Workshop Prequisites for cf.Objective() 2008
This document will continue to be updated between now and the conference but this should help you get ready for your workshop session.
We've worked hard to make cf.Objective() 2008 a "must see" event. We have a number of firsts this year that we're very proud of:
- The public release of Open BlueDragon on May 3rd!
- The public unveiling - and Alpha - of Model-Glue 3: Gesture!
- The public unveiling of Mate, the new Flex framework from AsFusion!
- The first conference to feature the latest rising star in the frameworks world: ColdBox - with an introductory session and a two hour, hands-on advanced workshop!
- The first public information about Swiz, the new Flex framework from Chris Scott of ColdSpring fame!
- Speaking of Chris Scott, we're the first conference to feature a two-hour, hands-on workshop for ColdSpring!
- We're also the first conference to feature a two-hour, hands-on workshop on agile development for ColdFusion developers by the leading light in automated process & testing, John Paul Ashenfelter!
If you're a Mach-II user - or thinking of using Mach-II - you might also be interested in the pre-conference classes.
- Mate - Laura Arguello
- Cairngorm for ColdFusion Developers - Brian Rinaldi
- Flex: No Frameworks Required - Maxim Porges
Would folks be interested in a Flex frameworks shootout BOF?
- Flex 3 for ColdFusion Developers - Mike Nimer
- Agile Bootcamp: What ColdFusion Developers Need To Know - John Paul Ashenfelter
- ColdSpring l337 - Chris Scott
- Advanced Techniques With The ColdBox Framework - Luis Majano
As we see which sessions are going to be the most popular, we'll finalize the Sunday sessions.
Adobe Developer Week is back, next week, March 24th thru 28th. Topics cover AIR, ColdFusion 8, Blaze DS with twenty sessions spread throughout the week.
Lots of AIR / Flex 3 stuff as well as three ColdFusion sessions!
It was an enjoyable discussion with some differing opinions and looks like being the first of an ongoing series of roundtable format shows. Next week's edition will cover's New Atlanta's announcement of BlueDragon J2EE going open source, among other things.
You can download episodes (sorry, "editions") from the site or subscribe via iTunes.
Browsing through the Grails site, I noticed they have a plugin for Flex so I figured I'd try it out.
Following the instructions, I installed the plugin (grails install-plugin flex) which took a fair while to fetch the plugin from the codehaus.org site and build it and install it into my project. Then I created a service class - a regular Groovy class - with just this one additional line:
Then I put my main.mxml file in the web-app directory of my Grails project with these lines inside the mx:Application tag:
<mx:Button label="Hello" click="ro.hello()"/>
<mx:TextInput text="{ro.hello.lastResult}"/>
Then I hit the MXML file in my Grails app:
http://localhost:8080/bookstore/main.mxml
Much churning ensued as the Flex app was compiled on demand and then up it came with the Hello button. Click. The return value from my HelloService.groovy hello() appeared in the text box.
It's a trivial app but it showed just how incredibly seamless the integration is. It uses the Web Tier Flex compiler for on-demand MXML compilation and it automatically manages the destinations for you.
It'll be a big event - we have around 150 RSVPs so far across the three groups!
- 6:30pm for food / drink / networking
- 7:00pm for the main presentation from Ted Patrick, Adobe's Technical Evangelist for Flex
The raffle will include:
- iPod Nano
- Flex Builder 3 Professional ($699 value - when released)
- CS3 Web Premium Suite ($1,599 value!!)
Due to the popularity of this event, we will be in the "Town Hall" open space inside the security area so you must RSVP using the BACFUG web site - http://bacfug.org/ (scroll down - the RSVP link is below the meeting information)
Direct RSVP link.
About this presentation:
Flex 3 and AIR are getting close to launch and in preparation, Ted Patrick from the Adobe Flex/AIR product team is traveling to select cities to show off the great new features and help prepare us for this exciting launch.
Flex 3 is a feature-packed release, adding new UI components like the advanced datagrid and improved CSS capabilities; powerful tooling additions like refactoring; and extensive testing tools including memory and performance profiling, plus the addition of the automated testing framework to Flex Builder.
Adobe AIR is game-changing in so many ways, extending rich applications to the desktop, enabling access to the local file system, system tray, notifications and much more. Now you can write desktop applications using the same skills that you've been already using to create great web apps including both Flex and AJAX.
Don't miss out on the opportunity to see and hear about this highly anticipated release of Flex 3 and AIR during this special pre-release tour. Plus, in addition to giving away some one of a kind Flex/AIR branded schwag, we will also be raffling off a copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional (pending availability), a full commercial copy of CS3 Web Premium and an iPod Nano at this event!
About Ted Patrick:
Ted Patrick is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe Systems. He worked with Flash since FutureSplash Animator and watched its evolution from animation to application.
Ted helped Macromedia/Adobe with the development of ActionScript 3, AVM2, ASC compiler, and Flash Player 9 for some 18 months prior to Flex 2's release.
Prior to joining Adobe in May 2006, he provided consulting services at PowerSDK Software and Cynergy Systems.
Ted is a serial entrepreneur having successfully started-up 4 times and raised over 7 Million in VC funding for companies he founded.
3 companies have been successfully sold to other businesses and one was sold to a publicly traded company in 2001. Ted is actively involved in the Flex development community and works at Adobe to define the future of rich media.
We will be raffling off some incredible prizes:
- Flex Builder 3 Professional (shipped after launch)
- CS3 Web Premium
- Apple iPod Nano
Read the BACFUG website for more details and make sure you RSVP (on the BACFUG website) since the meeting will take place inside the security perimeter at Adobe's San Francisco building!
AIR Beta 3, AIR extensions/updates for Flash CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3, Flex 3 Beta 3, BlazeDS, Brio Beta, Flash Player 9 Update...
Good grief!
I just installed the new Flex Builder plugin but won't get a chance to put it through its paces for a few days. The AIR installer is sitting on my desktop and I'm just about to install the updated Flash Player. Oh, and I have my Brio account but haven't had time to play with that either. Maybe Adobe think we need something to keep us busy over the holidays?
Check out Adobe Labs to see what you might be missing!
We all got together early in the summer and came up with the tracks:
- Architecture and Design in Software
- RIA - Flex / AJAX / AIR
- Frameworks A-Z
- Process and Tools
- Platform: Database Tuning & (Application / System) Security
- Tony Hillerson - Offline/Online Features of AIR
- Charlie Arehart - Hidden Gems in CF8
- Michael Smith - Using your Whole Brain for Developers
- Paul Kenney - Test-Driven Development with ColdFusion
- Sean Corfield - Design Patterns and ColdFusion
- John Paul Ashenfelter - Pragmatic ColdFusion: Build, Test, Deploy
- Matt Chotin - Introduction to Flex with ColdFusion
- Introduction to Design Patterns
- Advanced Design Patterns
- Integrating ColdFusion with .NET and other Microsoft technologies
- Publishing and consuming Web Services
- Interface-driven design (interface = API)
- Introduction to AIR
- Data synchronization techniques with AIR
- Designing for multiple user interface technologies
- Designing for code reuse between AIR and Flex
- Real-time data management with LiveCycle Data Services
Soon we'll be posting a general call for speakers. Watch this space!
Remember that registration is already open for cf.Objective() 2008!
See this blog post for more details on the speaker selection process.
Currently flights from the Bay Area to Sydney are around $1,200 including taxes... hmm...
I'll be blogging more about Model-Glue: Flex in due course - I'll be using MG:F, rather than Cairngorm, for the Flex (and AIR) development work I'll be doing over the coming months.
It's also worth noting that Model-Glue 2.0 is now an official release.
What do you get? A slick, clean monochrome interface with simple, intuitive controls. A library mode and a reading mode. Bookshelves to organize your books. Bookmarks. Text search. All in a 3Mb download.
Adobe has quite a few free sample books in its library to get you started.
Bill McCoy has plenty more details in his blog, in particular details of support for EPUB (aka OPS), an open standard, reflowable XHTML-based format.
Dave noted that Adobe has been active in Open Source for a good long while but has recently begun to move away from the Adobe Open Source License (a vanity license - like the old Fusebox license) to more standard licenses such as BSD and MPL. We've seen the ActionScript Virtual Machine released to the Mozilla Organization (as Tamarin) and this week the Flex 3 SDK was just released as Open Source with the ActionScript and MXML compilers and ActionScript debugger all following later this year.
You can keep tabs on Adobe's voice for Open Source on the Open at Adobe blog.
You can read about (some of) Adobe's Open Source projects on opensource.adobe.com, which includes the Adobe Source Libraries and the Generic Image Library. The latter was accepted into the Boost project for C++ - an open source library project that I was involved with back in 1998, when I was still involved with the ANSI C++ Standards Committee!
Dave also mentioned RIAForge which is probably the most well-known Open Source effort around Adobe technologies, as far as the ColdFusion community is concerned.
There are quite a few changes between the Apollo Alpha (aka "M3") and the new AIR (aka "M4") builds so you'll have to make some source code changes to rebuild your Apollo apps. It's not a big deal - I had my Apollo app - an administrative console for a website - up and running as an AIR app in just a few minutes. Despite the new Flex 3 SDK, my (recompiled) Flex apps and my new AIR app seem to work just fine with my existing CFMX 7 and CF 8 sites.
And tomorrow I get a whole day of training on AIR so I'll have more to say in the next few days.
Thank you to all the other folks who entered - I had about dozen entries in total, with half of those being within a very narrow window, around quarter past midnight!
Nearly 1,000,000 visitors have come to An Architect's View since I started blogging in June 2002. Dan Wilson suggested that I run a contest for the millionth visitor and then donated a prize so here's the contest!
The counter, as of this posting, is at 999,409. The person who takes a screenshot of the counter when it is closest to 1,000,000 visitors and sends it to me will win the "Flex 2 Essential Training" videos from Lynda.com.
But wait, you Photoshoppers... Sure, anyone can cheat. So to help prevent PhotoshopFraud, you must also send me the time you took the screenshot. This is something I can easily double check (because only I will know the timestamps on all the other screen shots submitted!).
The winner will be announced a few days after the counter reaches 1,000,000 visitors (to allow for folks to get their screenshots in).
The videos are being donated by Dan Wilson who is very keen for this contest to happen and, for some strange reason, really likes my blog!
Many thanx to Dan.
Get screen grabbing!
I just finalized my schedule and, somewhat to my surprise, my session choices are nearly all Flex! So I guess you could say CFUNITED is a great conference for learning about Flex :)
Here's where I'll be:
- Wednesday
- 8:00am - Welcome - Michael Smith et al (KN)
- 8:30am - Adobe Keynote - Ben Forta (KN)
- 10:15am - Flex 101 - Ted Patrick (FL)
- 11:30am - Leveraging ColdSpring to build robust Flex applications - Chris Scott (FL) - Yes, I know I saw this at cf.Objective() - it was a good session!
- 2:00pm - Integrating Spry and ColdFusion - Andrew Powel (FL)
- 3:15pm - OO Flex: An introduction to the Flex Framework - Andrew Trice (FL)
- 4:30pm - Using the Adobe Flex toolkit for Salesforce.com - Steve Rittler (FL) - Because I missed it at cf.Objective()!
- 6:00pm - Networking Event
- 8:00pm - Solo Coding - Charlie Arehart, Chaz Chumley, Mark Drew (BOF)
- 9:00pm - Apollo and Flex fears debunked - Andrew Powell (BOF)
- Thursday
- 8:30am - Testing CF Applications - John Paul Ashenfelter (ME)
- 9:45am - Continuous Testing with Flex and ColdFusion Projects - Thomas Burleson (FL)
- 11:30am - The Future of BlueDragon and CFML - Vince Bonfanti (KN) - Very interested to see progress on their "IronDragon" / DLR project!
- 1:45pm - Prototyping Applications with Flex 2.0 (FL) - Should this be 2:00pm I wonder?
- 3:15pm - AJAX Integration with ColdFusion 8 - me! (AC)
- 4:30pm - Using MVC with Flex/ColdFusion projects - Thomas Burleson (FL)
- 7:00pm - CF Celebration - Top Secret!
- Friday
- 8:30am - Ins and Outs of working with XML - Erik Goodlad (AC)
- 9:45am - Flex and Ajax: perfect match - Rob Gonda (FL)
- 11:00am - ColdFusion 8: Application Security - Adam Wayne Lehman (AC)
- 1:30pm - Flex Charting Explained - Rob Rusher (FL)
- 2:45pm - Pragmatic ColdFusion: Build, Test, Deploy - John Paul Ashenfelter - (DP)
- 4:00pm - Q & A Panel Session
- Saturday (my non-Flex day!)
- 8:30am - Step Debugging in CF 6/7/8 with FusionDebug or the new Scorpio - Charlie Arehart (BC)
- 9:45am - Working with RSS in ColdFusion - Pete Freitag (AC)
- 11:00am - ColdFusion 8: Integrated Flex Data Services (AC) - It's a bit Flex-y :)
- 1:30pm - AJAX Integration With ColdFusion 8 - me again! (AC)
- 2:45pm - Are You "Cashing In" on Caching? - Tyson Vanek (DP)
Joe Rinehart showed off a new project at cf.Objective(), which aims to brings the ease of use of Model-Glue to Flex. He showed me an example that he'd converted from Cairngorm to his nascent "MG:F" and it was definitely an improvement. I was still bothered by all the repetitive code, left over from Cairngorm, for handling the model - endless delegate object creation, asynchronous token management, responders and result / fault handlers. Boring, tedious, monotonous boilerplate code. There had to be a better way.
I asked Joe if he thought he could come up with some sort of automagic proxy mechanism to make all that code just go away. Being Joe, of course he could!
Read about the big changes to MG:F that introduce autoproxy functionality around the service layer so that you do a lot less typing! Very nice!
I think this is going to be a great project that will really help a lot of ColdFusion developers get into Flex (me included!).
The Mozilla Public License will be used to cover the source the AS3 Flex SDK (available in source form since the release of Flex 2) as well as the Java source for the AS3 and MXML compilers, the debugger and the core AS3 libraries from the SDK.
Most of the infrastructure should be in place by the summer with a full transition to open source by the end of 2007.
You might also want to watch the video interview with Ely Greenfield and David Wadhwani by Robert Scoble of PodTech.
If you haven't seen Buzzword - which they've demo'd a few times now - check out the screen shots on their main web site. It's very, very slick.
See you there!
In no particular order:
- Do more unit testing! Or, more accurately, get better at Test-Driven Development! I already evangelize about this but the more I get into unit testing - and TDD in particular - the more I realize that I still don't do enough and I still have a tendency to shortcut the process and code first, instead of writing tests first.
- Do more Open Source Software development! Yes, even with Fusebox 5.0, Fusebox 5.1, my Closures library and the REST adapter under my belt for 2006 (as well as numerous contributions to other frameworks), this is still an area where I want to be able to do more and keep giving back to the community. 2007 should bring Fusebox 6.0 at least!
- Do more Flex! Having finally gotten around to actually learning Flex for the first time in 2006 and written a few small applications, this is an area I really want to become much more proficient at in 2007.
- Write some Apollo applications! If I do more Flex in 2007, Apollo applications will be a snap but I want to stretch myself by learning enough AJAX to develop hybrid Flex/AJAX applications (like some of the cool stuff Christian Cantrell showed off in that video Mike Chambers made recently).
As I recall, these are very similar to Matt and Peter's resolutions... must be a theme...
What are your resolutions?
Adobe ColdFusion Specialist and former manager of the US Department of State ColdFusion User Group, Adam Lehman will be talking about using ColdFusion with the Flex Data Services.This will be a joint meeting of BACFUG and SilVaFug, so the meeting will follow 2 hours of free Flex training. Flex training starts at 5:30.
Also, we will be giving away software and having a Holiday Party! (I guess that means we'll have to spike the eggnog.)
Usual location:
601 Townsend St (Adobe SF), Kojak
San FranciscoRSVP for the meeting at http://www.bacfug.org
For more information on free Flex training, go to http://www.silvafug.org/
It's a Flex application, backed by Java code - and a number of LiveCycle components, and it also leverages the trial signup / terms of service Flex application we launched as part of Adobe Acrobat Connect a few weeks ago.
You can try the Adobe Document Center for free until the end of the year (the same as with Adobe Acrobat Connect). The commercial release is expected to be available in English in early 2007 at an introductory price of $19.99 per month (or $199 per year). Additional languages will be added throughout 2007.
You can see the full range of Adobe Online Services, all of which offer free trials.
Tom covered the basic concepts and then took us through the layout model and several of the containers Flex provides. He showed how to tie components together with ActionScript and that there is a debugger for stepping through your code. He covered the data grid and view stack components as well.
I followed along on my laptop (Flex Builder 2 for OS X rocks) and learned enough to be dangerous in this two hour session.
Tom said remote objects will be covered in the next training session but I experimented with that myself and, by this morning's BART ride, has conquered that too (it took me a while to figure out that if you have a non-empty context root on your ColdFusion server, you need to specify the endpoint attribute on the RemoteObject tag).
So now I have my first real Flex application running! It's a testing console for the web services / remoting services my team has been building. Nothing fancy but it does the job. A tab for each service being tested. Each tab offers a form on the left to enter parameters for the service to call and the results are displayed on the right.
I think I'm going to enjoy using Flex!
It was a very interesting meeting. Charles Freedman's presentation on Yahoo!'s Flash Maps API was great and stories of the Yahoo! Hack Day made it sound like a wild geekfest.
I was stunned and very pleased to hear eBay are offering free introductory Flex training to Silvafug members - something I shall be taking advantage of next month! My main reason for attending Silvafug is to learn about Flex since I haven't had a chance to use it yet and I think it's very cool technology. Ages ago I took an introductory Flex 1.5 course and was impressed at being able to create applications so quickly - but I never had a chance to use Flex 1.5 subsequently. I think if I learn Flex 2, I will actually find some very useful things I can build with it. I would have used it on my current project if I'd known how!
Adobe is enabling whole new classes of Internet applications with its current suite of tools. Become part of the team that is leading the way in showing customers and strategic partners how to develop these high-impact applications.Adobe Consulting (AC) is establishing a Manhattan office to meet the strong demand of enterprise customers who want to radically improve the user experience, performance and value of their web applications. We are looking for technical architects with consulting experience to provide customer-facing guidance in the design and implementation of these ground-breaking applications.
The Technical Architect is a pivotal role within Adobe Consulting. This individual is considered a company expert within technical discipline, and leads technical aspects of projects with strategic customers and partners.
This month's meeting will be a Q&A session with some of the Flex Framework team.
You must RSVP (for security badging reasons) to either Tom Ortega or to fugrsvp at gmail dot com. I strongly recommend joining the mailing list for more details of the group and its meeting agendas.
However, the date doesn't mesh well with my current workload so I have to postpone for about six months. I was disappointed and was about to fill in the form when I noticed that I could submit my request online! Yes, Alameda county have an e-juror system!
I guess not too many people are using it right now because the user experience is pretty sucky in many, many ways. It cries out for a Flex user interface! It ought to be a fairly simple process but it forces you through a very unnatural process in order to get both a home phone number and an email address entered, then when you ask to defer, it doesn't give you any hints about what date is acceptable... my first choice was exactly six months in the future. Submit. Refresh. Not acceptable - must be less than six months. So I picked the day before. Submit. Refresh. Not acceptable - that's a Sunday. Sigh. Why not popup a calendar that only allows you to pick valid dates??
And why can't I enter a work phone number? They have a field for it but you are never offered the option to modify it!
I'd be happy to hear reports from folks who did attend...
This month's meeting is this Thursday in San Francisco. Here's the announcement from Tom:
As promised, the next meeting for Silvafug is looking to be a good one. Here's the tentative schedule for the evening, tentatively scheduled for 7 to 9 pm. (Would a 7:30 to 9:30 work better?)I'll be there because, well, I need to learn Flex!As you can see, if you're new to Flex and want to get a jumpstart, this is the meeting to go to. If you're "beyond" the Beginner level, don't worry, we still want you! With one instructor/speaker, we'll need the "advanced" members of the group to walk around and help out the newbies. It'll be a great chance to help out the group and get to know each other.
- Call To Order
- Intros (5 Mins)
- Announcements (5 Mins)
- A word from our sponsor - roundpeg, Inc. (10 Mins)
- Beginner Session I (30 Mins)
- Intro to Flex concept, architecture, framework, key functions, etc.
- Break (10 Mins)
- Beginner Session II (30 Mins)
- Development Lab - 1-2 Page/Component Design
- SilVaFUG Member Open Forum - Intros/Q&A (25 Mins)
- Give Away/Closing Comments/Announcements (5 Mins)
The Intro to Flex speaker slot is open. If we don't get a volunteer, yours truly [Tom Ortega] will be at the podium. If no one steps up, no complaining as you were warned! =)
roundpeg, our meeting sponsor, is going all out. They're providing the meeting facilities, the lab with 12 computers, the food and yet another FREE TRAINING SEAT! You'll get a taste of the roundpeg Breeze-style training during the second session.
To make sure there's enough food and chairs, we're asking you to RSVP to fugrsvp .at. gmail .dot. com or to my email. Please make the subject line, "8/10 RSVP". In the email body, include the following info: # of people the RSVP is for, whether you'll have your own laptop, and time preference (if any).
I'm sure there will be other items to discuss and I'll bring them to the group beforehand so you can come with answers. If you have something your dying to bring up now, run it by me (if your shy) or post it to the group to get feedback.
Looking forward to seeing you at meeting #2!
Location: roundpeg, 595 Market St, San Francisco.
JamJar lets you create "spaces" that you can invite your colleagues and friends into, to plan events, share files, discuss topics, share notes etc.
To learn your way around JamJar once you are logged in, look in the Connections pod and open Community Spaces and then double-click the Welcome to JamJar space.
Enjoy!
p.s. No, this is still not the 'top secret' project. This was built by our Seattle-based team (Protect an Adobe PDF File was built by our San Jose-based team).
I'm very passionate about messaging as an enterprise integration approach - hence my creation of the JMS event gateway that ships with CFMX 7 - so I'm pleased to see good material like this being published for everyone to get more exposure to the capabilities of Flex Data Services.
Hopefully the article will show you how powerful and expressive this enterprise piece of the Flex product line is (and give you an insight into why only the FDS Express edition is free).
- ColdFusionMX 7.0.2 (release notes)
- Flex 2
- Flex Builder 2 - $499
- Flex 2 SDK (compiler and framework) - free
- Flex Data Services Express - free (single CPU, no clustering)
Once again, the question of Flex pricing comes up: "What is the end price target for Flex server", the developer asks Michael. As Michael says "Flex itself is basically free." I guess we just have to keep saying it over and over again before the message sticks.
Anyway, glad to see Michael posting about this and drawing some great comments, especially from Kevin Hoyt, in response.