Simeon Says

I am getting so excited for the 360Flex conference. I am in count down mode like its Christmas! I am a big conference fan, I dont think there is any better way to jam a bunch of information into your head than by going to conferences. But the real value for me is in making new friends. I have been a CF developer for a long time, and I have lots of CF friends.

I have been doing flex for a couple years, but most of my flex friends are CF crossovers. So I am really looking forward to getting out and making some new friends. I cant discount the value of old friendships either though.

So drop me a line if you are heading out to the conference. If you comment here I can ping you off line and we can look into hooking up at the conf. So lets hear it? Who is going?

I am teaching a flex class this week and we had a problem with several of the computers. In one of the units we walk through changing the workspace our Flex Builder instance uses. Everyone was able to switch, but several people got errors when we tried to switch back. Flex Builder would not even open. It ended up being that the workspace directory was not a file the users computer had access to write so flex eclipse could not create the necessary files to associate that folder as a workspace. With a little research I found that we could use the -data argument when starting Flex Builder to launch it and specify a better location for our workspace.

After fixing this I realized that this same trick could be used to create different shortcuts to Flex Builder which each opened using a specific workspace file. This could be useful for people who use multiple workspaces for managing projects. So I decided to share.

I have seen a lot of emails and blog posts with folks wanting to know how to connect their flex application to a remote ColdFusion server. At first I thought this was a really silly question, because its not much different than connecting to a local one. But then I realized that this was clear for me because I was not setting up my projects using the ColdFusion option in the Flex Builder new project wizard.

Because I started my flex 2 adventures on my mac, using only the Flex 2 SDK and the command line compiler, I look at creating my projects a little differently. But also when i begin a project I dont feel its a good idea to commit my self to any one of the RPC services.

So when I create a new flex project I always choose the “Basic” project type. I specify the name of my project and where I want my files to live. I then begin working on my application, building the layout and controls that make up the GUI. WHEN I am ready to look at connecting to a remote service for data processing, I walk through these steps.

1. Create a “libs” directory at the root of my project. (name and location is really arbitrary)
2. Copy the services config file from my ColdFusion instance (or another project) to this directory
3. Add a new option to the compiler settings for the project which specifies the location of the config file. (ie. –compiler.services=libs/services-config.xml)
4. In my services-config.xml I specify the exact path to the cf server I wish to access in my cf-amf channel definition
   < endpoint uri="http://simb.net/flex2gateway/" class="flex.messaging.endpoints.AMFEndpoint"/ >

I feel this method has several benefits. The first being that my project is now independent of any other projects using the ColdFusion destination on this server. Which means if I change the config file in cf (or in another project) my project will continue to function as I expect. The second benefit is that my application doesn’t have to take into account how this information is set. For instance Mike Nimer posted an excellent way to get rid of the services-config.xml file all together in your application. But I feel his method is quite a bit of work for something a few lines of xml take care of very nicely. And the third point is that I can actually use ANT to change the value of the server path as part of a deployment script, so I can have my application compile for local or remote server usage very easily.

I hope if you were confused about a solution for doing remote cf development in flex this might help you simplify your process. I know for me it did because I didnt realize there was such a problem

I was really happy to update to the newer blogcfc which included support for desktop blogging clients. I wanted to use flock but couldnt get it working. I found ecto to be a close second in features, but sometimes it doesnt work quite like I wanted. Knowing that Rob Rohan had used ecto in the past I pinged him via IM and was suprised to see that he now uses TextMate as his blog client. Thats right, the all purpose editor for mac also can act as a blog client for BlogCFC. Its not all that pretty, but if you are reading this it works :)Category: Blogging

And on the first day of Frameworks Conference in DC…Coincidence? Actually yes

Tune into the flex show episode 3 to listen to the second half of my interview with Ryan and Jeff. We talk about Flex and ColdFusion and no less than SEVEN frameworks.

I was disappointed that I could not make it to the frameworks conference this year. But I hope all my conference attending buddies will miss me Dont forget to blog about the fun stuff you learn!