One of the great things about Flex is that you get to spend most of your time working on the business logic and workflow, and less on the cosmetic aspect. This is because the Flex default's look-and-feel is great! The only problem of course is that most people won't spend much time cus

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), formerly known as Apollo, is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop. And you can get it right now on Labs.

Here is some more information about the first public beta release of Flex 3 (now available on Adobe labs), the first major deliverable for the open source Flex project (including a public bug base, and the beginning of public nightly builds). Some of the new features in Flex Builder 3

Today, Adobe has released 3 new public beta's on Adobe Labs: The Adobe Integrated Runtime (formerly known as Apollo) beta, the Flex 3 Beta, and the Flash Player Updater were all publicly released on Labs today. I've been recovering from a failed hard drive all day (remind me to post a

'The Java backlash,' writes Bruce Eckel, 'has been building up steam, and we're starting to see some fundamental shifts because of it.' Java has been around for 10 years yet applets are not the primary way that we interact with the web. Applets are not ubiquitous, and everyone got exci

I found the entire event to be surreal, like an out of body experience. I'd never been in a make-up chair before, and I'm really an 'in the trenches' kind of developer - I've never much aspired to be on TV, but I also won't turn down the chance to discuss things that I am passionate ab

SYS-CON.TV has invited me to participate in the live TV broadcast 'RIA Shootout.' This panel will discuss variety of tools and techniques available for developing rich Internet applications. If you are not sure if RIA is for you or what software platform is the best fit for your needs,

There are a couple of things to note before we begin. First, HTTP Compression is a great way to speed up your Website and lower bandwidth utilization all at the same time. In this example, your ColdFusion server (6.1 and above) will encode CFML output using GZIP and have the browser de

'Flex Developer Bootcamp' is an intensive, one-day hands-on training program that will teach Web developers and designers how to build Rich Internet Application using Flex. Flex Developer Bootcamp is a hands-on workshop that is not offered anywhere else: during this day attendees will

My partner Victor and I will be running a series of intensive 'SYS-CON Events Flex Developer Bootcamp' across the country. First, we ran such workshop as a part of the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 East last month in New York City. We've received a very positive and exciting feedbac

ColdFusion MX7 introduced the ability to asynchronously spawn ColdFusion requests using an event gateway. While many take advantage of this capability, it has some significant limitations, the biggest of which is that threads can only be spawned, there is no way to monitor spawned thre

We are going to introduce you to an effect that's a lot of fun to use. Items on the Flash stage are rarely static. Things move around, menus pull down, and so on. The line between what is Flash and what is video on the Flash stage has, for all intents and purposes, been erased. It make

Most of us at one time or another has had to give a presentation - for a project, a company, or something else; we have all used PowerPoint (or other desktop applications such as OpenOffice and KeyNote) in these presentations. We are all familiar with PowerPoint presentations, maybe ev

The increasing integration of Adobe and former Macromedia products continues with Creative Suite 3, which is available in a version targeted specifically to Web developers and designers. Designers today - whether they started in an era of X-acto knives and border tape or have recently

Other than Flash Player, ClearBI does not require any additional software install on the client side. At the time of this writing, ClearBI is the only professional reporting solution on the market of rich Internet applications developed using Adobe Flex and Java. ClearBI is available i

After a 7 year hiatus, ColdFusion once again has an interactive debugger, and this time it is built on top of Eclipse (and uses the same debugging interface as Flex Builder, and other Eclipse plug-ins). If you are interested in taking the debugger for a spin, here's what you need to kn

The Real-World Java Seminar is a one-day event that's packed with technical presentations delivered by the Java industry experts. Attending this event will allow you to take a fresh look at the architecture of the projects you're working on now and can serve as a roadmap for your furth

Today's online experiences often fall short of user expectations. For many consumers and business users, it is no longer enough to simply interact with static pages of information. Instead, a growing number of users want Web applications that deliver the responsiveness, performance, ri

One of the major features of upcoming Adobe Apollo is support disconnected Web applications, and Adobe's Kevin Lynch announced that Google Gears will be available in Apollo. Adobe Flex applications already use the space on the client's disk for storing instances of any objects (this is

On May 30, Adobe released the public beta of ColdFusion 8. Although things can change between the public beta and the final release - the features included in CF 8 are unlikely to change between now and the official release, so I thought I'd give a high-level overview of some significa

Nitobi (http://www.nitobi.com) has announced it will support the ColdFusion platform in its suite of enterprise AJAX components. The ColdFusion edition of Nitobi Grid and Combobox offers support to newer as well as older versions of Coldfusion. The implementation enables a simple backw

Customers of all sizes have actively participated in the ColdFusion public beta and found the solution offers many compelling reasons to upgrade. 'ColdFusion 8 delivers several enhancements that boost day-to-day productivity,' said Brian Rinaldi, ColdFusion Developer, Distributed Compu

Today I'm speaking with Ben Forta, the technical evangelist for Adobe. The first thing I have to ask you is - the acquisition has happened, Adobe is now controlling ColdFusion and has taken over everything that Macromedia was doing, and this is my first chance to really speak with you

When building the right project team to complete a custom solution there are many forces at work. These include business drivers, technical drivers, and organizational and political motivations. Regardless of the business or organization there are three basic rules to follow in buildin

In playing around with the ColdFusion/Flex wizards, I found that Adobe includes a really nice resizeable closeable window. When I get more time, I'll integrate this with my MaximizeRestorePanel class.

Over the past year the Dreamweaver product design and development team have been out on the road talking to Web designers and developers (Web pros) about the prospect of using AJAX to build more engaging and interactive Web pages and applications. While many Web pros were excited by wh

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is nothing new. The technologies behind AJAX have been around for quite a while. Jesse James Garrett just gave the amalgamation of XML, DOM, and JavaScript a catchy new name. Many CF developers hear buzzwords like AJAX and Web 2.0 and simply tune

As both a .NET programmer and ColdFusion developer, I always wondered how I could leverage the world of .NET in ColdFusion. Both platforms come with powerful features and using them together might be a wonderful friendship, if one could only make them cooperate. There are two worlds ou

When it comes to code, less is more. Or to be more precise, less is better. How do you write less code and still write enough code to make your applications function as required? One way is to reuse code: write code once, use that code many times. If the words 'code reuse' evoke though

For Web developers, form validation is a basic task, and yet one that presents some interesting challenges. Even discounting security issues such as SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting (XSS), form validation is a critical step in your error handling strategy.

Many times object-oriented programming (OOP) is billed as the end-all solution to cure the spaghetti code that can come from procedural style applications. After all, you just have to stuff your logic code into a component (big OOP buzzword - encapsulation), and now your code is instan

Gateways; you've heard about them. You've read the hype. You've probably created one or two. You've seen applications do wonderful things with them. There have been articles written about them. Don't be fooled. Not everything is always the way it seems. There's a dark side to the gatew

Yes, you read the title correctly: 'Scorpio,' the highly anticipated eighth major release of ColdFusion is coming soon to a town near you. Even before the release of the highly successful ColdFusion MX 7 two years ago, the ColdFusion team was already hard at work scheming, experimentin

I've written in the past about using DataMgr to make sure that the tables and columns you need exist. I have been asked a few times this week about making sure that those newly created tables are automatically loaded with data. If you don't know how to have DataMgr create the tables a

It sometimes feels like the Flash community isn't on top of the changes that are taking place in the greater web. It took months for Flashers to start adding themselves to Twitter, for example (and I wasn't a very early adopter myself!) It's almost as if we're a little too preoccupied

'Don't talk to strangers' may sound like the advice your mother used to give you as a child, but as is so often the case, mother knows best. As we'll soon see, 'don't talk to strangers' or 'only talk to your friends' is advice that can apply to programming as well. In programming terms

One of the many features available in Flex 2.0 is a ResourceBundle class, which allows for a standardized approach for internationalizing applications. Many recent projects of mine have required that applications be built that can easily be ported to other languages. Traditionally, I'

Adobe senior product manager Craig Barberick told SYS-CON's Web Developer's & Designer's Journal that 'this is really an extension of the Flash Video ecosystem. Up to this point, we did not have a tool that allows Flash Video players to play on their desktops or offline. (With the Adob

Hot Banana Software, Inc. (www.hotbanana.com), a leader in Web content management for marketing, announces a new white paper from The Gilbane Group that explains how marketers benefit from utilizing a Web CMS-driven eMarketing platform to deliver tangible ROI on marketing investments.

Several months ago I posted some articles on my blog about Flex 2 components and accessing/modifying their BitmapData. In one example, I sent the BitmapData to the server and saved it as a JPG file, and I've been asked numerous times since... 'How did you do that?' It's surprisingly ea