Technical Notes

As Flex continues to grow as the choice RIA technology, many developers start investigating and apply JEE patterns to Flex implementations. Cairngorm is a Model-View-Controller framework - endorsed by Adobe - that is widely popular within the community. Cairngorm, however, is not ready for 100% "out-of-the-box" implementations of production applications.  The current versions of Caingorm (version 2.2 or before) need to be "tweaked" for production use. One of those areas encompasses the subject of "view notifications".

Continue reading "Cairngorm View Notifications" »

Posted by Thomas Burleson at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am frequently asked to assist development teams with assessing their architectures, implementations, and deployment processes. In fact, whenever I start working with a development team,I have a mental list of issues that I ALWAYs use during the course of performing code reviews and recommendations.

While my "list" may be different for different technologies (Coldfusion, Java, Flex, Flash) and for client-side and server-side development, I thought I would outline most of the issues that I use when I am involved with client-side Flex technologies.

These issues - enumerated below - issues are categorized as "Pitfalss of Flex".

Continue reading "Flex Pitfalls" »

Posted by Thomas Burleson at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When building Flex2 applications, developers have four (4) categories of events that may need to be considered in their custom applications: (1) system events, (2) user events, (3) business events, and (4) data service events.

I personally think the term system event is ambiguous. For example does " system" refer to the OS system or the FlashPlayer system or the MX Framework system... such ambiguity forces me remind the reader that these events are the Flex 2 Framework system events. In the sebsequent paragraphs, we will learn about these four event categories and how they impact our thoughts regarding Flex development.

The Flex2 framework provides superb native support for system, user, and data service events. Developers must create their own business events and must take special care to use the data service events appropriately. This 4-part guide really focuses on the concepts and uses of business and data service event categories. Before we can properly discuss such topics, however, let's first review the concepts and issues with system and user events.

Continue reading "The Incomplete Guide to Flex Events (Part 1 of 4)" »

Posted by Thomas Burleson at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently presented at the CFUnited 2006 Conference. My 1-hour presentation was titled "Flex 2.0 Data Services (FDS) and ColdFusion – 203". During that presentation I outlined the major features of FDS and how they integrate with Coldfusion web applications. I discussed which features FDS features were automatically available in ColdFusion 7.02 Enterprise: specifically HTTPService and Remoting to CFCs. I also tried to highlight when a development project will need to obtain a separate licensed copy of the full FDS installation.

Continue reading "Flex Data Services - FlexStore and Inventory Demo" »

Posted by Thomas Burleson at 08:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently Eric Dolecki published a Flash 8 version of a very cool Elastic Cords flash application. I am sure he was - as I am - inspired by the works of Andre Michelle. This application, of course, does nothing commercially practical but does demonstrate great features of the FP8 API. I, of course, decided to continue that tradition. I wanted to create a Flex, object-oriented, component version...

Continue reading "Elastic Cords - Porting a Flash8 application to Flex 2" »

Posted by Thomas Burleson at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)