There’s nothing more fun than exposing horrifyingly bad ColdFusion code, that is so long as it’s not your own. Mike found Ray Camden’s Friday Challenge all too tempting and submitted some of the ugliest CFML known to man. Just to be fair, there’s plenty of poor HTML and JavaScript in there as well! Check out some of the contributions of lengthy code submitted on Ray’s blog!
AdobeMAX is in full effect and we’re not there! Listen in on our discussion regarding these conferences and let us know your thoughts. We debate the value of these conferences and whether or not you really walk away with anything of concrete value. We encourage you to listen to our differing opinions and share your own in our comments! On another note, if you’ve missed the AdobeMAX sessions and want to check them out, you can do so by checking out AdobeTV!
Lastly, we discuss creating applications with a ColdFusion backend in true OOP fashion while exploring the use of other technologies for the user interface layer. Of course, our preferences differ and we discuss the use of Adobe Flex versus JavaScript frameworks such as ExtJS. Listen in and share your thoughts in our comments!
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#1 by Chung on October 6, 2009 - 7:37 am
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Flex is awesome! At least start playing around with it. Pretty awesome stuff.
#2 by Chung on October 6, 2009 - 7:52 am
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Flexbuilder been around since Flex came out. From the beginning as Brian said.
#3 by Chung on October 6, 2009 - 8:02 am
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Just finished listening the who thing. I haven’t played with xjs much but flex is definitely some great stuff. Went on of those coldfusion groups over in Industry City a while back where Ben Forta was showing some stuff off with Flex. First thing I did was install the thing and play around with it at home and made a simple dinky chat interface.
I wish I’d had more time or projects to play with Flex but the problem I run into is the cost for buy the flex server enterprise that clients usually just don’t bother with.
#4 by Mike Chandler on October 6, 2009 - 8:14 am
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Chung, that’s what we were struggling with in the conversation in regards to licensing. Initially, licensing was an issue if you were using Flex Data Services as Brian pointed out, but I really wasn’t sure if licensing was still a consideration under the Adobe label since they transformed Flex Data Services into Adobe LiveCycle data services. As we were chatting I was trying to do a quick look-up on LiveCycle to see if there was pricing listed but I was quickly side-tracked.
#5 by Chung on October 6, 2009 - 2:33 pm
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Yeh went and looked it up after listening and I’m trying to figure things out again. I haven’t touched flex for a long, long time but over the year dabbled around with it with friends and stuff. That’s about it. I just played with it and say “cool” then went to go do thing to try and pay da billz. lol
And when it came to flash, flex+flash was cool and all but I program directly in flash with actionscript and using CF thru XML… etc to do what I probably could have done in flex.
I guess the biggest argument with some friends I have are “Yeh, but I don’t need to know all the fancy designer stuff!” and I guess that’s what makes it so worth it for them to learn it quicker than I but I look at some of the things they produce and it’s pretty bland, though functionally it was great.
#6 by Shaun McCran on October 8, 2009 - 3:05 am
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Hi,
Just finished listening, congrats on the webcasts, its an interesting way of delivering your views! On the subject of Flex or AJAX or XJS, I’ve been using Flex since version 2 (1 and 1.5 was horrible) and I have to say I love it. It has the odd quirk, but once you get it hooked up to your back end CF it becomes really powerful.
Its really worth getting the amf gateway working, once you are returning typed objects (custom structutes if you will) then everything becomes a lot easier, and you can leave that XML behind!
I prefer it over AJAX as I think it has a different, more polished finish on screen.
#7 by Micky Dionisio on October 8, 2009 - 10:12 pm
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@shaun – thanks much for the note and taking the time to listen to us.
quick question for you – would you say for most of the development you do that uses flex, the front end is completely flex-based or do you sprinkle in flex components/widgets as needed while still leveraging {insert typical front end language of choice}?
#8 by Shaun McCran on October 20, 2009 - 7:23 am
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No problems, it is interesting to hear what the ColdFusion community is doing state-side.
To answer your question, my first 2 or 3 flex applications were entire sites. The whole framework was built on a flex front end, and a CF and PHP back end. This quickly became cumbersome though, and I realized that producing a 2.2mb swf file of an entire application was seriously affecting usability.
Since then I have integrated flex apps into a standard framework, like FuseBox, Mach 2 etc. I’ve found it works much more effectively if flex is used to provide specific functionality, like a login application or a shopping cart etc that is embedded into you ‘normal’ templates.
P.s. Thanks for the mention! Was listening while writing this!
#9 by Adrian on October 21, 2009 - 1:31 am
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Hi Guys
Thanks for the podcast, nice to get someone view point on CF stuff.
I remember having a play with Flex after doing the first Lynda.com tutorials on it and one of things that annoyed me was the whole compile/deploy aspect.
When youve got a bug that is 5 steps in to a process you have to make a change and then compile it and then do those 5 steps again. I am not sure what changes there has been since then but i do remember thinking how would you ever build a reasonable sized app using this. Saying that in doing a reasonable size ext js app i am sure you have the similar issues but with a press of f5 to just reload and start from scratch.
#10 by Jon on October 29, 2009 - 8:09 am
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Like your conversations, very informative.
Your thoughts about going to conferences is wrong. Going to them should not be about the cost, it is about meeting other developers and being exposed to technology that you are not normally exposed to. I have gone to quite a few MAXs and have always take away new ideas that have helped my career.
#11 by Wade on October 30, 2009 - 7:13 am
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In reference to conferences, I went to CFUnited this year. All the big coldfusion guys were there, but they were very accessible and I only went to the Saturday session. I was able to talk to the presenters after their sessions and generally had a great time.