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).

Late Night Rant on the Flash Help Files and the Datagrid

So I'm sitting here after a long day of Flash programming and thinking about how much I hate the flash help system. The little window is annoying in the extreme. The font size is too small. The interface is counterintuitive. I can't ever find anything - at least not easily. If I select a combo box and hit the little "help" button in the properties window (I really aught to say "hideous" properties window) I would expect there to get help on the combo box - right. Nope. It always says "sorry - no help can be found for this component." But when I do a search for "combobox" it turns out that there is page after page of help. It's sort of like being white trash at a fancy restaurant. I can see all the empty seats but the hostess just keeps telling me, "sorry... we don't seem to have any openings..."

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Flash Remoting on CFMX7 Multiple Instances

If you use flash remoting on multiple sites on the same server you have probably had to configure the JrunScripts virtual directory. On the standard edition this virtual directory points to the folder <%cfusionmx7%>/runtime/lib/wsconfig/1. When you are running multiple instances you end up with several folders in the wsconfig folder - 1 for each instance (FYI - the root of a multi-instance CF installation is JRUN4, not ColdfusionMX7 as you might think). You might suspect that each site needing flash remoting should point this virtual to "it's own" instance. This is not the case. As Russ (a.k.a. "Snake") pointed out in a recent cfguru post, you must point this virtual to folder number 1. So...

...would not work, but... ...does work. I'm betting there is some other setting in a config file somewhere that needs to be adjusted to bring the instances into alignment with flash remoting.

Classes Missing After Migrating to Flash 8

If you moved from Flash MX 2004 pro to Flash 8 and then opened an existing fla file that included remoting (or other classes) you might find that the compiler complains about missing classes when you try to test or export the movie. At first I assumed this was because I needed to run the flash remoting component file (an add-on that installs the classes) that I originally downloaded from Macromedia. That did not work because it tried to install the files in the "old" directory for the old installation of flash (mx 2004).

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Debugging Flash Remoting Using Service Capture

I was introduced to a debugging tool called Service Capture by it's author Kevin Langdon. In fact he was reading a previous post of mine on my frustration with the netconnection debugger and he added a comment that he had created his "Service Capture" tool to deal with some of that frustration. I tried it out and it has some excellent features and advantages.

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Flash UI and dynamic Sizing

Although I love flash for UI's, there are things about it that are tough to work around. One of them is the "fixed size" nature of the medium. When working with a multi-paned Flash object I often find myself writing javascript functions to resize the movie container based on the amount of data in the pane. I hate having tons of empty space in pane "A" just because pane "B" needs the real-estate. Or having to size the movie quite long because one of the panes is extra long. I want the embeded object to work like a really well-made CSS site. I want to "fix" the size of some things (navigation, info or helper clips), but make the "content area" fluid - like a good three column layout (is there such a thing - ha). It would be great if the publish options simply included an "auto-size" option that embeded the necessary JS in the page. Maybe an item for the wish list eh?

Debugging the Netconnection Debugger for Flash Remoting

Sometimes the Netconnection Debugger simply stops working. I will be viewing data in it one minute, run a piece of remoting code, and ... nothing! These little coffee breaks are annoying and it took me a while to figure out how to fix it. I tried rebooting, repeatedly restarting flash, replacing files and libraries and reinstalling the remoting objects - nothing worked, until....

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