The Creative Suite group have just released Kuler, a fun RIA for experimenting with color palettes. The Flash front end speaks XML to a Model-Glue ColdFusion application. The authentication service is provided as a server-to-server SOAP web service by my team's ColdFusion / ColdSpring / Transfer code.

It's been done, although not as "flashy", as a pure HTML/JS/DOM system.

http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html

Kuler may be an example of a feature rich Flash-based interface, but the "wellstyled" version also didn't take 45 seconds to download and start up on my DSL connection.

So, are you using an XML view in MG, or speaking directly to the service layer through a remote facade?

It's actually using XML views in MG.

Interesting! Go have a great vacation, but some time I'd love to see a posting comparing and contrasting the two approaches along with any ideas you have on when to use which!

I was going to point out the excellent colour scheme tool at Wellstyled - which I have used now and again over the past couple of years. I see no point of Kuler - it's just an overdeveloped less friendly rip off of a good idea that someone had a few years ago. I would have thought the creative minds at Adobe would have come up with something more original that could showcase their technologies. Am I being too critical?

I'm probably a funny person to ask this, but why isn't it just using Flash Remoting / RemoteObject?

It is completely useless. Adobe should take it off labs before Microsoft starts pointing and laughing.

What I don't like about Flex, as awesome as it is to play with, is that the client relies on SOAP. It just seems heavy and slow to me. Any chance Adobe will give a ReST/JSON or anything lighter in a future release of Flex?

On first visit it looked like my save hung.

On return visit it looked like my save worked.

Hi - I'm the lead developer on the kuler project. Just to clarify - kuler's user interface was built with Flash 9 and Actionscript 3. It communicates with the backend server using a REST based protocol that sends & receives theme data as XML. The services that are accessed on the backend are built using CFMX 7. We are currently using Reactor to handle the database objects on the backend. However, due to the unexpected high traffic of the site, we are looking into switching to the Transfer ORM since it has a bit faster performance. Currently, the only piece that fully uses Model-Glue is our admin tools application for managing the site's content.

Also, we've made a number of performance enahancements since launch, so the slowdowns previously experienced should be mostly resolved.

When I first heard about Kuler I thought yeah, it's already been done... but this is the slickest color schemer app I've seen! Nice job. Now, when is it going to be able to export PS/AI color swatches ;)

Is there any plan to publish Kuler API (via REST or WebService)?

We do indeed plan on publishing some of the APIs, as well as having RSS feeds available to subscribe to. However, there is no set timeline for this at this time - probably early next year.

Dan:

Flex isn't reliant on SOAP. It can make very light requests for structured data via AMF, a binary remoting protocal that maps to either Java classes or ColdFusion Components.

It can also make HTTP requests, which means that ReST and JSON are fairly easy implementations - in fact, there's already a JSON library available. Googling "'flex 2' JSON" turns it up immediately.

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