I've been focusing on a full-time job for the last 2 years now, and as a result, my consulting business has all but ceased to exist. I've maintained a dedicated server to maintain previous clients over this time, but financially, it just wasn't making sense any more. Therefore, I undertook the arduous task of transitioning clients off of it so I could get rid of it (and its expensive monthly cost) because I wasn't recouping the cost from hosting fees.

I've put this off for 2 years because the thought of finding a compatible hosting company to support the ColdFusion and database services most of my projects required plain scared me. With all the remoting-config.xml and services-config.xml (not to mention data-management-config.xml with LCDS) to setup I figured it was going to take a very understanding hosting company to maintain these sites.

I found just such a company in GoWest hosting. I have used other services in the past, and most recently an Adobe endorsed provider for the Austin Flex User Group site (I won't mention names, but it shouldn't be too hard to track down who they are). The service and support from this (and other, but especially this) company was absolutely pathetic. I've found that too often these days it's easy to just expect sub par services and support because it seems to be becoming the norm... and so you just deal with it and think 'hey, it could be worse i guess'. Seriously though... a lot of times customer support is literally becoming an afterthought (eg. Dell's troubles in the past few years, and their 180 reversal to try and gain back disgruntled customers).

When I first contacted GoWest to ask them if they could support what I needed, not only did I get a quick response to the positive, but also an offer to setup a trial account and test it out before committing to a hosting plan. I took them up on this offer, and in fact their system did support what we needed, and was easy... really easy... to setup. It literally took me 10 minutes to ftp contents directly over, backup and restore the database, and fire up the site. Not one glitch in the process, and all done through their control panel interface. I immediately sent them an e-mail stating my joy over this.

There was a bit more correspondence to come in setting up the ColdFusion services, and after a thread of about 30 emails back and forth we did get it working. Now, I'd like to step back and point out again, I hadn't given them a single dollar yet, and we could have potentially hit a roadblock in the setup which could have resulted in me saying 'thanks for your help, but I'm gonna have to look elsewhere'.

This didn't happen and everything got transitioned over just fine. GoWest is now the new hosting provider for my clients, and I know they're in good hands given the service I received during the process.

That's my pitch for the day... and hope that more Flex/CF developers read this and look to GoWest for their hosting... I know I will be in the future.

http://www.gowesthosting.com

I have deadlines, which means I've just moved back to 3.3 and won't have time to look into this right now.... as is usual...

But has anyone else had this issue?

Basically, I have a couple of external libraries which I'm using in my current Flex project. I was trying to use the global trace() function within these libraries, but there was nothing getting output. Wha? I was in debug mode... I have the debug player... this has worked before... wtf?

Skip back... about a month ago my Subversion provider did a major migration which caused me massive headaches, and basically, I had to wipe out all my projects, and check them out fresh from the new svn repository locations, instead of just updating the repo address. In doing this, I thought I got all my settings correct, but alas...

One particular Library project (the project in question above) had -optimize=true as compiler argument. I saw this and didn't figure it for the issue as you have the -debug argument, and -debug-verbose which deal with output stuff.

Finally, after googling/flexcodering/blog searching/etc... along with confirming my mm.cfg file and flashlog.txt setup was correct, I began trying stuff willy-nilly to get this fixed. That's when I discovered that -optimize=true does indeed prevent any trace outputs.

And that's the morale of this blog post :-)

ANSWER:

Tom Jordahl provided the answer on this for me. Here's the solution:

1) Prior to implementing this solution, it's important to realize that because LCDS manages the data, switching datasources dynamically could potentially cause issues if there is overlap between identifiers on the records you are retrieving. In my case, I'm using GUID fields as primary key and identifiers in my destinations, so this is not a problem. However, for example, if you were to use an incrementing integer for the identifier, then you could feasibly have LCDS managing a record, which would match identifiers with a record if you switched datasources on the fly.

2) I'm using ColdFusion as my middle-tier layer, but this could be applied to any form by accessing the flex.messaging.FlexContext class within your solution of choice.

3) The solution involves extracting the ID value of Flex client which makes calls against your Destination. Grab the identifier by calling FlexContext.getFlexClient().getId() to get a unique key for the "session". I use the term "session" loosely, as it's really just representative of the particular swf instance which has been loaded with your Flex Application. However, the ID doesn't change and persists across all calls you make against your destinations.

4) On application load, make a call to your CF layer which gets the ID, and sets it to the Application scope of the CF server as follows:

<cffunction name="set" access="remote">
<cfargument name="datasource" type="string" required="yes" default="">
<cfset var clientID="">
<cfscript>
clientID = CreateObject('java', 'flex.messaging.FlexContext').getFlexClient().getId(); APPLICATION[clientID] = arguments.datasource;
</cfscript>
</cffunction>

The function above receives a unique string which I want to be my datasource of choice. You could call this "set" function again anytime to reset the Application variable for this "session".

5) The only other thing to do, is now access this Application variable for each datasource.

datasource="#APPLICATION[CreateObject('java', 'flex.messaging.FlexContext').getFlexClient().getId()]#"

6) The last consideration is that each connection that is made via Flex will be setting a new variable in the Application scope on the Coldfusion server. This is a pretty minor concern for me, and I'll just run a schedule to clear the Application scope once a day, but if you have a high volume of users, a better solution would have to be found.

Rombla is an online "no programming" site builder that enables designers to create fully-editable websites using simple visual editing tools and then share them with their clients to edit and maintain.

I was able to design and build a basic template in about 5 minutes and a full site in about 25. Some cool features but my favorite has to be the color scheme mixer where you can create your own palettes in Kuler then import them into Rombla. Then you can really experiment by changing layouts and navigation. You can literally change the entire look and feel of your site in seconds.

It's addictive for a designer and super easy and fast for clients to do their own edits - great for people who don't like getting caught up with endless text edits.

Check it out at: http://www.rombla.com/

I needed both DataGrid and List support using this feature, so using Chris' example for DG, I modified for List as well.

All credit goes to Chris for figuring this out, and my thanks... here's an example of each below:

DataGrid

  package com.bm.custom_components
  {
  import flash.events.MouseEvent;
  import flash.geom.Point;
  
  import mx.controls.DataGrid;
  import mx.controls.listClasses.IListItemRenderer;
  import mx.events.DataGridEvent;
  
  public class DoubleClickEditDataGrid extends DataGrid
  {
  public function DoubleClickEditDataGrid() {
  	super();
  }
  
  private var triggeredEditable:Boolean = false;
  
  public function triggerItemEditor(event:MouseEvent):void
  {
  	var r:IListItemRenderer = mouseEventToItemRenderer(event);
  	var p:Point = itemRendererToIndices(r);
  	if ( columns[p.x].editable != false )
  	{
  		if (!editable)
  		{
  			editable=true;
  			triggeredEditable = true;
  			addEventListener(DataGridEvent.ITEM_EDIT_END,
 triggeredEditorEnd);
  		}
  		var dEvent:DataGridEvent = new DataGridEvent(DataGridEvent.ITEM_EDIT_BEGINNING, 
false, 
false, 
p.x, 
null, 
p.y, 
null, 
r, 
p.y);
  		dispatchEvent(dEvent);
  	}
  }
  
  private function triggeredEditorEnd(event:DataGridEvent):void
  {
  	if ( triggeredEditable )
  	{
  		editable = false;
  		triggeredEditable = false;
  		removeEventListener( DataGridEvent.ITEM_EDIT_END, triggeredEditorEnd);
  	}
  }
  }
  }
  

List

  package com.bm.custom_components
  {
  import flash.events.MouseEvent;
  import flash.geom.Point;
  	  import mx.controls.List;
  import mx.controls.listClasses.IListItemRenderer;
  import mx.events.ListEvent;
  	  public class DoubleClickEnabledList extends List
  {
  	public function DoubleClickEnabledList(){}
  		
  	private var triggeredEditable:Boolean = false;
  
  	public function triggerItemEditor(event:MouseEvent):void
  	{
  		var r:IListItemRenderer = mouseEventToItemRenderer(event);
  		var p:Point = itemRendererToIndices(r);
  		if (!editable)
  		{
  			editable=true;
  			triggeredEditable = true;
  			addEventListener(ListEvent.ITEM_EDIT_END, triggeredEditorEnd);
  		}
  		var dEvent:ListEvent = new ListEvent(ListEvent.ITEM_EDIT_BEGINNING,
false,
 false, 
-1, 
p.y, 
null, 
null);  		dispatchEvent(dEvent);
  	}
  		
  	private function triggeredEditorEnd(event:ListEvent):void
  	{
  		if ( triggeredEditable )
  		{
  			editable = false;
  			triggeredEditable = false;
  			removeEventListener( ListEvent.ITEM_EDIT_END, triggeredEditorEnd);
  		}
  	}
  }
  }  

I want to reference a remote instance of the services-config.xml file for a project I'm working on. I'm now developing on the mac platform (which I love) and need to figure out how to reference it.

Solution:

1) Connect to and "mount" the external drive on which the services-config.xml file resides.

Connecting to the remote drive via Finder by choosing Go -> Connect to Server or Cmd+K will give you access to the networked drive, but doesn't help you when you need to reference that drive (mapping in Windows) within the compiler settings in FlexBuilder. So...

Fire up Terminal and navigate to the root of your system, and then into your Volumes directory. Create a new directory here as follows:

mkdir [new_name]

Choose something relevant as the name as you'll be referencing it in a second.

Next, use the following command to "mount" your remote network drive to this new drive you've just created.

mount_smbfs //[userame]:[password]@[remote_server_url]/[drive]/ /Volumes/[new_name]

Each of the vars used here is pretty straight forward, but make sure you use the same when you reference the "mounting" location in /Volumes

You won't be returned with any confirmation of success, but if you don't get any error, then it's setup successfully.

Now, go back into FlexBuilder, and setup your services pointer to:

-services '/Volumes/[new_name]/ColdFusion8/wwwroot/WEB-INF/flex/services-config.xml'

or whatever your path may be.

As I mentioned, Ben's done a lot of shit to the project over the past few months (most of which I freely admit I don't know anything about and had nothing to do with :-) which he summarizes in his latest post release. I will say that I did have some border resizing functionality ready to add, but didn't quite make the deadline for this release. I'll be updating the FlexLib project with code in short order.

So a big thanks to Ben for continuing to drive this project. He just presented on this in part of his presentation at 360Flex in Atlanta so hopefully there will be a lot more folks that check out this little framework we put together.

1) Open up the jrun-web.xml file located in ColdFusion8/wwwroot/WEB-INF directory.
2) Add a virtual directory mapping as follows:

  <virtual-mapping>
    <resource-path>/cf/*</resource-path>  
    <system-path>/Users/meutznerb/Documents/dev_flex3/CFMiddleTier/</system-path>  
  </virtual-mapping>  

The mapping above will now allow me to call files from

http://localhost:8500/cf/

The trick was getting the directory path correct... starting from /Documents/... would not work, and required the full path with /Users/meutznerb/Documents/... to be defined.

That's my mac newbie tip for the day :-)

I came up with the following example by creating some functionality around the DataGrid mouse movements to display a "tooltip" (in reality a Menu instance) at the mouse position. Rather than digging into the framework to try and extend the ToolTip class to make it "stick" when moused over, I realized we've got popup menu functionality like that already. Slap a custom menu item renderer in there, skin it, and you've got a mousable, interactive tooltip instance.

I could have gone the extra mile and created a custom DataGrid instance using this new functionality, but I'm lazy so I'm just going to post the instance I implemented and let you figure out how to implement it for yourself :-) The idea being that it could be just as easily implemented on any List based control, and even with a bit of work any component in the Flex framework. Just modify the renderer to fit the content you need!

Example Here

Source Here

Excel is able to recognize an HTML table format and pastes the structure into appropriate cells. The following example is tailored to that type of structure, but can really be formatted to whatever needs you have by modifying the createHTML() (or more appropriately named) method.

View example here : Example

And source here : Source Code

So here's my tip for the day:

Check out the compiler arguments line in the Flex properties and add

-default-background-color #PUTYOURCOLORHERE

Easy to do, and then your Flex apps won't look like everyone else's anymore :-)

More compiler arguments are available if you'd like to get frisky...

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/201/html/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Book_Parts&file=compilers_123_24.html

And better yet, check out Ted Patrick's blog on creating custom preloaders and be a real rock star.

http://www.onflex.org/ted/2006/07/flex-2-preloaders-swf-png-gif-examples.php

See Full List

A good indication of great things to come in 2008!

I registered a couple of domain names back in 05 while doing contract work through recruiting agencies. It didn't take long for me to establish a sincere dislike for recruiters, and although I'm sure there are great ones out there, I feel the vast majority aren't qualified to do their jobs.

But enough about that...

I registered both riajobs.com and riacareers.com with the intention of creating a marketplace where developers could get in contact "directly" with employers... and vice versa... I noticed another site recently (www.nauglegroup.com) founded by Kevin Langdon and upon seeing it though "that's what I intended to do".

However, given time and commitment constraints, it hasn't happened yet, and probably won't for quite a while.

So that leaves me to ask the question, what/where/how can these be put to best use? I'd obviously love to sell them for a million bucks, but that's unlikely. I talked with John/Tom over at 360 Conferences about using them for their recent ideas on RIACommunity.

Does anyone else have thoughts on this topic?

UIComponent(tBBInstance.rawChildren.getChildAt(X)).enabled/disabled

Anyone find a clearer way?

Sign Up Here

Visit AustinFlex.org

So I've been settling down (ie. working constantly) nicely since arriving in Austin TX 2 months ago. The wife and I love the city so far, and only regret we haven't gotten out to see more of it. I've had the pleasure of talking to a few companies in town who are doing Flex development, and it's nice to still be part of a little slice of IT heaven after leaving the Bay Area (read Round Rock/Dell/IBM/etc...).

However, I made the mistake of kicking up some dust with the Adobe User Group folks a bit too soon after arriving. One of the top things on my list to do when getting here is to start up a Flex user group for the area. However, I have yet to find the time to actually do this... :-(

So here's the reason for the post... Anybody in the Austin area (that includes Dallas/San Antonio/Houston cause if the CA folks can drive an hour from SF to SJ, the Texas folks can drive 2) that would be interested in attending meetings?

So if you're from Texas, or know someone who is, forward/re-post/shout it out to me, so that I get my ass in gear... I'm not looking for justification (I'll do it eventually) just encouragement to move it up the priority list :-)

Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) - org.eclipse.emf.codegen.ecore.ui (2.3.0.v200706262000) requires plug-in "org.eclipse.jdt.core".

Joao (Fernandes?) has posted the solution over on his blog:

Link Here

Note the comment I added about having to check a second option labeled:

'Eclipse Java Development Tools 3.3.1.r331_......' as well to get it to work.

Thanks Joao!

- an RIA design tool

- allows designers to create rich internet applications with logic embedded

- allows them to wire up interactivity without working any code

- allows them to use dynamic data without having access to the data source

- seamless workflow for developers working with flex builder

- can access Flex source code for the design

- taking a layered image from photoshop, and importing the psd file into Thermo generates layout and code for that layout.

- converting artwork to components on the fly (wow, very cool)

- they take a rectangle graphic, right click, convert to a TextInput component, and it retained the text within the graphic (made default text of TextInput component), all style information on the graphic is transferred to component (including font styles)

- highlight multiple graphical elements, and converted the group to a list, and creates a design time data set with the selected images to power the list

- changed padding on list items, and an onion skin of original image placement was retained for reference but just with reduced opacity

- edited an item in the list in place, and added an event to it to go to a new state, applied a transition to the state change. The state change was a size change, and was able to preview the increase in size, with the transition effect applied. Added some text information underneath the new state, which had fade effects applied to it. Was able to stagger effect play times using a simple gantt chart type tool.

- automatically provides lorem ipsum text for testing, and can define the number of words to show for it.

- takes two selected rectangle and converts to a scrollbar instance (seriously?... no way...) Able to identify the different layers of the graphic selection as the different components of a scrollbar. Associates the new scrollbar with the list using a wiring handle to simply drag over the list that it should affect, binding the two components together.

- able to easily add new items to the design time data collection

- and it all just works... amazing... bring on the applause :-)

- thermo and flexbuilder share the same project format, meaning designers and developers can very easily collaborate during development cycle.

- can expect early alpha/beta next year (2008).

In addition, I use Google Analytics for stats tracking on my own personal sites, and while their interface for use is great, I love the fact that Nicolas has put together a Flex/AIR interface for this. I'll be getting involved in testing/giving feedback, and I'd encourage others to check it out and do the same. I'd like to think this blog appeals to the more "charting-oriented" of us, so hopefully there's a few of you who will enjoy this as much as I do... :-)

http://www.aboutnico.be/index.php/google-analytics-air-beta-sign-up/

I met Brian Holmes and Ben Clinkinbeard at the 360 Flex conference in Seattle back in August. After a lot of discussion over many beers at the Elephant and Castle at the hotel, we came up with the idea of collaborating together on a MDI interface for Flex. We'd all seen examples of the functionality but felt there was a real void in a robust (free) solution on that topic. So here we are a month later, and after many frustrating IM sessions in 3 different time zones we've released the first iteration of an open source solution.

I couldn't be happier with the way things have turned out, and am very much looking forward to expanding on this project, as well as starting others with these two guys. I'll leave the description of the project to Ben's post on the matter.

http://www.returnundefined.com/2007/09/announcing-flexmdi-robust-extensible-mdi-framework-for-adobe-flex/

Samples Index - Right click for source

A debugger... thank the gods!!!

Then this morning, for the first time ever, I overheard a couple of guys above me discussing Flex. Well that's kind of neat isn't it... a sure sign that the Flex buzz is really catching on. I caught bits of the conversation, and the two guys (one with a background in Flash) had nothing but positive things to say about the framework, and ability to create "cool" things easily.

So a word of caution... don't sit close to me on the train if you want your privacy ;-)

http://www.morearty.com/blog/2007/04/16/new-flash-player-and-also-a-flex-builder-patch/

While the presentation was exciting and fun to do, I think my last minute prep, and the fact I haven't spoken in public for many many many years resulted in a less than stellar walk-through of the functionality involved. However, the experience and feedback gained from last night was HUGE. I realized how I can improve the presentation 1000% percent, and plan on doing so before I give my talk in Seattle at 360Flex on August 13th (at least that's the tentative date.

Today I'm posting the app for everyone to play around, but am holding off on posting the code until Seattle (I don't want to steal my own thunder). However, I fully intend to release both the code-base, and an associated swc file for everyone to use, and integrate their own data into this type of interface. Hopefully this might entice the fence-sitters to attend 360 in August if you're interested in this kind of stuff.

I will say that it's not complicated stuff... and everyone and anyone should be able to insert their own data, or adapt the UI to fit their own project needs.

So here's the app... (click the image to view)

360 Flex - Seattle

A really basic example of using annotationElements and the dataTransform methods to transform horizontal axis values to coordinate values. It draws an HRule instance at the selected horizontalAxis point and provides a button to link to details re: the milestone point.

http://www.stretchmedia.ca/code_examples/chart_milestone/main.html

http://www.stretchmedia.ca/code_examples/chart_range_selection/main.html

http://www.stretchmedia.ca/code_examples/chart_range_selection/main.html

Three words... "I love Flex"...

Have to give credit to Ely Greenfield (for his data generation function, and let's face it, for being The Man) as well as Doug McCune for his Dual Slider component (which is better than the one I did, which is why I used it here).

Anyway... the solution I came up with was to specify a selectionEasingFuction style which returned "0".

  
  
  
      private function myEasingFunction(t,b,c,d):Number
      {
          return 0
      }
  

View Here

View Calculator >>

Thanks to Ely Greenfield (www.quietlyscheming.com) for the inspiration and calculations, and to Ben Lucyk (www.esria.com) for the suggestions on improvement (sample chart and code).

I didn't really find a suitable solution for exporting to Excel after a bit of searching through forums and blogs, so I came up with the following. I wanted to achieve seamless "click to generate a report" from Flex and have the file option dialog popup in the browser allowing me to open or save. Here's what I came up with. While I don't see any issues with the solution, I realize it's a bit of a hack, and would appreciate any CF wizards letting me know if this is going to create problems.

From Flex, I'm calling a CFC function with my data being passed back as an array. The CFC takes the data and stores it to an application variable in CF. I then send a trivial result back to Flex. On the CFC result inside Flex, I make a call to a template CFM file which uses the cfcontent tag to generate the excel file from an html table structure I build with the saved application variable data.

CFC

<cffunction name="exportToExcel" access="remote" returntype="any" output="true">
<cfargument name="data" type="array" required="yes" default="" />
<cfset session.exportData = #ArrayNew(1)#>
<cfreturn 'true'>
</cffunction>

Flex

if(event.result == 'true')
{
var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest(URLToCFTemplate);
flash.net.navigateToURL(request, "_self");
}

Brendan

Updated: Download the source files here - Download

Using named parameters with stored procedures using cfprocparam

1) If you've never been to Las Vegas, and you travel there for a conference like I did, don't fool yourself into thinking you'll concentrate 100% on the conference while it's taking place. I made sure to plan my trip with a few days after the conference in which to explore and discover the sights, but still found myself sufficiently distracted during the first 4 days during MAX. It doesn't help when Adobe decides to throw a party on Day 3 over at the Palms Casino :-)

2) I'm the biggest hypocrite in the world for saying this (as a past smoker) but the city really needs to do something about the indoor smoking. Seriously... walking out of a presentation to find 3-4 people lighting up in the hallway in between presentation rooms was ridiculous. What's funnier is the perfume crap that the casinos pump into the air system trying mask it.

3) While the present

Sorry for the large download size, and the fact it's still just a movie. I created this for a presentation by my colleague Bruce Boston for an Emetrics conference he attended and presented at last week. If you skip about half-way through you'll see the annotation portion.

http://www.visualconcepts.ca/blog/attachments/CNET Charts Demo.zip

http://travel.webshots.com/album/555094730SqHbvq

View Demo - Right click in demo to view source

Adds a "scrollbar" below the span between a dual-thumb slider which is draggable. When the drag action takes place, both

I finally figured out the method behind setting up the CF-Flex Connectivity this afternoon. I'd setup the default "ColdFusion" destination out of the box, with a minor adjustment to the channel uri setting a few weeks ago. However, I decided this afternoon that I would get it setup so that I could easily copy from my development environment over to production (both have CF and the CF Connectivity installed). So I wanted to setup two different destinations, one for my local instance, and one for the production instance.... that way when I was ready to deploy to production just test locally, and move it over if all was good.

The solution ended up involving the same version of the flex-gateway-config.xml file to be placed in each location, which had destinations for both the local development box as well as production box. Before moving over to production, change the destination to the production box, test locally, and if al

A link to Teoti Graphix's Blog (Michael Schmalle) for a bit more info. http://www.flex2components.com/f2cblog/2006/06/27/flex2-the-time-has-come-to-push-the-button-released/

And off to Adobe for the real deal:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=flex

Let me just say, I'm really looking forward to the next year of

Another one I had done the other day, and figured I'd post now that I've got the blood pumping on this Blog!

ComboBox Renderer Example

I'll try to start posting code in this in addition to the zip files, but I'll have to implement a rich text editor into this before I start... don't really feel like hand coding my code just to display right now. Also think I'll add an upload feature for attachments too maybe...

BTW, excellent job by Ray Camden on this CF Blog solution. Aside from having to upgrade my MySQL instance, this sucker was a breeze to setup... probably took all of 10 minutes to install and configure....