Ladies and Gentlemen of the Flex 2/Coldfusion Remoting Development Community, If I could offer you only one tip for your future, Staring ColdFusion from the command line would be it.

When you start coldfusion from the command line not only does it give you a good idea of what actually happens when CF starts up, but there is a great deal of information that also gets displayed in that little window. When using Flex 2.0 remoting that information can save you from loosing your hair and gaining ulcers.

All of the information that is passed from CF to Flex and from Flex to CF gets output in that screen in a wonderfully easy to digest manner. Including when you pass an object from flex to coldfusion, you can see what exactly is being passed and how cf sees it. Why would this be important? Well what if CF doesnt realize that it needs to turn the data from your User.as file into a User.cfc object? The only error you are going to get in cf is that the argument passed to your function is not of the right type. But you wont know why :)

So for you windows folks you will mostly likely be running something like this from your command line:

JRun4injrun -start cfusion

or for mac users something like:

/Applications/JRun4/bin/jrun -start cfusion

Both of those assume you are running the multiserver version of CF, and you can exchange the word “cfusion” for whichever cf instance you would like to start up.

I have talked to many developers now that are troubleshooting remoting problems and this is one of the first things I have them do. Quite often it is the only step I have to help them with because once they see the output they often can figure out their woes :)

Good Luck in your Remoting Adventures!