It's not often that I wish I was in America,'' writes one (UK-based) developer, 'but this week sees the MAX 2006 show in Las Vegas.' He was not alone in wishing he'd been able to make it: around the Web world, bloggers both outside the US and inside have been discussing the many announcements made at this year's MAX and their implications for working developers and designers everywhere.

By the time you read this, another MAX will be in the history books. In fact, with a record attendance of around 3,500 developers and designers, this MAX in Vegas will also be in the record books.

Once you've learned the syntax of cfcs, one of the hardest things to do is to figure out exactly how and where to use them. The goal of this article is to run you through the most common (and useful) ways to use cfcs to make your applications easier to maintain.

Dreamweaver's native Log In User server behavior combined with the Restrict Access to Page server behavior can help you protect your pages from prying eyes. However, when it comes for more fine-grained control of content on pages viewable by users from multiple access levels, Dreamweaver doesn't have anything built in to offer any assistance to you.

The book 'RIA development with Adobe Flex and Java' is written. Check out the book site. Do you know why we are smiling? Because the writing is over! It took us longer than planned because we had to work for a living, and the time for writing this book was just stolen from our families and our sleep.

Did you know ActionScript 3.0 supports multiple inheritance? Here's how... Multiple inheritance is actually possible with AS3, despite popular belief that it's not supported. It's not really multiple inheritance in the true sense of the word going by the strict definition... but there's a way to get the job done in AS3 that behaves almost like the real thing.

Digital content is exploding; video on the Web is booming; Web 2.0 is hurtling toward us; and Adobe believes 'engagement' is the one word that best captures its strategy and encapsulates the competitive advantage that its fast-expanding product set gives to the developers and designers who use it.

Typically, Flex developers use Flex Builder IDE, but Adobe also offers free Flex SDK, and you should know how to build your applications without Flex Builder. Using a sample Flex project, this article shows how you can automate its build and creation of HTML wrappers for your swf files.

Adobe Systems introduced a beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS3 software, the next release of the world standard in digital imaging. Also introduced is a beta release of Adobe Spry framework for AJAX, a designer-focused solution for adding the interactive power of Ajax when developing rich, dynamic web-sites.

Check out my 2h 17mins AJAX presentation recording. I presented AJAX in various flavors to the Scottish CFUG last week and I promised to post the slides and files. You may check out the Adobe Connect Presentation, download the slides, and download the source code. Code includes examples for ajaxcfc, dojo, jquery, prototype, spry, and well as hand-coded XmlHttpRequest objects. AjaxCFC examples also include some using the Model-Glue and MachII frameworks, not included with this download.

One thing that constantly bugs me on projects is when I am asked to work on the user interface. I can do CSS, but it is, admittedly, not my strongest suit. I can do some graphics work, but not my strongest suit.

Flex framework contains a pretty impressive library of the off-the-shelf controls, which can fit the bill for many of the Rich Internet Applications needs. And yet, it is just the tip of the iceberg, because Flex enables you to create, combine and/or extend existing components with a simplicity and elegance hardly ever offered by other GUI development systems.

SYS-CON Events announced today that the first'iTVcon Internet TV Conference & Expo 2007' (www.itvcon.com) will takeplace in New York City. Calls for papers for the conference, sponsorshipand exhibit opportunities were made available today at the conferencewebsite. Delegate registration information can also be obtained at the conference website, www.itvcon.com.

'As people increasingly communicate and collaborate across the Internet, Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat Connect enable an effective workflow around documents,' said Kevin Lynch, Adobe's visionary SVP and chief software architect, as it was announced this morning that Adobe Reader 8 software is now available as a free download worldwide.

Unless your project is as simple as HelloWorld application, compilation and deployment of this application has to be automated. Creating a build script for any decent size application (i.e. hundreds of files in Flex and server-side Java) is a project on its own. Java programmers typically use one of the open source build tools such as Ant or Maven to formally describe and execute all steps required to build and deploy their projects.

Closures is one of the cornerstones of dynamic languages. Closures are unavoidable when you use asynchronous operations or need to process an event on the other object. Almost any non-trivial action in Flex communication with the server or getting an input from user is asynchronous. Using closure automatically gives you the reference to the class instance in which you have your function to the external object processing the event.

Video over the Internet and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are the latest craze. With Flex 2 and Flash Media Server 2 (FMS), developers can easily create interactive media Web applications. In this article you'll create a basic video conference application that will give you the foundation to take you to the next step.

Hot Banana Software, a provider of Web content management software for marketing and a wholly owned subsidiary of J.L. Halsey, introduced a multilingual content management plug-in that automates the process of translating and publishing Web site content into multiple languages.

Do you know what's the main goal of any gas station owner? To get lots of trucking accounts. Business from small car drivers is worth pennies, and it gets on my nerves to hear them ask again and again, 'Five dollars of regular, please.' Trucks are different. They usually pump in a couple of hundreds of gallons at a time. For instance, here comes a flashy 18-wheeler with a sign 'Software Delivered.' These guys ship reusable open source components around the globe. As a former programmer, I was trying to play it smart by asking why they don't just let people download these components from the Internet? But the smiley truckers (many of whom used to be software developers too) just shrug and tell me that nothing beats personal delivery, plus the tips.

This command will build the swf file with the frame rate of fifty frames per second. Display list rendering and the ActionScript execution take turns, hence the frame rate can affect your application performance. Setting the frame rate to fifty does not mean that each frame will be displayed in exactly 20 milliseconds, as there is some OS/browser overhead. Besides, some browsers may impose restrictions on plugins to lower CPU utilization on the user?s machine.

In Part 1 (CFDJ, Vol. 8, issue 10) we introduced the destination-aware grid, formatters, and renderers. In this article we are continuing our discussion about datagrid renderers and...

With the release of Flex 2, Adobe has introduced a tool that makes building rich user interfaces for the Web easier than ever; of course, as anyone remotely plugged in to the Web development community knows, Ruby on Rails has made creating database-driven Web applications brain dead simple. This article discusses a technology that marries Flex with RoR applications by providing a means of automating the communication between the client and server. The technology is 'WebORB for Rails,' a free and open source (GPL) server made available by Midnight Coders (www.themidnightco ders.com).

Adobe Systems has introduced Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server 7.2, an enterprise rights management (ERM) solution for protecting and controlling documents throughout their entire lifecycle, from creation, through distribution and collaboration, to archiving and destruction. Now, organizations can conduct critical business processes more securely by protecting a broad range of financial, government, and engineering documents or other files across multiple formats, including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Dassault Systèmes CATIA V5 files.

This Yahoo internal document by Brad Garlinghouse (a Yahoo senior vice president) is a tremendous read. Brad started by stating his love for Yahoo, for example: I proudly bleed purple and, yellow everyday! And like so many people here, I love this company Then he bluntly outlines the big problems he sees at Yahoo, and 'I believe we must embrace our problems and challenges and that we must take decisive action'.

I'm a Webmaster for the Air Protection Division (APD), EPA Region 3 in Philadelphia and in April 2006, I wrote an article for CFDJ entitled 'How ColdFusion MX 7 Made Me a Hero at the Office' (Volume 8, Issue 4). That article described how I harnessed the power of ColdFusion to improve access to our most vital business information.

'With Adobe Document Center, we're putting the control and protection of sensitive information within the reach of individuals in businesses of all sizes,' said Tom Hale, SVP of Adobe's Knowledge Worker Business Unit, as Adobe yesterday introduced Adobe Document Center - a new hosted service that, as Hale summarized it, 'enables knowledge workers to better protect, share and track the usage of Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel documents as part of day-to-day communications and collaboration.'

There are many resources we should analyze to ensure optimal ColdFusion operation or to help diagnose problems. Fortunately, there's an awesome free tool that comes to our aid to turn voluminous data into useful information.

This is a short comparison table of major elements/concepts of these two languages for a quick reference.

In this excerpt from our book, Rich Internet Applications, we'll cover how to set up large applications intended for Web or, more broadly speaking, distributed deployment. As an example let's consider an enterprise application that consists of hundreds of screens, reports, forms, and dashboards. Accordingly, about a dozen engineers specializing in GUIs, frameworks, data layers, and business domains are working on this application in parallel.

For over a decade now, we have been trained to use the 'back' and 'forward' buttons in our Web browser to review or backtrack previously viewed content. We are trained to the point that there are even keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, this can be a problem when browsing Flex applications. Being the well-trained users that we are, we often forget that we could cause the Flex application to reload unwittingly.

PowerPoint has been capable of accepting and playing back videos for quite some time, at least as far back as Office 97. In most cases the process is quite simple. Go to the Insert menu, click on Insert Movies, and away you go. At least in theory.

I love the definition in Wikipedia of Media convergence: 'Media convergence is a theory in communications where every mass medium eventually merges to the point where they are indistinguishable to each other due to the advent of new communication technologies.'

Once upon a time, Sun and Apple used to have about the same market cap. Today Apple has a market cap of $63BN while Sun's is just $17BN. Ahead of Sun, unbeknownst to many, is Adobe. Its market cap today is $18BN. For a company that in 1998 was worth 'only' $1.7BN it has not been a bad 8 years!

The growth of Flash and AJAX in Web applications is driven by real market needs - applications that are visually compelling and simple to use gain faster adoption and can be a competitive differentiator, enabling customers, employees, and partners to interact effectively with information and other people. There has been tremendous innovation in applications delivered via the Web; however, browser limitations such as the lack of access to local files, the inability to leverage desktop functionality, and reliance on continuous connectivity ultimately limit the functionality of a browser-based application. In addition, creating these applications is not always a simple process and browser compatibility issues continue to plague front-end developers.

Adobe today announced that Adobe Flash Video technology has won a Technical and Engineering Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, in recognition of the technology's pivotal role in bringing television content to the Internet. TV like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy and My Name is Earl are being delivered online thanks to Flash Video, the same technology that also powers the video capabilities of social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

Every now and then we create reusable components, and so far we are giving them away for free. Some pathetic bloggers call this 'giving back to the community'. We look at it simple: if we do not have time to productionize the component, we donate it.

It's really convenient for anyone coming from an HTML background that we can now provide colors to Flex using html standard syntax for hexidecimal number (#000000 = black, #ffffff= white, etc). I've recently been building some tools to convert drawings in the flash player to and from SVG format. SVG, like HTML, likes to specify hexidecimal numbers with a '#' prefix, but the flash player drawing API needs hexidecimal numbers to be prefixed with '0x' To help migrate back and forth between hexStrings and AS numbers, I wrote a few static methods, which are working well for me:

ColdFusion Extensions for Flex, included in ColdFusion MX 7.0.2, enable Flex Builder 2.0 developers to automate the more mundane tasks like CRUD (creating, reading, updating and deleting records) by creating ColdFusion components, ActionScript class files, and code to invoke a Web Service.

Amidst the hustle and bustle leading up to MAX, I managed to steal some time to work on a skunkworks project. The idea was to let people experience the fun and instant gratification of Flex, without needing to download and install anything at all. And thus The FLEXifier.

The sign of an experienced developer is solid design. Novices edit examples they find on the Net, journeymen figure out how to code something as they do it, but craftsmen plan their work. Starting out, this can look like wasted time, but if your app is any good, your customer will want to expand it. Then, if you need some help, you'll have to explain all that intuitive code to ten people, all of whom you are paying by the hour. Diagrams would be nice then, right?