RSS feed for InstantSpot - (Adobe)

Flex, Data grids and Excel

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 04:00:00 GMT

I write a lot of data-focused applications, a lot of grids, reports updates and inserts. It’s the usual stuff the business wants, Flex and Coldfusion work really well together for this sort of thing. We produce quite a few custom reports using the often unknown little gem that comes for free with cf Coldfusion Report Builder. It can be clunky but I doubt there is a quicker way to produce what we need.
When all this is said and done and we are happy with what we have produced ( and so is the business of course ) they seem to inevitably come back with “This report is great, any chance I can get it in excel?”
As per usual it was required ASAP. We already write out several reports into excel but each report is different and I was after a generic solution. I was directed to this article by Dale Fraser: http://www.cflex.net/showfiledetails.cfm?ObjectID=298
Which didn’t really work and had a few issues not surprising it was for Flex 1. Plus I felt that all the HTML was unnecessary and I was after a cleaner simpler solution. I didn’t want to restrict the use to IE either so the js was to go aswell. What I came up with was a solution that loops the datagrid columns ( hidden and seen ) and produces a tab separated block of text that will paste into excell perfectly separating the grid columns into nice excel columns. It even takes into consideration label functions. The accountants where happy and could now paste into excel with 1 click and manipulate the data in anyway they want.
You can see an example of this where I grab the rss feed from fullasagoog and tidy it up a bit and put it in a grid. Let the grid load up, click copy, open excel, click in a cell and paste. It works on mac and windows ( I’ll assume linux my desktop is at home so I cant test ) in ie, safari and firefox.
http://code.kukiel.net/dgc
I also enabled code view.

Some videos from Adobe Max 2008 in San Francisco

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:29:00 GMT

Adobe kicks off Day 1 in San Francisco (keynote highlights and commentary from attendees)
From Adobe Flash Catalyst to Adobe CS4, see highlights from Day 2 (keynote highlights and commentary from attendees)
What was your geek-out moment of the day? (Day 1)
What was your geek-out moment of the day (Day 2)

Adobe Max Day 1

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:12:00 GMT

Well MAX is definatly bigger then I initially thought. It was the biggest turn out at any MAX event topping 5000 attendees. The opening session was full of Flash and the recent Flash 10 release ( including many mentions of AIR 1.5 ) and even included a visit from Arnie’s wife Maria Shriver ( First Lady of California ). Strangely absent was any news of ColdFusion although Flash being Adobe ‘s best known product ( other then Acrobat ) its not surprising that’s what they focused on.
I was almost sad as they talked about Flash on the iPhone ( as I just got a new Blackberry ) and while they say they don’t have it yet I highly doubt Adobe haven’t done there part and actually have it running on the device.
I was impressed with the CF un-conference and got to meet, in person Ben Forta, Ray Camden, Sean Corfield and Brian Meloche.
I finished the night with the Meet the CF team and the CMFL BoF’s which was great to meet the team and hear Ben give away some hint’s relating to CF9. Not really hints but anything cool he refused to answer I took as a hint ? It was great to hear Gert from Railo and other members of the committee discuss the standardisation of core cfml functions as choice gives freedom and I hope the 2 big open source CFML engines ( Railo and Open Blue Dragon ) can help promote cfml as a alternative to php.
I’m really looking forward to tomorrow key notes with Ben regarding Centaur.

Oh and I got this neat CF shirt.

Code View

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:23:00 GMT

I tried to get my code view working for my Twitter Pod but it seams there is a bug in Flex 3 that wont let me specify the code view source. Every time I change it Flexbuilder changes it back when it exports the release build.

Here is the code in code block:

CF:

<cfcomponent output="false">
	<!--- Get Data --->
	<cffunction name="getData" output="false" access="remote" returntype="query">
		<cfset var local=StructNew()>
		
		<cffeed source="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/15001308.rss" 
				action="read" query="local.result" />
		
		<cfreturn local.result>
	</cffunction>
</cfcomponent>

AS:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute" width="180" height="194"
	creationComplete="remoteObject.getData()"  cornerRadius="16" 
	viewSourceURL="srcview/index.html" color="#000">
	<mx:RemoteObject id="remoteObject" destination="ColdFusion" source="paulcfc.Twitter" showBusyCursor="true">
		<mx:method name="getData" result="getDataSuccess(event)" />
	</mx:RemoteObject>
	<mx:Script>
		<![CDATA[
			import mx.formatters.DateFormatter;
			import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
			import mx.collections.ArrayCollection;
			
			private var resultData:ArrayCollection;
			
			private function getDataSuccess(e:ResultEvent):void{
				resultData = e.result as ArrayCollection;
				for( var i:int = 0; i < 5; ++i){
					ta.text += niceDateFormatter.format(resultData.getItemAt(i).PUBLISHEDDATE) + 
					": " + resultData.getItemAt(i).CONTENT.replace("paulkukiel: ", "") + "\n\n";
				}
			}
			
		]]>
	</mx:Script>
			
			<mx:DateFormatter id="niceDateFormatter" formatString="DD MMM" />
			<mx:LinkButton label="Twitter" textAlign="left" 
				click="navigateToURL(new URLRequest('http://twitter.com/paulkukiel'))" 
				y="0" x="10"/>
			<mx:TextArea id="ta" width="160" height="163" editable="false" y="21" x="10"/>
	
</mx:Application>

And here is the bug report at Adobe. It was already entered but I put my vote forward hopefully they fix it.

bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-13194

Wow - Flash 10 for Windows, Mac... and LINUX?!

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:58:00 GMT

Most of you may not realize this, but historically Linux support for Flash has been somewhat of an afterthought by Adobe. While you everyone else was using Flash 8, we were using Flash 7. In fact, they just skipped that version entirely for Linux. When Flash 9 beta came out, they assured us that Linux was in the works. Eventually we did get Flash 9, but well after the rest of the world.

That brings me to this morning when opening up the aggregators and Digg (go digg it!), I find that they have released a beta for Flash 10 (Astro) for all 3 platforms concurrently! I find this pretty exciting, and want to thank the Adobe Flash development crew for keeping us current!

For all the information about updatess/features on this version, check out the Penguin.SWF blog and their announcement.

Coldfusion Forums

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:15:00 GMT

I don't mind browsing an online forum now and then and I really like to have a place I can go to ask questions. Mailing lists are great but often I tend to skip over alot of emails. So I did some searching and found the following Coldfusion forums.

DigitalPoint CF Forum

DreaminCode CF Forum

Sitepoint CF Forum

Adobe CF Forum

Adobe's actions speak loudly about their lack of support for ColdFusion

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:09:00 GMT

I keep hearing from Adobe that it stands behind ColdFusion today and from here on out, and by all accounts if you based your perception on the continual development of the product you would think that it is definitely a part of their focus. We are already hearing CF9 features for goodness sake!

If this is true, why is it that the Adobe marketing seems so out of step with this message?

When I attended the Flex 3 kickoff meeting for the Dallas Flex User Group, they used an Adobe presentation that went into some detail about talked about server-side language interoperability with Flex, explicitly citing .Net, Java, PHP, yet they apparently didn't feel that their own product ColdFusion made the cut. Given how gracefully the two work together, coupled with the fact that it is their product, how can that really be excused? Actually as I look back at that post, I pondered that question here.

This past week someone posted the following image to our ColdFusion User Group list asking why Adobe would so obviously exclude ColdFusion when showing showing various languages talking to Flex and posted this image from the Adobe site.

***EDIT: Adobe has updated the image below since the time of this blog posting***

I mean... come ON! That seems like such a glaring and purposeful ommission.

Earlier this year, I received the shirt below from Adobe. It irked me when I got it, but after seeing this theme of publicly dismissing ColdFusion over and over, I took a picture of it last night for this post. Here is the "entire" Adobe family as seen through their eyes.

Adobe, I truly want to believe that you support ColdFusion and I repeatedly try to convince my my employers and clients that you are, but over and over, you continually weaken my case.

Adobe Air Camp

Sat, 17 May 2008 15:13:00 GMT

I recently attended Adobe's Air Camp ( Melbourne Australia ). There was quite a large turn out and a surprising amount of interest. I spoke with a few people and, as noted by Adobe, one of the key points is due to Adobes push for cross platform frameworks.

I'd say 70% of laptops I saw there were Macs and 100% of the Adobe staff were on Macs. I sat with a few guys who basically said if this didnt run on Linux then they wouldn't have been there that day. I think this is a good thing for Adobe. I have personally been using Flexbuilder in OSX, Windows and I played with it in Linux all with great success.

One of the nice things Adobe is doing is working hard to integrate its products and although I don't use CS3, others at work do and now they can design UI in Flash and Fireworks then pass that onto a developer to implement the logic.

The presenters and their blogs were:

Andrew Spaulding - http://www.flexdaddy.com/

Mark Blair - http://www.blairsblog.com/

Matt Voerman - http://blog.schematic.com.au/

Coldfusion XML Unformat

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:38:00 GMT

I found this function very usefull just recently so I though I'd share.

Description
This is a simple UDF which does the exact opposite of CFMX's XmlFormat() function. Specifically, it replaces the following five characters in XML-escaped data with their normal equivalents: > with > < with < ' with ' " with " & with &

XMLunFormat

Coldfusion on OSX ( again )

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:56:00 GMT

Well the CF 8 install on leopard was working well the constant wifi drop outs I was experiencing were just not worth the price on the "newest and shiniest" OS. So today I wiped the old partition and reinstalled OSX 10.4. Ill follow the same steps as before on hopefully have my setup running again soon.

Coldfusion and Flex a perfect harmony.

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:09:00 GMT

A new site has been launched to give examples and short tutorials on how Coldfusion and Flex communicate. Anyone can submit a tutorial and request specific examples.

www.flexcf.com is the sister site to www.learncf.com

Blue Dragon is Open source

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:27:00 GMT

So by now we have all heard that BlueDragon is open source. What do I think about this? I think it’s good news, personally I will probably never look under the hood but if I needed to I can. I have never used Blue Dragon as I have always had access to dedicated CF box's but now that it’s free I might pull and old server out of the cupboard and give it a go.

The thing that appeals to me is the free edition. Any cheap hosting plan out there has php almost none have Cold Fusion and I don’t think I have ever seen it for free. Now with a free cmfl engine I'd like to see more hosts offering this as part of their service. If this happens we might start seeing some more community projects ie phpbb like forums and wordpress blogs for cmfl becoming more popular. I currently use phpbb however I do little to no code customisation and that’s really because it’s already so good, but every now and then there are parts that we’d like to change and I would be more comfortable working with cfml.

I don’t see php/.Net devs throwing away what they know for cmfl but with a free edition out there I hope to see an increase in its use. I also don’t see any big projects move from ColdFusion to Blue Dragon but there might be some that have a application that don’t need the extras and its now easier to sell a project that doesn’t have a server side technology that they have to fork out even more for.

New Atlanta

Adobe CEO: We're bringing Flash to the iPhone

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:47:00 GMT

Well finally there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Flash for the iPhone. I am very happy about this and hope iPhone Flash will have excellent support for Flex. I'm already thinking of the possibilities and hitting up the boss for one as soon as they are out in Aus. Which I hope coincides with the Flash release.

Excellent News!

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8263

New Flex User Group Special Presentation

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:08:00 GMT

For those in Melbourne Australia the Melbourne Flex user group is having a special presentation evening:

Presentation one:

Join Matt Johnston (OzFlex) at a joint OzFlex / AUG Vic event as he presents and demos Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 - as announced by Adobe on February 25th. You'll see exclusive video presentation by Adobe Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, hear some important product news, plus get your hands on some exclusive giveaways.

Presentation two:

What you didn't know about video in the real world. Find all the details here: ozflex.urbanwise.com/

Drinks and dinner will provided courtesy of Adobe.

Web 2.0 Footer

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:52:00 GMT

Here is a nice tutorial on how to make a Web 2.0 footer in Photoshop over at PSDTuts.com.

Yes ColdFusion fans... we are a ColdFusion site!

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:32:00 GMT

I don't know how pervasive this point of confusion is, but today a regular face in the ColdFusion community was making some remarks in this comment thread and further on his InstantSpot site that InstantSpot is not a ColdFusion-based application, with the insinuation that he won't support our efforts because of this.

Just to be clear, no matter whether or not you actually see ".cfm" in the URL, we are running InstantSpot on Adobe ColdFusion 8, using Mach-II 1.6, ColdSpring and other community tools. We are strong advocates for ColdFusion, work with our local ColdFusion User Group, try to be evangelists for it wherever we can, and we will continue to do so.

My notes on Adobe's Flex 3 presentation: D-Flex UG kickoff meeting

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:54:00 GMT

Last night was the kickoff meeting for D-Flex which is the Dallas Flex User Group. This meeting was planned in conjunction with the Flex 3 Launch and featured a presentation by local Flex guru Mark Pillar, of Midnight Coders, Inc who delivered a presentation that was created by Adobe. As he went through the presentation, I took some very high level notes in bullet point format.

One thing of note specific to ColdFusion - Not *once* in Adobe's presentation materials did they even give the slightest mention to CF and how gracefully it natively interacts with Flex. As a CF developer, I find this a bit troublesome and makes me wonder a bit about Adobe's commitment to promoting ColdFusion outside of the ColdFusion community itself.

Here are my notes...

Mark Piller - Midnight Coders, Inc

General demo of features of Flex Builder
- Design view
- Descriptions of XMXL & AS
Adobe RIA technology principles
- Deploy consistently no all browsers, and now on the desktop
- Engaging, highly interactive, expressive experiences
- Highly productive environment
Description of Adobe's stack of tools
Adobe reaches 700+ million PCs and 200+ devices
99% reach on connected PCs. 8 million installs per day
250,000,000 PDF Files on the internet
Discussion of the Designer Developer Workflow - Fw, Fx, Ps, Fl, Ai
- Thermo
Some interesting Flex implementations
- Buzzword - very cool web based Flex word processing app (url: http://www.buzzword.com )
- Small Worlds - Virtual 3d world written in Flex (url: http://www.smallworlds.com/beta/ )
Rich library of common UI Controls
- video playback components
- datagrids, date, controls, etc
- charting components
Extensible model
- CSS support
- skinnable components
price for Flex Builder - $249 standard, professional $649 (upgrade pricing: Standard - 99 plugin, 249 standalone... I may have recorded the upgrade pricing incorrectly as I was still typing when he changed slides)
Import Skin Assets into Flex Builder
- CS3 makes it easy to create custom skins, then use the Flex Import Wizard
New in Flex 3
- visual CSS editor
- view all component states in one view
Design view enhancements
- Enhanced Constraints Model
  - align components with edges of any vertical of horizontal coordinate
  - support for basline alignment
- Skinning Model Improvements
  - New skin states simplify styling
  - Enhanced control over individual components
- OpenType Font support
Advanced Data Grid
- New "Grouping" including multiple grouping in datagrids in Fx3. Looks like an expandable folder tree view
Charting enhancments
New list and detail enhancements
Working with Data
- Web Services Introspection
  - Generate client proxy classes from wsdl signatures
  - Includes support for complex types returned from web services
  - enables complete code hinting for service methods and custom types
- Introductory Data Wizards
  - generates crud, etc but is mostly only useful to those just getting started
AIR
- Previously named Apollo
- Cross-OS application engine that enables hybrid desktop-internet application
  - New capabilities
    - Native OS drag and drop support
    - multi-windowed apps
    - access local file sys
    - local database storage
    - complete rendering support for html
- Flex Builder support for AIR apps
- Platform evolution
  - Reduced application size
  - users only need to download the Adobe-signed F3 platform component once
  - Flash player cache stores it for use by any flex-enabled site
  - enter flex apps can no be as small as 50K (used to be around 250K)
  - Flex 3 RSL - runtime shared library
  - RSL is potentially pulled from any Flex app.
    - question about the case where someone might modify the RSL on their site? Handshake from the player maybe? No answer
Example of the Flex Builder profiler that allowed visibility to bottle necks & high memory spots in the application. Also shows how many instances of objects have been created.
JavaScript and Ajax Wrappers
Deep Linking
- updates browser URL to represent application state
- enables user to bookmark particular points in the app or share urls
- standalone web-tier compiler modules for IIS and Apache
- Mark questioned how usable it is in its current state and insinuated that there may be some issue with using this
AIR application stack
- walk through of Seamless install (after you have AIR runtime installed which makes this a bit less than "seamless" for first timers)
- web launcher
- AIR installer contans
- Privileges - AIR apps have full desktop application privileges
  - read/write files, background execution, network access
  - There is apparently some setting in the AIR runtime environment to limit this... (an operating system where the default user doesn't have admin rights is my personal suggestion)
- Window Chrome
  - use native OS window chrome
  - use custom chrome implemented by application
- Local File Access
  - create delete copy move, list directoreis, get system info on files, dirs
- Local database
  - SQL Lite
    - supports ACID transactions
    - zero-config allowing for embedded solution
- AIR desktop integration
  - install/uninstall
  - task manager or process list
  - application shortcuts, drag/drop
  - clipboard
  - app can run in background, can show on taskbar
- Adobe Reader integration
- AIR limitations
  - limited hardware accessibility
  - no access to native libraries/executables
  - no USB or serial port
  - limited support for accessibility,
  - limited printing support
  - limited localization
    - English only for 1.0
    - Japanese, German, French for 1.1
Flex Remoting, Data Management and Messaging
- Java,.NET, PHP and Ruby solutions... no ColdFusion in your preso Adobe???
- first connectivity for Java was FDS,
  - JAVA -open source on elater Granite Data Service, Red5, WebORB ***matches LiveCycle features***, BlazeDS
  - .NET - WebORB for .NET, Flourine, AMF.Net
  - PHP - WebORB for PHP, AMFPHP, SabreAMF
  - Ruby - WebORB for Rails, RubyAMF (*stronger than WebORB for Rails*)
- Introducing Open Source BlazeDS
  - Capabilites
    - Easily connects FLex and AIR apps to existing server logic
    - high performance data transfer
    - real-time data push over standard http
    - full pub/sub messaging that extends existing messaging infrastructure
    - publication of AMF3
- bottom line: there is a free connector for almost every solution
- Remoting performance example - significant performance with remoting vs http/web services - james ward google "Blaze Bench" ???
ILOG Elixir Components (charting)
- advanced charting components
Thermo - Convert Artwork to Functional Components

My pointless wish for ColdFusion 9

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:26:00 GMT

Before continuing, I am aware that the likelihood of this every happing is remote at best, but that won't keep me from dreaming. If I could choose 1 thing - just 1! - for ColdFusion 9, it would have nothing at all to do with new features. In fact, it would actually mean less features in way.

What is this wish?

... a totally stripped down free version of ColdFusion.

Why would they do this? It would make ColdFusion far more accessible to the masses and would encourage a much larger user base. If Adobe was to offer a stripped down version for free, then the natural progression would be for people to build more mature applications that need more of the advanced features that would then be only available in the non-free versions, Standard and Enterprise. Small shops might be able to get away with the stripped versions, and as more applications are developed, more developers are created. More developers mean bigger and better applications, all pointing to the eventual goal of more Enterprise licenses sold. In addition to the potential upgrades to pay versions, this would open up a new stream of revenue for the pay-support that Adobe already offers.

So what changes should be made in the free version? Let's start with a Standard license version as the comparison point. Obviously non-of the Enterprise features should be available. Here are the other changes I would recommend in my imaginary world in which a free version of ColdFusion would exist.

Limit the number of datasources that can be added. Heck, even just allow 1. I think that this limitation alone would keep Adobe from losing a majority of its pay customers to the free license. It would still make it a useful server and could definitely encourage an up-sell.
No <cfdocument /> functionality. There is no need to offer this powerful tool for free, and again this would be a good up-sell point for people who need that functionality.
No <cfsearch /> functionality. It is my understanding that some fraction of the consumer cost of ColdFusion goes to pay for Verity licensing contained within ColdFusion. Strip that out and make it a pay feature.
No <cfajax /> functionality. I they want to use Ajax, they can roll their own.
No <cfchart /> functionality
No Flex Remoting support
No LiveCycle integration
No Event Gateways
No scheduled tasks. It they want to schedule something, they can always make a cron job.
No WebService support (I am on the fence with this one, but let's throw that in for good measure)

Am I crazy or couldn't taking this approach be a smart thing for Adobe? I would be interested in others thoughts about my imaginary world where a free version of ColdFusion is a reality.

I'm Famous!

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 10:48:11 GMT

My two articles finally shipped in the newest FAQU! I wrote two pieces on utilizing Flex with Coldfusion: Business Reporting and Printing, and an article on doing CRUD work with a database. I will be posting code samples here as soon as I unpack my bags from MAX :)

Is Adobe Going After Microsoft?

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 14:03:13 GMT

This article in Wired argues the point that having entered the desktop application market, Adobe could have Microsoft's suite of office products in it's sights...

...And Mike Downy's response...

"We want to build a platform that lets any corporation build applications in the browser and on the desktop, and just like any of our customers, Adobe is planning to take this platform and use it to build applications as well."

This could get interesting.

I'm going to MAX

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 18:36:31 GMT

Even though I said I wasn't going, turns out that things just worked out so that I can! Now, if I can just afford lodging.... :P

Chicago, here I come! (well, in a month and a half)