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Flex Authority Volume 1 Issue 2 Released!

Flex Authority Volume 1 Issue 2 is now available in PDF format. The new issue focuses on "Components: The Building Blocks of Your Application", with 104 pages containing such gems as "The Life and Times of a Flex Component," "Getting a Handle on Flex Events," and "Ten Commandments of Component Layout." In addition, the issue contains articles on other important aspects of Flex development, such as Billy D. Spelchan's "Developing a Game in Flex Part II: A World to Play In" and John Wilker's "Under the Hood of a Flex/AIR application Part II," which dissects the planning and development of the 360|Flex conference session survey, an AIR application built to allow conference attendees, whether online or offline, to change their session registrations. The issue even gives an overview of Adobe's Flex IDE, Flex Builder 3, full of tips and tricks for Eclipse and Flex Builder users.

The issue and subscriptions are available for sale on the Flex Authority website. The table of contents and summaries of all articles are up on the website, as well as live PDF copies of the issue's editorial and table of contents.

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New Flex Articles:

How to Set Up Flex 3 for a ColdFusion Backend

Part 1: Flash Remoting – It's easier than you think.

by James Holmes

Senior Systems Analyst

Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia

With Flex 3 and ColdFusion 7.02 or 8, Flash remoting is easier to use than ever. This tutorial will work with either version of ColdFusion and requires Flex 3.

Obtain Flex 3 builder. The 60 day trial is free and once you see how much time it saves, you just might want to keep it. If you don't have it you can use the free Flex 3 SDK to work with Flex, but this tutorial is geared around the builder.
Install ColdFusion developer edition on your local machine (with or without Livecycle Data Services – we're only using Flex Remoting for this part of the article, although LCDS will be used in future parts). This step is to make compiling and testing the finished Flex application easier (the compiler looks at the XML config files within your local ColdFusion install to work out how to connect to ColdFusion). Keep it simple and use it standalone on port 8500 for now. You can move your finished product to your production server when you are done, even if it's on a different platform and installed differently. The next part of this article will cover multiserver installs and other more complicated setups.
Get http://blogs.adobe.com/flexdoc/UseFlashRemotingUpdate_Blog.pdf for the latest information on ColdFusion’s Flash Remoting and see http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=data_access_4.html for the LiveDocs on Flex with RemoteObject. The topics examined in this tutorial are covered by those two docs.
Set up the Flex project:
- Select File> New> Flex Project to open the New Flex Project Wizard and enter the appropriate information in the first sections of the Create a Flex project page.
- In the Server technology section of the Create a Flex project page, select ColdFusion as the Application server type, and select Use remote object access service.
- Select the ColdFusion Flash Remoting radio button to compile in Flex Builder.
- Click next and fill in the details. You can click Validate Configuration to make sure Flex can find the relevant services-config.xml or remoting-config.xml file, etc.
- Click finish.
Create the MXML for your application. In the source view in Flex 3 Builder, enter the following code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute">
   <mx:RemoteObject
   id="mycfc"
   destination="ColdFusion"
   source=" testobj">
      <mx:method
      name="getTime"
      result="returnHandler(event)"
      fault="mx.controls.Alert.show(event.fault.faultString)"/>

   </mx:RemoteObject>

   <mx:Script>

      <![CDATA[
      import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
      import mx.controls.Alert;
      private function returnHandler(e:ResultEvent):void {
      mx.controls.Alert.show(e.result.toString());

      }

      ]]>

   </mx:Script>
   <mx:Button x="30" y="30" label="Button" click="mycfc.getTime()"/>
</mx:Application>

In the code above, we're telling Flex to connect to the destination called "ColdFusion" that's automatically defined in the ColdFusion install. The source, "testobj," is the name of our CFC.
Create the cfc "testobj.cfc" to which Flex will connect, in the webroot of your local ColdFusion server:

<cfcomponent>
   <cffunction name="getTime" access="remote" returntype="string">
      <cfset myResult=TimeFormat(Now(),"HH:MM:SS")>
      <cfreturn myResult>
   </cffunction>
</cfcomponent>
Click the run button in Flex 3 Builder; a browser window should pop up with a button. Click the button and a popup alert should appear with the current CF server time.

That's all you need to do to configure Flex 3 to work with ColdFusion Standard on a standalone installation; pretty simple, isn't it? In the next part we'll cover the slightly different setup necessary for a multiserver / J2EE install of ColdFusion with Apache and some potential issues with CFCs in ColdFusion mappings.

James is a Senior Systems Analyst at Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia, responsible for the University's fleet of CF7 servers. He blogs on ColdFusion, mxAjax, and related topics at http://www.bifrost.com.au/blog/.