In Part 1 (CFDJ, Vol. 8, issue 10) we introduced the destination-aware grid, formatters, and renderers. In this article we are continuing our discussion about datagrid renderers and...

With the release of Flex 2, Adobe has introduced a tool that makes building rich user interfaces for the Web easier than ever; of course, as anyone remotely plugged in to the Web development community knows, Ruby on Rails has made creating database-driven Web applications brain dead simple. This article discusses a technology that marries Flex with RoR applications by providing a means of automating the communication between the client and server. The technology is 'WebORB for Rails,' a free and open source (GPL) server made available by Midnight Coders (www.themidnightco ders.com).

Adobe Systems has introduced Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server 7.2, an enterprise rights management (ERM) solution for protecting and controlling documents throughout their entire lifecycle, from creation, through distribution and collaboration, to archiving and destruction. Now, organizations can conduct critical business processes more securely by protecting a broad range of financial, government, and engineering documents or other files across multiple formats, including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Dassault Systèmes CATIA V5 files.

This Yahoo internal document by Brad Garlinghouse (a Yahoo senior vice president) is a tremendous read. Brad started by stating his love for Yahoo, for example: I proudly bleed purple and, yellow everyday! And like so many people here, I love this company Then he bluntly outlines the big problems he sees at Yahoo, and 'I believe we must embrace our problems and challenges and that we must take decisive action'.

I'm a Webmaster for the Air Protection Division (APD), EPA Region 3 in Philadelphia and in April 2006, I wrote an article for CFDJ entitled 'How ColdFusion MX 7 Made Me a Hero at the Office' (Volume 8, Issue 4). That article described how I harnessed the power of ColdFusion to improve access to our most vital business information.

'With Adobe Document Center, we're putting the control and protection of sensitive information within the reach of individuals in businesses of all sizes,' said Tom Hale, SVP of Adobe's Knowledge Worker Business Unit, as Adobe yesterday introduced Adobe Document Center - a new hosted service that, as Hale summarized it, 'enables knowledge workers to better protect, share and track the usage of Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel documents as part of day-to-day communications and collaboration.'

There are many resources we should analyze to ensure optimal ColdFusion operation or to help diagnose problems. Fortunately, there's an awesome free tool that comes to our aid to turn voluminous data into useful information.

This is a short comparison table of major elements/concepts of these two languages for a quick reference.

In this excerpt from our book, Rich Internet Applications, we'll cover how to set up large applications intended for Web or, more broadly speaking, distributed deployment. As an example let's consider an enterprise application that consists of hundreds of screens, reports, forms, and dashboards. Accordingly, about a dozen engineers specializing in GUIs, frameworks, data layers, and business domains are working on this application in parallel.

For over a decade now, we have been trained to use the 'back' and 'forward' buttons in our Web browser to review or backtrack previously viewed content. We are trained to the point that there are even keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, this can be a problem when browsing Flex applications. Being the well-trained users that we are, we often forget that we could cause the Flex application to reload unwittingly.

PowerPoint has been capable of accepting and playing back videos for quite some time, at least as far back as Office 97. In most cases the process is quite simple. Go to the Insert menu, click on Insert Movies, and away you go. At least in theory.

I love the definition in Wikipedia of Media convergence: 'Media convergence is a theory in communications where every mass medium eventually merges to the point where they are indistinguishable to each other due to the advent of new communication technologies.'

Once upon a time, Sun and Apple used to have about the same market cap. Today Apple has a market cap of $63BN while Sun's is just $17BN. Ahead of Sun, unbeknownst to many, is Adobe. Its market cap today is $18BN. For a company that in 1998 was worth 'only' $1.7BN it has not been a bad 8 years!

The growth of Flash and AJAX in Web applications is driven by real market needs - applications that are visually compelling and simple to use gain faster adoption and can be a competitive differentiator, enabling customers, employees, and partners to interact effectively with information and other people. There has been tremendous innovation in applications delivered via the Web; however, browser limitations such as the lack of access to local files, the inability to leverage desktop functionality, and reliance on continuous connectivity ultimately limit the functionality of a browser-based application. In addition, creating these applications is not always a simple process and browser compatibility issues continue to plague front-end developers.

Adobe today announced that Adobe Flash Video technology has won a Technical and Engineering Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, in recognition of the technology's pivotal role in bringing television content to the Internet. TV like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy and My Name is Earl are being delivered online thanks to Flash Video, the same technology that also powers the video capabilities of social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

Every now and then we create reusable components, and so far we are giving them away for free. Some pathetic bloggers call this 'giving back to the community'. We look at it simple: if we do not have time to productionize the component, we donate it.

It's really convenient for anyone coming from an HTML background that we can now provide colors to Flex using html standard syntax for hexidecimal number (#000000 = black, #ffffff= white, etc). I've recently been building some tools to convert drawings in the flash player to and from SVG format. SVG, like HTML, likes to specify hexidecimal numbers with a '#' prefix, but the flash player drawing API needs hexidecimal numbers to be prefixed with '0x' To help migrate back and forth between hexStrings and AS numbers, I wrote a few static methods, which are working well for me:

ColdFusion Extensions for Flex, included in ColdFusion MX 7.0.2, enable Flex Builder 2.0 developers to automate the more mundane tasks like CRUD (creating, reading, updating and deleting records) by creating ColdFusion components, ActionScript class files, and code to invoke a Web Service.

Amidst the hustle and bustle leading up to MAX, I managed to steal some time to work on a skunkworks project. The idea was to let people experience the fun and instant gratification of Flex, without needing to download and install anything at all. And thus The FLEXifier.

The sign of an experienced developer is solid design. Novices edit examples they find on the Net, journeymen figure out how to code something as they do it, but craftsmen plan their work. Starting out, this can look like wasted time, but if your app is any good, your customer will want to expand it. Then, if you need some help, you'll have to explain all that intuitive code to ten people, all of whom you are paying by the hour. Diagrams would be nice then, right?

This article is about creating a Flex tree control that uses a component hierarchy as the data provider. As with most of my Flex development, after struggling for days and then finally getting something to work, I later find out that there is a much easier way to do it that none of my searches ever turned up. I am a beginner Flex 2 developer, so any constructive feedback would be greatly appreciated.

The recent years of Web development have been marked by several important events. In the Flash world, we have seen a constant evolution of the technology. From a developer's point of view, Flash started to be really usable with the introduction of ActionScript 1.0 in Flash 5 and the improvements made in Flash 6. It turned out that Flash was no longer only an animation tool for designers but also a framework for developers. This led to many Flash projects that would not have been possible before, ranging from Web games to Rich Internet Applications.

'The innovation we are most excited about,' said Bruce Chizen, Adobe's CEO, 'is Apollo, which we believe will revolutionize the way the world will interact with the Web in the future.' He was speaking at MAX 2006, the biggest ever Adobe developer conference, in Las Vegas.

The opening keynote was superb, definitely one of our more exciting keynotes, and without a doubt the loudest. After several 'let's tease Ben' segments courtesy of Kevin and Shantanu, I got to present two segments. The first concentrated on ColdFusion. I talked about the CF/Flex integration in CFMX 7.0.2, showed the ColdFusion Flex Application Wizard, and then discussed 'Scorpio'.

Getting good quality text in a JPEG file has long been a concern for many designers. Fortunately for us, Fireworks MX and higher versions have a very useful feature to help with this called the Selective Quality. In Fireworks MX 2004 and higher, we also have the ability to adjust and customize the aliasing of text. In this short tutorial find out how to utilize these features to keep your text crisp and snappy when exporting a file as a JPEG image.

At its first MAX developer and customer event since joining forces with Macromedia, Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ: ADBE) today will demonstrate technologies and future product workflows that make it possible to create and deliver new kinds of high-impact, rich applications and engaging content and experiences. Adobe is previewing the company's next-generation technology, code-named Apollo, for developing rich Internet applications for the desktop, and debuting the public beta of Adobe Digital Editions, new software for interacting with eBooks and digital publications (see separate release).

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today introduced the public beta of Adobe® Digital Editions, a Rich Internet Application (RIA) built from the ground up for digital publishing. With native support for Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) as well as an XHTML-based reflow-centric publication format, Digital Editions delivers an engaging way to acquire, read, and manage content, including eBooks, digital magazines, digital newspapers and other digital publications. Initially available as a free public beta for Windows®, Digital Editions will support Macintosh systems as a universal binary application, Linux® platforms, as well as mobile phones and other embedded devices in future versions.

ColdFusion developers have known for years how powerful rapid development can be and how much of a difference that makes when building dynamic Web applications. Over the course of a little more than a year we've watched as the Web model was turned on its head in favor of something that feels much more intuitive and is much more user-friendly. Part of this change has come about because of what most people call 'Web 2.0.' Web 2.0 has brought about more buzzwords than a marketing convention. A lot of normal users have stopped trying to figure out what tagging is, what AJAX means, or what the blogosphere really is. They have to be wondering why most of the Web sites they're using suddenly have 'beta' on them.

'MAX 2006 is both a milestone in the integration of Adobe and Macromedia, and a reflection of what's possible when all these creative forces come together,' said Kevin Lynch, Adobe SVP & Chief Software Architect today here in Las Vegas, where Adobe is staging its first MAX developer and customer event since joining forces with Macromedia.

'By creating a specialized, consumer-friendly application like Digital Editions, Adobe is ensuring publishers can securely deliver high-impact content to the widest possible audience, across hardware platforms, operating systems and devices,' said Shantanu Narayen, president and COO at Adobe, as he today introduced at MAX 2006 the public beta of Adobe's new Rich Internet Application (RIA) built from the ground up for digital publishing.

This article is based on a presentation that I made at the Adobe Flex seminar in August 2006 (www.flexseminar.com/), after which the master of ceremonies Jeremy Geelan asked me to explain how to make great mapping mashups using Adobe Flex.

Christophe Coenraets, a senior Flex Evangelist from Adobe has published a blog showing a number of sample Flex applications that communicate with Java on the server side.

When I joined Macromedia/Adobe Consulting, my role as Practice Leader was to grow a practice in EMEA around Rich Internet Application technologies. , reflecting the recurrence in opportunity for us to fuse these client and server technologies together to solve a number of enterprise business problems. As I assume the responsibility to grow this combined practice in EMEA, I'll extend my blogging to share some of the excitement and thinking we have around how the technologies from our Enterprise Developer Business Unit - including Flex, Flex Data Services and the numerous LiveCycle technologies - converge as an enterprise business platform.

Oracle and Adobe today announced they are working together to enable developers to easily create Web 2.0 applications for the enterprise. For the first time, enterprise applications will be able to include animations, charts and graphs in Adobe(R) Flash(R) combined with other AJAX content surfaced in a rich Java- based portal such as Oracle Portal, which is part of the Oracle(R) Fusion Middleware product family.

Your footsteps echo down the unmarked path. Gravel shuffles everywhere as you slow and strafe around the corner of a generic concrete bunker. You reach for the double- barreled shotgun but it's too late. A loud bang rips through the air but it's the soft thud as you hit the ground that confirms your worst fear, you're dead...again. A quick click of the mouse and poof...like magic you're all the way back to your last reached checkpoint.

The winds of change in the Web world have reached hurricane force right now, and nowhere are they blowing more fiercely than around that epicenter of weather activity that's been labeled 'Web 2.0.' There, a perfect storm is brewing.

Ten years ago I've been doing PowerBuilder and my mentality was different: first, I was the best friend of business users, and second I did not really worry about what's under the hood. I could do stuff quickly, or using the modern jargon, I was an

SYS-CON Books (www.books.sys-con.com) announced the forthcoming publication of two uniquely comprehensiveand up-to-date books devoted to every aspect of AJAX technologies and RichInternet Applications in the greater context of the overall 'Web 2.0'spectrum:

There is this blog and a nice looking demo showing how AJAX can happily live together with Flex charting. This vendor's AJAX grid component is populated with the data first, and then using FABridge the data is being passed to the Flex Charting component. Typically blogs demos like this get a number of Wows, and I expect several 'Cool, man' comments to this blog within the next day or so.

The subject of this piece is how to pass parameters from HTML to a Flex 2 application using flashVars parameters.