Flex a no-brainer?
by Neil Middleton 9:32 pm Monday, 27 March 2006.

I was thinking today about the Flex beta that's going on at the moment, and then thought about the target audience for Flex, i.e. people just like me. By this, I mean people with several years at the wheel of CF, HTML, CSS and JS with some basic flash knowledge.

Well, as far as I can see there is now no longer any valid reason for me to develop anything in Flash anymore now that Flex is around. It's exactly the same argument as CF vs Java. Why write something is Java when I can use a RAD tool like CF?

From a manager's point of view though I can see some possible problems, namely one of cost and confidence. Before, developers were convincing their managers to let them publish their companies first RIA's in Flash. They promised datagrids, large amounts of remotely accessed data and swizzy new interfaces.

However, what flash was actually capable of fell someway short, (although the improvements in Flash Player 8 made massive inroads into some of the main problems) which lost confidence somewhat in the platform as being able to provide RIA's (well, in my experience anyway) from a manager's point of view.

Now Flex is nearly here, and we're again trying to convince managers to re-tool and re-train for the new tools that are again using the Flash platform. Admittedly this is a RAD tool, and there are the great new data services available, but is it as clear cut for those who won't be actually cutting the code?

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Connecting CFMX 7 to MySQL 4+
by Neil Middleton 2:03 pm Saturday, 25 March 2006.

You may have noticed that there are some hoops you need to jump through in order to connect a CFMX7 install to a MySQL4+ DSN. All the details of this can be found on this .

However, be careful when downloading the MySQL Connector J JDBC driver, make sure you don't pull down the latest version as this is incompatible with CFMX. Now, the technote does say that 3.1.11 is not compatable due to bug 13469 and won't be until it's fixed. Well, the good news is, that isn't going to get fixed at time of writing, so in the meantime stick with an older version and don't hope to upgrade any time soon.

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Model-Glue: First Impressions
by Neil Middleton 6:39 pm Friday, 24 March 2006.

I've just been taking a good long look at the framework Model-Glue by Joe Rinehart. I have to commend Joe on what he's acheived as I am very impressed.

I have come from a very procedural background, not really even taking the time to look into OO before CFC's came along, and only then taking a cursory look. One of the standout things about model-glue for me is the fact that you have absolutely no links between the different parts of the application, which is a complete contradiction to almost everything I have done in the past.

For me, this single point alone is enough reason to consider moving to a framework like this fully, especially when you consider the power then provided to you using these code units combined with CF(C)Unit and CFEclipse. These tools in conjunction with one another should give you one hell of a reliable, extensible and maintainable set of applications.

Now, I will admit, I haven't got all the way through the quickstarts yet so there are few question marks outstanding in places that I need to figure out for myself. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to blog about these when I can.

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UK CFUG with Ben Forta
by Neil Middleton 11:05 pm Monday, 20 March 2006.

I’ve just got back from tonights UK CFUG meeting with Ben Forta at City University in London. Overall, a good night with Ben talking for a couple of hours about the current Flex Beta and some ancillary topics.

Covered were many topics:
- Flex Builder 2 - This is currently in Beta 1 with Beta 2 apparently only a few days away. Ben wouldn’t give any dates for a full release, and the official line is “Mid-Year”, although I did spot that Ben’s Beta 2 install had 73 days until expiry which puts it May/June time. Pricing, as mentioned in other blogs, is said to be below $1000, whilst the framework and compiler (bundled in the SDK) and being handed out for free.
- Mystic - The Coldfusion 7.0.1 updater. This includes a new remoting engine and enables push/pull of data between CF and Flex using JMS.
- Data Synchronizing Services - A new cool gadget that controls multiple users updating the same data at the same time and helping them sort out any problems caused by them overwriting eah other.
- Flash Player 8.5 - Ben spoke about the massive performance improvements to be found in 8.5, and also the inclusion of the original FP8 virtual machine (in addition to the new 8.5 VM) to make sure there is 100% backward compatability.
- Planned Flex/Livecycle integration.
- A brief mention of CF8, better know by the name Scorpio, which include a raft of monitoring, analysis and performance probing tools.
- A brief mention of Jrun, which is undergoing development of a new version fully using Java 1.5 etc.

Nearly all of the above are available at http://labs.adobe.com

As always, Ben presented very well, and the CFUG had a whole load of questions which were answered very efficiently. Some of the demos were very good and showed how powerful Flex could be in the right hands. Unfortunately, Ben’s data services demo’s weren’t working at the time, but nevertheless, we got around these with a little imagination.

The general feedback from the group on Flex was one of excitement, with a couple of members remarking how “the mind boggled” at the possibilities that were now open. Hopefully it won’t be too long before Ben is back with us for another demonstration (hopefully of CF8 ;-)).

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Microsoft Buys Allaire’s Onfolio
by Niklas Richardson 1:24 pm Friday, 17 March 2006.

We did some work for Onfolio a few years back while their first product was in Alpha. So the news that Microsoft has bought JJ Allaire’s company Onfolio was of great interest.

This news is a few weeks old mind (it was posted on CRN.com on 8 March 2006), but, I felt it was blog-worthy for those that knew JJ and Onfolio, and hadn’t heard either.

Onfolio was a really great company and they had a great product. We got hooked to using the product while we worked on the Beta website. I’m really excited for them - it just shows what a great product it was!

Congratulations to everyone at Onfolio! Nice work!

My only upset, is that there won’t be any more updates to the Firefox version! :-(

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