MonsantoBlog - ColdFusion / Flex

CFUnited 2009 Sumo w/ Joe Rinehart

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Before:

After:

Fail

360Flex Indy - Day One reaction

Tue, 19 May 2009 11:28:00 -0400

Reflecting on my day yesterday at 360Flex Indianapolis, I am happy to have attended all of the regular 360Flex events. This has been the most consistent conference I have been able to maintain. It might also be because it is my favorite. The Flex Show was kind enough to sponsor my way to this event and allow me the opportunity to be an onsite reporter for their ongoing podcast. After doing live interviews with about six people, I think I am getting comfortable hearing my voice outside my own head (well maybe not). At the very least, I am meeting some very cool developers and becoming even more jazzed about how the community is growing and moving forward. Michael Labriola with Digital Primates did a session on arrays and ArrayCollection in Flex that was my favorite session so far. But Degrafa (w/ Juan Sanchez) was worth the look; and I am happy to see the new licensing model for products (Licensing and Encryption for Flex). The Charity Code Jam seems to have gotten launched with good attendance. There were like 20 people in a little room giving their time away to help the The Leukemia & Lymphoma society. The particulars are all here. We ended the day after mingling with lots of great people at Rock Bottom Brewery (and playing Rock Band) for the second night... some of us were here Sunday for the pre-show training (very cool)... in the hotel restaurant with some scintillating conversation on ColdFusion and Universal Healthcare (??). Almost like real people and not just a bunch of geeks, no? Well, I'm off to another day of sessions and interviews for The Flex Show. It just doesn't get any better than this! bb

Working From Home... not

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:48:00 -0400

Working from coffee shops and cafes and other public places has been a mainstay for developers and designers ever since wifi became so popular. Here in Dallas, a pretty cool concept is capitalizing on this behavior. I was slow finding out about it, but Cohabitat seems ultra cool. At $35/mo for Community Membership, there are a bunch of grass roots type presentations and meetups that could make for useful networking opportunities. People from out of town looking for a cool place to do a ColdFusion or Flex event should look at this. I hope the place succeeds!

FlexCold is coming soon!

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:54:00 -0400

For longer than I can remember... ok not really, for about 10 years... I have written form after form after form to essentially accomplish CRUD. Every site just about seems to require a page or multiple pages which basically serve the purpose of reporting on the records of data in specific tables. Then a form is required to update this data, add new records, delete records, or changes related lookup data in response to this data's status changes or the site's requirements.

The thought occurred to me that a widget or control or panel or whatever you want to call it could be useful to allow any page the basic functionality of displaying, editing, and interacting with the data in a given table or "selected table" w/o re-writing the interface to this purpose. A form would have to be dynamically built based on the fields of data in the chosen table. The widget would have to have an understanding of field datatypes, so that UI controls could be shown in the form to given relevant perspective. Boolean fields would show as radio buttons. Lookups fields could be select boxes. Dates could prompt a calendar control. etc.

Well, time has rolled by and I got further into Flex development and kinda don't wanna do this in CF anymore. I love ColdFusion and I thought of doing this project in both, but after careful consideration, the Flex platform will simply allow me better options. ColdFusion will handle the configuration and database access portion of the project. Flex will handle the UI for both the widget and the admin for widget configuration.

I should have more details on this project in the coming weeks and will post some links as they are available.