just can't stand ASP.NET.
What I really like about the Silverlight 2.0 screenshots shown is the the darn thing looks good. Frankly, out of the box Flex looks pretty lousy next to it. It's got clean scroll bars, good-looking buttons, and I don't see anything that's the weird-shade-of-blue-green-not-found-in-nature that's all over default skinned Flex apps.
Odd to see a Microsoft product that's graphically more pleasing than something from Adobe. Maybe Flex 4 (or a 3.01) could bring about a real skin update that makes our default applications look halfway decent?
2 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 12:47 PM - Categories: RIA Platforms | Flex
I posted a 30onair video over at YouTube today showing the first pass at the cf.Objective 2008 conference scheduler application I'm working on.
I've spent about 3 hours on it, and it's already pretty usable!
1 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 12:30 PM - Categories: Flex | Flex and ColdFusion
This is the first blog entry in a series (that'll be completed in an asynchronous manner...) about managing data with Flex. I've been talking to a number of ColdFusion and Java developers that encounter the same problems with using Flex in a real-world, non-classroom situation where managing data and instances becomes problematic. Through this series, we'll be exploring solutions to these problems.
2 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 11:59 AM - Categories: Flex | Flex and Java | Flex and ColdFusion