I figured I would try to spend a day with FB3 to see how it's coming along (so far it seems a little faster). Of course. we do a lot of ColdFusion development so CFEclipse is pretty much a requirement.

However. I could not install it due to some missing files in Eclipse. Thankfully. Joao posted instructions on how to correct this and get CFEclipse working on FB3b2.

Thanks. Joao!

Forgot about this. but apparently it wasn't a one time document...this is the latest release of the ACME guide to setting up a CF development environment:

* Apache * ColdFusion * MySQL * Eclipse

Check it out!

http://www.stephencollins.org/acme/

Have to do a full writeup later. but we did have a great discussion tonight. Thanks again to Brookwood Media Arts for hosting us well after their office was officially closed for the day!

I led off with some cool coder-oriented features in Dreamweaver 8. That morphed into a discussion on code environments. so I showed off CFEclipse and the Flex AlphaBits. The group seemed to appreciate seeing them all together and just about everyone contributed their thoughts and current config.

Matt then did a great presentation on CFAJAX. Did a nice walkthrough of what it takes to do a full request/response cycle without a page reload and explained some of the weirdness/limitations of CFAJAX.

This spawned an excellent discussion on security. when to use and when not to use Ajax techniques. and some minimal coverage of frameworks. That pretty much filled our 2 hours together!

Everybody seemed to enjoy the meeting so i'm looking forward to a presentation on Coldspring from Chris Scott. a Philly local and clearly a bright guy at an upcoming meeting.

I'll be putting together a better writeup soon. Matt's also going to package up all the CFAJAX work he's done along with good and useful documentation and drop it out on our site for all to reference.

g'night. all. 'specially you guys out at MAX!

To anyone who's been reading this blog for a while. you won't be too surprised to hear my enthusiasm for Flex.

But look at this lineup:

Flex 2. Flex Builder (Zorn) built on Eclipse. Flash Player 8.5. ActionScript 3.0.

How hot is that?

I was fortunate enough to be in on the first Flex beta. Due to some changes in my company at the time. I was unable to continue working with it. But I did see the potential of the platform and kept my eyes open for an opportunity to use it.

Just about a month ago we realized one of our projects could really benefit from a rich dashboard for status and reporting capabilities. We mocked up an HTML version and immediately got clearance to start working on the "next generation" UI for the tool. Not too much later we learned about Flex 2...so guess which platform we'll be using?

We're so excited that we don't want to wait another day to get started on the project. The client is chomping at the bit to get the app up and running too. Alpha bits are on my laptop as of tonight :-)

Beyond that. i've done rich internet apps with Flash in both AS1 and AS2. The changes that i've noted so far regarding AS3 look like a really great movement towards "cleaning up" the language and making it somewhat more approachable (and comprehensible) by us server-side geeks.

We've got a LOT of learning to do!

I'm excited...REALLY excited...because i've seen what Ajax can do. i've seen what Flash can do and i've seen what Flex can do.

* Ajax: works well. gets a lot of press. Our biggest problems with this is the "dual controller" issue. We have our Mach-ii app framework for CF app flow and a completely different one tied to the client interaction in Javascript. It's "yuck" and we need to find a cleaner solution.

* Flash: I can't tell you how much I hate the timeline and movie clips and all that "design" stuff. I have seen some AWESOME RIAs done in Flash. but i'll be damned if I have a good way of getting started without making a mess of the .fla. I could go and do a cheesy CF application in much less time simply because I don't need to know a darn thing outside of my application. Doing Flash RIAs is a PITA because of the knowledge outside of AS (and about design/layout) that you have to have.

* Flex: Frameworks constantly evolving. in use right from the very beginning. A programming model aimed at clean separation of sexy and slick presentation from a SOA backend. Tag based - i get it! ActionScript 3 - an ECMAScript compliant langage - I can figure it out. Oh. and I can develop for it in Eclipse? Woo hoo!

So yeah. if you think i've had too much kool-aid. you may be right. We have spent a LOT of time as a company developing our proficiencies as software engineers. devouring as much as we can about software architecture and frameworks and design patterns. We have coding standards. We do peer review. And because of this effort. we can immediately see how Flex gives us the "pretty face" to put on our bulldog-tough back ends.

We're excited. I'm excited. You should be too!