RocketFM Project on RIAForge

I have been writing a series of articles dedicated to creating a Flex & ColdFusion application. I just wanted to let everyone know that the project was approved yesterday and can be found at http://rocketfm.riaforge.org/. There is currently no code up there but as soon as I get the next part up I will throw the source up there. This way as we are going through the steps you can grab the code and play along. I also wanted to ask your opinion about branching different steps. I could keep the latest code in the trunk and create branches for different steps.  To be quite honest I don't do any branching or tagging in subversion so I am a little lost when it comes to that. Is this typically what its used for? A way to break down release builds? Thanks!

AIR Directory Listing Example

I was just playing around today trying to pick up some of the differences in AIR from Flex. The first and probably one of the reasons AIR applications can truly be considered desktop applications is the file system access. You have complete control over the file system like you would expect from an app running on the desktop. For my example app that I am writing I needed to be able to get a listing of files for a directory.

I decided to whip up an example so that I could show you just how easy it is to accomplish this task. This example is very basic but it shows you the real power and simplicity of the File class. This example has a text area and a browse button. When you click the browse button you will be able to select a directory. When the directory is selected all of the files will be displayed in the text box. It will not show you any directories and it will clear itself out when you select another directory. The image below shows a directory of files right off of my camera.

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Real World Flex/ColdFusion: Part 3

In this step of our series we are going to focus on the layout of the application. As I stated in a previous article in this series the layout is a very important step of our application and we need to look at all of our options. This is where I am really going to enjoy some feedback from others so please chime in with your thoughts. Before we get into what my first choice was with the layout and how I can improve on it lets take a look at our options.

We basically have 3 options when laying out our application.

• Absolute Positioned Layout
• Percentage based layout
• Constraints based layouts

Absolute positioning is a layout that you probably won't use to much but its by far the quickest of the layouts. The reason for this is because the application does not need to calculate where items are going to fall on the screen. In an absolute layout you tell the application where to place components based on x,y coordinates. Think of the top left part of your screen as 0,0. From there you can place a component on a screen using x,y attributes for the components. If you are building some widget for a page and you know that the width is going to be a fixed width its not a bad choice but I still think in my opinion I would use constraint based layouts but we will get into that in a second.

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Real World Flex/ColdFusion: Part 2

In the 1st part of this series we took a look a defining the project and listing out some basic requirements. In this part we can to dive in and setup our project. We won't actually get into any code until the 3rd part but this is an important step. I will be using Flex builder for this project but you certainty don't have to. Your setup will be different from mine but once we get into to coding it should be the same.

After firing up Flex builder 3 we need to create our project. Select file > New > Flex Project. All of the screen shots below can be clicked on if you want view a larger one. As I said in part 1 we are going to create a fictional project named RocketFM.

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Real World Flex/ColdFusion: Part 1

Today I am going to start a new series that I think anyone interested in Flex is really going to enjoy. I was assigned a task of building a new application at work about a month ago. Now that I have successfully deployed the application into testing I thought I would walk through the many things I learned from this project.

In part 1 we will take a look at the start of an application. What are the requirements, features and what are my recommendations as a developer. I also want to go through a little bit of the thought of why I have chosen Flex/CF for this project. After we take a look at what it is we need to build we will go through building our own version of this application. I have been doing Flex development here and there for a little while but his application really helped my growth and I hope it will do the same for you.

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ActionScript Rest Parameters

The more and more I write ActionScript the more I really enjoy it. Tonight I was working on an problem where I needed to pass x number of arguments to a function. Lucky for me I found out that ActionScript 3 supports rest parameters. The rest parameter specifies that a function will accept any number of comma delimited arguments. This is a quick class I whipped up to show an example of how you can take advantage of the cool little feature of the language.

package { import flash.display.Sprite; public class HelloAS extends Sprite { private var colors:Array; public function HelloAS() { colors = new Array(); addColor("red","blue","green"); } public function addColor(...args):void { for(var i:uint = 0; i < args.length; ++i){ trace(args[i]); } } } }

cfSilence not so silent anymore

On top of being a good Friend, Todd Sharp is a brilliant developer right here in Ohio. We all know him as being a strong contributor / speaker in the ColdFusion community but I am pretty sure a few more people are going to start to take notice. Tech crunch just posted an entry about his start up project SlideSix. I would go check out the article and a big congrats to Todd on all his hard work.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/30/slidesix-a-guerrilla-presentation-sharing-system/

Oracle on the fly

When I started my job the one thing that was new to me was Oracle. As a developer I am hear to tell you that you don't need to be scared to learn it. While there are some major differences (especially in 8i) there is nothing overwhelming to learn. I am speaking from a developers standpoint, I am sure that a DBA would tell me its a different world but I am no DBA and I don't even play one on TV.

The first thing I had to get used to was some terminology. If there was a physical database machine and I created different databases I would refer to each instance as a database. I guess its more common in this world to refer to each as a Schema. Again, maybe someone could fill me in on this but its just what I am noticing here. The first thing you need to do if find yourself a tool to manage your schema's in. I am coming from the world of MSSQL so I am really use to enterprise manager. Here are some alternatives that can get you up and going quickly.

• Oracle Developer - This is a free tool from oracle and it has a nice familiar feel to it.
• Orace SQL Plus - Another free tool from Oracle, its a command line only tool
• TOAD - A commercial tool that is quite popular. I installed it and it just seemed a little over the top for me.
• Aqua Data Studio This is easily my favorite new tool in my tool belt and I plan on devoting a whole writeup on it so stay tuned.

I have a ton of things that you might run into as a developer so stay tuned for some tips.

Flex Authority

I forgot to mention this in my last post so I wanted to make sure I got this out. I gave a presentation on Flex for the Java Users Group last Wednesday. The fine folks over at Fusion Authority were nice enough to send out 3 copies and a free year subscription to the magazine that we raffled off to one lucky winner. I have long been a fan of the ColdFusion publication they have and the Flex one seems to be following in the same steps. If you have not had a chance you really need to check it out. At the very least you can go download a single issue PDF to see if its right for you.

https://secure.houseoffusion.com/flex-authority.cfm

Cleveland Java User Group RIA Discussion

On Wednesday night I had the pleasure of presenting Flex to the Cleveland Java User Group. This was part of a RIA discussion that would include JavaFx and Microsoft® Silverlight. The meeting started off with a discussion on the new release of JavaFx, then my presentation on Flex and unfortunately we were unable to secure a presenter on Silverlight.

So if you follow this blog at all or know me then you will know I am a pretty huge Adobe honk. With that said I am not closed minded and I am really open to new technologies so I was interested in finding out more about JavaFx. One of the first things I am always interested in is how I am going to be developing with a new technology.  I am a huge Eclipse fan because it has a plugin for almost everything you need, if someone would just write a plugin to do the dishes I think I would be set! JavaFx is a child of Sun so naturally you would expect a NetBeans plugin which there is but no eclipse plugin at the moment. There was a hint of plans for this in the future.

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