For some reason, the ColdFusion Team is going on a tour in March and April, to spread the word about ColdFusion Builder, which is currently in public beta 3 on labs.adobe.com.

I'm hitting two cities for now; some other dates are still in talks:

Dallas
March 24, 2010 7:30PM - 10:00PM
To RSVP

Philadelphia
March 30, 2010 6:00PM - 7:00PM
To RSVP

I'm extremely excited about both of these events. I hit Dallas on the last year's User Group and they did a completely kick ass event with the Flex Group. As for Philly, it's where I live, and I haven't been to an event here since I've worked for Adobe. I'm always somewhere else, but not this time.

I've got some cool stuff to show, and I can't wait to see you all.

So, buried in the documentation around ColdFusion Builder is the fact that you can write extensions in Flex. I decided to fool around with this for a bit.

If you want to skip all of the demo and explanation and just try it out, feel free to pull down the extension:

Builder Stats at RIAForge

Builder Stats - ColdFusion Extension with Flex from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.

So doing it is pretty easy on the Builder side:

• Create a remote service CFC for all of the information that you want to expose to Flex
• Have your ColdFusion Builder extension pass information to the Flex generated SWF
  • Pass any variables to the SWF just like you would pass URL variables

On the Flex side:

• Pull in the remote service cfc as a WSDL* using Flash Builder's Data/Services
• Write your Flex app to use the services that get created
• Alter the generated ActionScript classes to use a WSDL that is passed into the SWF via the URL (Flash Params)

One more thing:

I'm not sure if this is a Flex thing, a ColdFusion thing, an OS thing, a webservices thing, or a me being dumb thing, but the automatically generated WSDL for my remote service CFC was different on Windows and Mac. Consequently the SWF could call the Mac hosted WSDL but not the Windows hosts WSDL. My solution? Create a static WSDL file that had the service spelled both ways. Maybe a hack but worked like charm.

Anyway, if you want to see the code, it's available on github:

• ColdFusion Builder Extension
• Flex Front End

*WSDL? Why not Flash Remoting (or ColdFusion in the Data/Services list)? Remoting needs to be configured to each system's configuration, and isn't very discoverable. WSDL doesn't require knowing about the Extension user's AMF setup; it just uses a URL, which can be easily discovered.

We released a performance brief on ColdFusion 9.

• Flash Remoting is now 8 times faster
• Object instantiation is 7 times faster
• IIS connectivity is faster
• Implicit Getters and Setters are 7 times faster than explicit

There's a lot to love here, check it out: http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/pdfs/cf9_performancebrief_ue.pdf

I'm doing an eSeminar on Flash Builder and ColdFusion 9 on Wednesday February 24th at 11:00AM -12:00PM PST (2:00PM – 3:00PM EST.)

I'm going to show off the features that the ColdFusion team have added to make ColdFusion work easier with Flex as well as the features in Flash Builder that make working with ColdFusion ridiculously easy.

You have to register in advance so head on over to the Online Events page and register.

Evidently we rolled out the first cumulative hotfix for ColdFusion 9 on Friday. Feel free to download it here:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/825/cpsid_82536.html

Note there are already a few things to look out for.

• Ray Camden reports an issue with MXUnit and CHF 1. Has to do with changes we made to parsing around the local scope in functions.
• Sean Corfield isn't sure if one of the changes impacts his FW/1 framework. Not clear if the bug he references was included in the hotfix.

One of the cooler features of ColdFusion Builder's extension tooling is the ability to create extensions that are driven with HTML/JS/CSS instead of with the default XML options. I think this has a few advantages:

• Allows interface options enabled by the XML options
• Allows better branded extensions via CSS and background images
• Allows you to develop/debug your extensions like normal web applications

This is pretty easy to enable. Normally you would have code like this in your handler to communicate back to the IDE:

<cfheader name="Content-Type" value="text/xml">
<response status="success" showresponse="true">
    <ide >
        <dialog width="600" height="400" />
        <body>
            <![CDATA[
                Some Response
            ]]>
        </body>
    </ide>
</response>

Instead you pass a URL parameter to the ide tag in your extension handler:

<cfheader name="Content-Type" value="text/xml">
<cfoutput> 
<response showresponse="true"> 
    <ide url="http://localhost/extension/handler.cfm?configPath=#configPath#" > 
        <dialog width="655" height="600" /> 
    </ide> 
</response> 
</cfoutput>

As you can see it can even handle URL variables.

Now, where I ran into trouble with this was with the URL itself. Basically you can't be sure of the URL when dealing with extensions. It could be localhost, but it just as easily could be on a remote server. So I was all clever and wrote some code to handle this:

<cfset baseURL = "http://" & cgi.server_name  />
<cfset messagesPath = getDirectoryFromPath(cgi.script_name) & "/messages.cfm" />
<cfset messagesOptions = "?type=notanapplication" />
<cfset messagesURL = baseURL  & messagesPath & messagesOptions >

You see, this will give me the correct URL to use to pass information to a template named "messages.cfm" that sits in the same folder as my handler. I use CGI variables to grab the server information. Then I use getDirectoryFromPath to make sure that I get the real relative path of the folder that the extension is sitting in (as opposed to assuming that it lives in the webroot). This works great.

Except I got reports of one of my extensions not working at all for some people. Look at that code again… There's another big assumption there. The assumption is that the extension is being called over the default http port, which for many ColdFusion developers it isn't. So the correct version of this code goes:

<cfset baseURL = "http://" & cgi.server_name & ":" & cgi.server_port />
<cfset messagesPath = getDirectoryFromPath(cgi.script_name) & "/messages.cfm" />
<cfset messagesOptions = "?type=notanapplication" />
<cfset messagesURL = baseURL  & messagesPath & messagesOptions >

Doing this you can be sure that you hit the right URL regardless of:

• Server hostname
• Server http port
• Relative location of extension to the webroot

Happy extension building.

I know I've been quiet of late. But I've been working.

You see a few weeks ago I had this checklist up on the site:

• Make sure apptacular_blog database works on MySQL on MAC.
• Make sure apptacular_blog database works on MySQL on PC.
• Make sure sakila database works on MySQL on MAC.
• Make sure sakila database works on MySQL on PC.
• Make sure apptacular_blog database works on MSSQL on MAC.
• Make sure apptacular_blog database works on MSSQL on PC.
• Make sure adventureworks database works on MSSQL on MAC.
• Make sure adventureworks database works on MSSQL on PC.
• Fix major issues in code readability.
• Start Document how to work with Apptacular

See those AdventureWorks database items? They nearly killed me and made me want to stop work on Apptacular. AdventureWorks is like a cruel Double Dare obstacle course for code generation:

• Composite primary keys
• Composite foreign keys
• Composite primary keys that are also foreign keys
• Custom Datatypes
• Constraints (Really only affected unit testing).

I came through, and now I can give you this list:

• Make sure apptacular_blog database works on MySQL on MAC.
• Make sure apptacular_blog database works on MySQL on PC.
• Make sure sakila database works on MySQL on MAC.
• Make sure sakila database works on MySQL on PC.
• Make sure apptacular_blog database works on MSSQL on MAC.
• Make sure apptacular_blog database works on MSSQL on PC.
• Make sure adventureworks database works on MSSQL on MAC.
• Make sure adventureworks database works on MSSQL on PC.
• Fix major issues in code readability.
• Start Document how to work with Apptacular

So that's where I am. A few of you asked if you could get your hands on Apptacular and I would be happy to distribute it to individuals. I'm not ready for general availability yet though.

And as a final note, I thought I would share this feature with you: Apptacular can model CRUD for image fields in your database.

Apptacular ColdFusion Builder Extension - Working with Images from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.

There's a security issue with ColdFusion 9 related to Solr collections. If you are using Solr collections this is a must.

http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb10-04.html

You may have seen my previous posts about Apptacular. I'm getting pretty far along in it, and I wanted to figure out how many lines of code I had written, you know, for my only curiosity's sake. There's no easy way of doing this, but I figured that this was the perfect excuse to build another extension.

So basically I wrote an extension that will count every nonblank line in every file in a targeted folder. It then groups those line counts by folder, extension, and then just all files.

This extension isn't going to change anyone's life. But it's a great example of the fact that ColdFusion Builder extensions remove barriers to entry for this sort of thing. If I had to drop to Java to extend this in Eclipse I would have never done it - too much work for too little reward. But with ColdFusion Builder extensions in ColdFusion there's very little cost to indulging in this sort of experiment:

• 10 minutes to write the base code
• 10 minutes to turn it into an extension
• 1 hour getting the formatting right to share publicly. (CSS is sadly harder then ColdFusion)

Feel free to use it, and improve on it: BuilderStats at RIAForge.

My old colleagues at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia are hiring for a ColdFusion and Flex developer position.

I have probably said this before but Wharton is an incredible place to work. It promises better than decent pay, interesting work, brilliant co-workers, and incredible benefits.