Rob's Ramblings

I wanted to pass along my experiences from my Flex Training for ColdFusion Developers that I took yesterday in Chicago.
 
This was a course from Adobe that was along the lines of an "intro to..." kind of course regarding Flex. Flex is the bridge that connects Flash to a backend (in this case CF9 but it can connect to any backend). It was aimed at people with my skill sets, but it was clear within the first hour that if you had some Flash and Actionscript background you were going to get a lot more out of it. I had neither, but I was able to follow along well enough.
 
Our trainer was Jeff Tapper, a senior Flex developer who has worked on some high profile projects, most recently working with Major League Baseball on their MLB.tv video feeds (I hope I got that right). He took a good amount of time in trying to make sure that we did not fall behind much.
 
On the Flex/Flash end they laid out some interesting (albeit very basic) usages. A lot of using Flash as a front end for basic forms and having it call CF9 to do some processing and returning data to the front end without a page reload. They did show that Flex can do form validation natively, and since it is not tied to a feature that can be disabled like JavaScript, it lessens the need for writing both front end and back end code for data input validation to a nice-to-have instead of a must-have. With a standard HTML front-end, if a user disabled JavaScript they could still submit the form and therefore having server side backend validation is an absolute must. Here, they either have Flash enabled and get it all, or they don't and don't see the form. There is no in-between.
 
Using Flash Builder you could set the Flash compiler to make the flash application accessible with a single checkbox in the options. I would be curious to see what our 508 team would think after taking a look at some of the demos we did, to determine if it truly is 508-compatible or not.
 
I did like the Flash Builder tool a lot, it has a nice GUI interface for creating the Flash front-ends and allowed you to manage some of the actions for the form objects as well. If I was going to build a Flex application, I would choose to use Flash Builder (which is built on the Eclipse IDE). But it costs at least $250 for the standard copy, and can get up to $700 for the Premium (which includes network monitoring to test the efficiency of your Flex application).
 
What I would need though is a lot more training on the Flex language itself. This I can self-teach given time I believe, but there's a lot still to be learned on that front.
 
What I ended up walking away most impressed with though was the new CF9 server and the ColdFusion Builder application. CF Builder is currently in Beta 2 phase, and is also an Eclipse-based IDE. It did have a couple of bugs but nothing major, and I really liked how it could be integrated with your CF server, either a local one or a remote one, to give you some control over the server, and through RDS get a lot of quick access to the database.
 
As far as CF9, the single biggest thing I walked away from this was the introduction I got to CF9's ORM (Object Relational Mapping) feature. After a first introduction to it, and watching a couple of other presentations on it since, this could be a tool that changes how we interact with databases. It enables you to write fairly generic code, and use functions instead of queries for accessing the database (and supports all parts of a CRUD interaction). Because of this, you could write CF code that would work the same with a database no matter what server it's on - be it MSSQL, MySQL, or Oracle (to name the three most common ones). It also takes a lot less code to interact with the database, which will save us time in coding. ColdFusion Builder has extensions that can speed this up even more, by connecting to your database via RDS, reading the configuration of a table, and auto-generating the components needed for you. CF9 also natively handles a lot of this communication as well. If you couldn't tell, I'm pretty excited about trying this out.