ColdFusion Muse

Webmaniacs Live - Ben Forta Keynote, Monday

I'm here at Webmaniacs soaking in knowledge from various CF luminaries. This morning, a harried but erudite Ben Forta gave us a very thin sketch of Centaur (the upcoming CF 9) and an overview of the under utilized but extremely powerful Live Cycle Data Services (LCDS - and no, it's not a denomination). I don't suppose I ever grasped the nuances between remote object calls from flex (flash remoting and "flexgateway") and integration with data services.

I always knew that the "express" version of LCDS was limited to a single processor. But I had assumed (wrongly as it turned out) that LCDS was really the new label for the venerable old "flash remoting" - meaning the translation engine for AMF3 requests. What I had not realized was that the ES version allows for messaging and data synchronization services "out of the box" without a 10 thousand dollar license upgrade. While the processor limitation is significant in some cases where the load is expected to be heavy, in many cases it is a tolerable condition. Consider, for example, a typical intranet application. Even with a few hundred users a single dual or quad core processor would no doubt be enough to handle expected load.

Of course it's also possible that I missed some important cost aspect of ES - or that not all the features are enabled on CF standard and require enterprise. That gives me a bit more digging to do. Perhaps I'll look up Ben Forta and ask him for some clarification. The problem is that his face glows so brightly I have to shield my eyes (See Exodus 34).

Two Hotshot Developers Build Flex Gallery - Film at 11:00

I have 2 amazing young men working for me named Axel Jensen and Jake Churchill. Although they were both hired as entry level Coldfusion programmers their meteoric rise in knowledge is only surpassed by the number of donuts they eat and the sheer number of musical artists that they seem to know by name. Jake has quickly become an expert at working with Farcry. He has personally shepherded 12 separate Farcry sites in a short 9 months. I guess I should say "birthed" 12 Farcry sites in 9 months (ha). Axel has devoured flex and build some amazing applications interfacing with Google Maps, charting, data visualization etc. I'm overjoyed to have hired 2 burgeoning geniuses. My biggest problem is going to be how to keep them :)

The 2 of them collaborated on a flex based photo gallery that is among the better ones I have seen. It was done for a client of ours, hopecenterforkids.org (see their new coming site at hopec.cfwebtools.com). Axel wrote a rundown of it on his blog and he included the source code for all of you aspiring flex developers out there. In the words of the Governator of the great state of California, Happy Flexing!

It's Axel's World and We are All Just Livin' In It

We've been doing more and more Flex programming lately. Typically we use it for a UI that needs extra care to handle user interaction. One of our developers, Axel Jensen, has become quite good at it. Check out the latest iteration of his music play list application at Kill the Heart. He's a young man and so I will just quote him and say succinctly, "It's pretty sweeeeeet!"