Here are the slides from my Cairngorm Jumpstart presentation at bFlex in Bloominton. Special thanks to Brian Rinaldi for help on the presentation slides.
Slides
bflex_Cairngorm_Jumpstart.ppt
Code
CairngormShell.zip
If you have any questions, comments, insults feel free to comment or email me directly.
Here is both the slides and code from my presentation on Using Value Objects in ColdFusion and Flex from 360Flex in San Jose.
If you have any questions, feel free to email me.
Slides:
Code:
So, what do baby showers and Flex have in common? Not a whole lot. But the Target Gift Registry and Flex have a lot in common!
My fiancee and I were shopping for a shower gift for a couple who are registered at Target. I fired up the the registry kiosk and there it is, the ubiquitous Flex loader!
The application itself was put together quite well and the usability was excellent.
The only part of the process that I didn't like was selecting a state. You would pick a letter and it would immediately switch to another view of buttons to select from, listing all the states that begin with the letter you selected. Hit the wrong letter, you have to go back. With the capabilities that Flex offers, I would have much preferred to see a list of state names that narrowed down based on the letters you entered.
For example, I live in Indiana. If I had entere "In" I could have had it narrowed down to just Indiana. Instead, I had to hit the letter "I", jump to another screen, and pick from the list. Not to mention, I hit "H" first.
Oh well, enough gripes! It was great to see Flex out in the wild, in an application being used by the masses!
Ok, so I was pulling my hair out last night trying to figure out why the value object that ColdFusion was returning was not casting to the value object on the Flex/Actionscript side.
I bet I ran the Flex debugger 100 times. Everything looked just fine. The object that was being returned from ColdFusion was typed correctly and had the correct data, but when I went to assign the object to the proper type in Flex, it would end up being null.
After a few hours of this, I decided to open a bottle of wine and call it a night. Nothing like a well rested pair of eyes to solve the problem.
After having no luck this morning, I had my friend, Kevin Kazmierczack take a look at my VO on the Flex side of things.
Before:
Kevin suggested moving the import statement above the meta data for the RemoteClass. Shazaam! It worked.
Now, I don't know if I'm just dumb and I missed this in Flex 101 and need to go back, or if this is just something you have to find out the hard way. I'm guessing it's the former, but who knows. However, swapping those two little lines of code to this made all my headaches go away:
After:
Anyone else ever run into this?
360Flex is headed back to where it all started, San Jose and the eBay Town Hall Center on August 18-20th.
I've had the opportunity to speak at both the inaugural 360Flex as well as 360Flex Atlanta and will be speaking once again this time around in San Jose.
This time I'm teaching a half-day Flex 101 class on ColdFusion and Flex the Sunday before the conference, focusing on using Flex applications to manage the data in your database. I will also be giving the 90 minute scaled down version during the actual conference.
In my opinion the 360Flex conference is an amazing value when it comes to conferences! Come on out, as you won't be dissapointed! And maybe, if you are lucky, Tom will show you the eBay NOC, one of them anyway!
Jesus, it's been since September 27th since I wrote anything!?!
Well, I've got a few things to say so I'll just get started.
From the yesterday's news department, MAX Barcelona was amazing, aside from spending 9 hours crammed into a Northwest Airbus. It was better than MAX Chicago. It wasn't as spread out and certainly had a better feel to it.
Next, 360 Flex Atlanta, I'll be speaking on using the ColdFusion 8 Flex Gateways! A great line up of speakers and an all around great conference!
And finally, for those of you who remember my bet with Ed Sullivan, well he finally paid up. At the Union Oyster house in downtown Boston over Thanksgiving weekend!
Here's my reward and Ed in all his glory!
A yummy 2lb. Lobster
Thanks Ed!
Yes, I'm wearing my Peyton Manning jersey in Boston
Well, I know I'm a little late with this, but I feel it worth mentioning.
If you haven't already read it somewhere else, cf.objective() was an amazing conference. The quality of the content was great and so was the food!
Jared and everyone else did a rock star job putting the conference together. Thanks again to everyone.
I'll be heading back there next year for sure and I hope to see you there.
If you're wondering where the code from my presentation is, well, click on this link.
Also, as a side note, I'm going to be holding a noob Flex contest, similar to that of Ray Camden's noob ColdFusion contest. Stay tuned for all the details.
Since I'm in Atlanta, I decided to attend the Atlanta Flash/Flex User Group.
It was a good time, I got to talk to Josh Adams and Charlie Arehart about my opinion on Slugworth and BlueDragon. They didn't convince me that my opinion is wrong.
But, opinions are like assholes, everyone has got one and they usually stink.
Now, on to the title of my post. Cliff Hall, who's teaching the Flex class that I'm taking demoed his new framework, pureMVC, during the show and tell portion of the meeting.
It looks really interesting and Cliff is billing it as a simpler architecture without the learning curve of Cairngorm.
Cliff is basing his pureMVC framework off the Gang of Four. He's got a demo Apollo application, Pantry Mouse, built using the framework as a proof of concept.
Unfortunately Cliff ran out of time last night. He's planning on launching the site pureMVC.org in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes open.
In my pursuit to become an Adobe Certified Instructor for Flex (already am for ColdFusion) I'm in Atlanta this week for Flex training.
One of the requirements to become a Certified Instructor for Flex is having to take the classes.
The first class is Flex 2: Developing Rich Client Applications. So far, it's pretty basic stuff. We've covered the IDE, Layout, MXML Components and event handling. Already knowing this stuff, I think it's a pretty good class for someone wanting to learn Flex.
I'll keep you posted as things go along.
I'm sorry this is so late, but I've been extremely busy.
Here's the code from my Flash Remoting (AMF) vs. Flex Data Services (FDS) preso that I gave at 360Flex about 3 weeks ago.
Flash Remoting vs. Flex Data Services
If you have any questions about the code, please feel free to email me.
Here's a couple of pictures as well.
Me and Ed Sullivan
Me and Ben Forta
Some signs I pay attention to...
Others I don't...
360Flex is over and I must say, it's one of the best conferences I've been to. I'm taking the next two days in San Francisco with my lovely fiancee, so I'll have my full report up, pictures, and my preso slides and code later this weekend.
I know, it'll be yesterdays news by then, but you'll just have to wait for my riveting recount.
In short, Tom, Ted and John did an absolutely awesome job. If these guys do it again, which they have plans to, don't miss it.
