Articles on ORM for the AIR Developer

I recently completed a two-part series entitled ‘Object Relational Mapping for the AIR Developer’ in the Adobe Edge newsletter. This two part series will help any AIR developer get going with FlexORM (which is an open source ORM solution for Adobe AIR). This series also covers many of the basics of ORM in general including complex relationship types, cascading, lazy loading, and more. I hope you find it helpful!

• Adobe Edge: Object Relational Mapping for the AIR Developer – Part 1
• Adobe Edge: Object Relational Mapping for the AIR Developer – Part 2

Get a ColdFusion 8 License for Cheap

I am in the process of moving all of my servers to ColdFusion 9 Standard. That being said, I have an old ColdFusion 8 Standard license that I am currently selling on Ebay. I paid full price for this license ($1299) last year, and I can truly say that it was worth every penny. I know that many developers find the price of ColdFusion a roadblock to building client projects on CF, but hopefully this can help a lucky CF developer get rolling with a license for cheap. The starting bid is at $450 (and there is no reserve). You can use ‘Buy it Now’ for $750. I hope this helps someone!

ORM for AIR Presentation Notes from RIA Unleashed

First, I would be remiss if I didn’t say that Brian Rinaldi put on a great event in Boston! Unfortunately I missed the keynote and morning sessions because I had to do some client work, but everything seemed well organized. I was also greatly impressed with the attendees at my session. They asked some great questions – and gave some good feedback.

Slides, Code Samples, and Resources

This particular session doesn’t have a great deal of slides – but, if they are helpful, I have included them here:

• Slides: ORM for AIR – PDF (953 kb)

I also presented two sample FlexORM applications. The first example uses a single VO with no complex relationships. The second uses some complex relationships to demonstrate how FlexORM stores data across tables. These two applications were created for a series I did in the Adobe Edge newsletter (which I will link to below). Only the first of these articles has been published yet (as of 11/13/09):

• Article: Object Relational Mapping for the AIR Developer
• Source Code: Both FlexORM Examples – ZIP (1.46 mb)

I am actually not releasing the code for the example with the CF9 AIR ORM just yet. I am still working on the primary key generation part of the ‘wrapper’ I referred to. I will let you guys know (here on the blog) when everything is ready. You can speed up the process for voting for the following bug: http://cfbugs.adobe.com/cfbugreport/flexbugui/cfbugtracker/main.html#bugId=80681.

The Current State of Flex Frameworks

At most of the conferences I attend – people come up to me to discuss Cairngorm. Many of them have learned from my tutorials. I am glad that the videos have been helpful to so many (and the daily views still astound me). However, these videos were created by me over two years ago (almost to the day). In reality, a lot has happened in the last two years – and I want to give more insight into my current frameworks choices.

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Colorado Growth Model and the Max Awards

This year one of the projects I worked on at Universal Mind, the Colorado Growth Model is a Max Awards finalist. This application is really ground-breaking in the way that it connects parents directly to their school’s performance data. A parent can very easily use the application and see how their child’s middle school compares against charter schools in Denver, or how the nearest elementary school compares with other elementary schools in the district. The possibilities are almost endless.

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Come Learn about CF9 with Flex and AIR at Adobe Max 2009

I must admit that my session is going to be pretty awesome. While some people get to speak for an hour – or maybe an hour and a half, I will be speaking for 8 hours (with some breaks of course). I will be presenting on Building ColdFusion Powered Flex and AIR Applications (see all of the labs here). While the preconference sessions are an extra cost ($595), you get an entire day of training from some amazing developers. If you look around at rates for a one-day training, you will see that this is a huge bargain. Normal sessions give you a taste of certain functionality, but at a preconference lab you can really learn it and take it back to your job.

In my session you can be sure that I will be covering:

• Utilizing the new Data-Centric Development Features in Flash Builder 4 (with ColdFusion)
• Working with the Proxy ActionScript classes that were introduced in ColdFusion 9
• Configuring and Using the ColdFusion 9 AIR Offline Sync functionality
• Working with ColdFusion Builder and configuring it to work with your development server
• Defining a Complex Domain Model using the new Hibernate ORM Support in ColdFusion 9
• Using the Hibernate ORM and its ColdFusion Builder Extension to create remote CRUD services
• Creating new Script-style CFC’s (with annotations)

All in all – you won’t want to miss this session! If you have any questions – feel free to leave a comment!

Quick CF9 Remoting Tip

I was working with a CF9 + Flex 4 example last night. This was a new installation of CF9 - and I hadn't tweaked any of the remoting settings at all (more on that in a bit). I was setting up a data paging example - and noticed that the Flex application was going crazy. From the network monitor I noticed that it was making continuous calls - and eventually caused the application to hang. After further analysis in the network monitor, I determined that Flex was receiving the objects back from ColdFusion - but they didn't contain any data. I hadn't seen this issue before.

After rummaging through the remoting config files, I discovered the issue. My bean CFC was using ColdFusion 9's new implicit getters/setters. To get this to work properly, you have to change a setting in the remoting config( specifically in services-config.xml):

By setting use-implicit-accessors to true, ColdFusion then uses the new implicit getters and setters in CF9 for your remoting calls. With that quick fix (and a restart) everything was working perfectly.

Flash Camp Atlanta – Right Around the Corner

We are now only two weeks away from Flash Camp Atlanta! We have some amazing speakers lined up including names like: Ben Stucki, Jesse Warden, Greg Wilson (Adobe), Christian Saylor, Carl Smith, Lief Wells, and more... You will certainly want to be at this event.

ORM for the AIR Developer

I will be speaking on ORM for the AIR Developer at Flash Camp Atlanta. I will be covering the different solutions that are available today - and how to develop and work with an actual domain model for your AIR application. Let me know if you have any questions on using an ORM solution - and I will be sure to cover them in my session.

Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook Available for Kindle

The Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook from O'Reilly is now available for the Kindle. This book is great for anyone from beginning to advanced and covers Flex, Flash, and JavaScript/HTML AIR development:

The hands-on recipes in this cookbook help you solve a variety of tasks and scenarios often encountered when using Adobe AIR to build Rich Internet Applications for the desktop. Thoroughly vetted by Adobe's AIR development team, Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook addresses fundamentals, best practices, and more. If you want to learn the nuances of Adobe AIR to build innovative applications, this is the book you've been waiting for.

As you might guess, I am a bit biased - but, I think this book is the best source of AIR recipes available today.

An Honest Open Discussion on Web Standards and HTML 5

If you monitor the web, you likely think that the Flash Player and Silverlight are on life support, and that HTML5 is rapidly changing what is possible on the web. In reality, many people who are commenting on HTML5 don't fully understand the current landscape. Did you know that HTML5 editor Ian Hickson stated that HTML5 won't fully be implemented in all browsers until 2022? Did you know that iPhone developers can start fully using HTML5 now? Did you know that all features in HTML5 were originally from web plugins? Did you know that Google uses a web plugin for Google Wave?

We need an open honest discussion about HTML5 and what it means for the web. Unfortunately, you aren't going to get the truth from fanatics on either side, but instead we all need to examine all of the evidence and come to our own conclusions. I have spent a great deal of time analyzing the facts, and in the process I have made several observations.

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