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| Description: | A blog about ColdFusion, Flex, Flash, ActionScript, and other topics. |
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cf.Objective wrap-up and thoughts about ColdFusion
Sat, 10 May 2008 06:48:00 GMT cf.Objective() was a great conference, thank you to the organizers and speakers! I was not able to attend to as many sessions as I wanted, but just being able to talk at the lounge with super-smart people was worth enough (Chris Scott, Maxim Porges, Brian Rinaldi, Andy Powell, and many others). I had the feeling that anyone I would talk to would have something interesting to say or something I could learn from. I haven’t had that feeling for a long time, and it was great.I think my session went pretty well, thank you all for attending. I had been preparing for the presentation for a few months, and thanks to Sean Corfield, who asked for drafts, seconds drafts, release candidates and final versions of the slides, I had the general flow of the talk long ago. There were, as always, last minute changes, particularly because we added features to Mate and changed the names of all the framework tags the week before cf.Objective! English is not my first language, and I believe that if people in the audience need to make a lot of effort trying to understand the speech in addition to trying to understand the topic, they get bored and you lose their attention. So as part of my preparation, I took a class on accent reduction. I don’t really know if I speak a lot better now, but it seemed to at least give me more confidence, something you really need when you are up on the stage.A highlight of the conference for me was the Birds of a Feather where Adobe brainstormed features to add to the next version of ColdFusion. It was very interesting to see a little bit of a “divide”, where certain people will ask for the normal enhancements while others will ask for a complete revamp of the language or the product itself. I saw that kind of divide within Adobe itself, where some wanted to hear “sellable” features while other were more open to hear about more drastic changes. While I see the latter to be the least likely thing to happen, I do believe we have reached a point where a major change needs to be made. I don't like being looked down by other development communities because I am a ColdFusion developer. But it goes beyond that. Whether it looks like Java or not, we need to be able to create well-architected object-oriented applications (though I would give up the OO part as long as we have a really well architected app). ColdFusion definitely needs to be a rapid application development platform, but not at the expense of creating bad-architected/sloppy applications. Everybody, including myself, write bad code, so it is not ColdFusion’s fault, but the fact that it encourages you to do so. I do think both things can be done, but it may require a bigger change than just adding a couple of new tags. Regarding rapid application development, recently, I’ve been hearing things such as that people are more productive in other environments (ie: Ruby). ColdFusion: you are getting pushed out of your comfort zone, one of your *main* competitive advantages is being implemented by others, and where you might have been king before, now you are only one of the many.At times it seems that there are a lot of ColdFusion developers trying to push the envelope by creating frameworks and top-notch applications, to find later that they have hit a wall, be it performance, be it lack of supporting syntax, be it lack of features (ie: cfthread was only added in CF 8). It is hard for me to say this because I am very used to ColdFusion and its idiosyncrasies, so most of the time, I don’t see any problem. But I see there is a problem when I try to explain ColdFusion to other developers, they either don’t get it or it is just more work than they are willing to do (ie: writing a CFC is more work than writing a Java class). I see other problems too, the biggest one being performance. Whether performance is only a matter of perception only or not, it is not acceptable for a page to take 20 seconds to render just because I am instantiating a few objects and calling a few functions on them. I am sorry, but I don’t buy the argument that CF is slow only because it is dynamic. I know a lot other languages that are as dynamic or hybrid (ie: ActionScript 3), and still perform well. I am not asking for everything, I just want to feel good when I recommend ColdFusion to my clients. ColdFusion: I love you, but you either change or I will have to go and find somebody else.PS: nobody should take this personally and I still love you all, including my dearest ColdFusion |
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Mate Flex Framework in public alpha
Sun, 04 May 2008 16:00:29 GMT A new Flex framework has been born. Actually, it is not really new, because we've been developing and using this framework for a long time, but it is now available to everybody. "Mate" (pronounced "mah-teh" like latte) is a tag-based Flex framework that uses implicit invocation to route events to handlers using an "EventMap". Those handlers are a list of actions that is executed when the event is dispatched. In addition, Mate uses dependency injection to set the data that the views need directly to the views, without having to crate direct references to the model. I am just highlighting some of the features, and I can't cover all of them. We have a lot of information on the site (http://mate.asfusion.com) that you can read. So why is Mate in alpha if we were using it for a long time? Mostly because we've never got any feedback from outside AsFusion and we want to have a short alpha that allows us to fix any problem or implement any suggestion that people may provide. It is probably more a beta than an alpha release. Before the final release, I think that we will focus on fixing bugs and only add a couple of features that I have in mind but not make big changes. |
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Mango has grown up
Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:02:27 GMT After over two years of working on Mango, I have released version 1.0. This version has the features that I considered to be the most important, so having been tested by many people, I decided that is was robust enough to remove the "beta" adjective from it. I'd like to thank all those brave enough to try it out - you've helped shaping Mango up. So far, I've got good feedback about Mango: Just wanted to say I'm am completely impressed with Mango. The install process was about as smooth and simple as it could get. Skins are incredibly easy to make. Plug-ins are useful and easy to develop. The admin is well thought out. - Rick Mason, Technical Director, FITC I've also started to get contributions from people in the form of plugins, and a new skin. People started to solve their own problems and, by creating plugins, they are able to do so without having to hack into the core code. In addition to the skin contributed by Nick, I've seen people using unique skins that I did not provide, which I believe is the proof that skins are easy to create. I am hoping to see a vibrant community of CF developers using and contributing extensions and skins for Mango. I still have a list of features that didn't make the 1.0 release, but I'd also like to hear from you about what you think Mango should have. |
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Flex Frameworks Roundtable Podcast
Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:28:14 GMT The ColdFusion Weekly Podcast, hosted by Matt Woodward, has a new episode. The topic this time is Flex Frameworks, and I am on it! I talk about the soon-to-be-released Mate framework and my presentation at cf.Objective(), which is rapidly approaching. It was an interesting discussion, with supporters of Cairngorm (Thomas Burleson and Jeff Houser to some extent), two frameworks creators (Chris Scott and me), users of PureMVC (Kurt Wiesma), and no-framework proponents (Maxim Porges). Though Thomas is a supporter of Cairngorm (he wrote Cairngorm's training materials for Adobe), he created extensions that address some of the shortcomings Cairngorm has. These extensions were recently released to the public. He talks more extensively about them in the Flex podcast. And you will see that what Maxim is really against are not frameworks per se, but the excessive boiler plate code that many frameworks make you write. The Rountable was a little over an hour long, but let me tell you, this discussion can be extended for hours, and even then, it would be impossible to agree on which framework is better or which framework you should use. ColdFusion developers here know that the same debate has been done between all the different ColdFusion frameworks and nobody has the definite answers to those questions. Though, when it comes to Flex frameworks, I am a little biased :) |
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Developing open source: satisfaction or debt generator?
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:00:14 GMT While I am looking at the mere 7 billable hours for the whole week, I can't help wondering why I enjoy developing open source software so much. A quick recap of the week reveals: making the distribution packages and testing the upgrade scripts for the new release of Mango Blog; fixing last minutes bugs encountered while testing the packages; answering questions in Mango's forums; making a new example and writing a tutorial for the soon-to-be-released Mate framework; writing missing documentation for Mate; working on the cf.Objective() presentation about Mate; preparing the audio files for the ColdFusion Weekly roundtable about Flex frameworks... Mmmh... Can you spot the pattern here? Most of my time was spent working on personal, open source projects. I stopped counting hours spent on Mango Blog long ago, to be more exact, in March 2006. By that time I had already spent over 150 hours. And I can tell you that amount has multiplied many times by now. At my usual hourly rate, that would easily go way beyond $50,000. Could I have used that time on client work? I could've, and I would have $50,000 more in my bank account. Who paid for that? I did. With my time, energy and even money that went into them (FillColors t-shirts and postcards, for example).I still don't know what the business model for open source is, if there is one. Or maybe there shouldn't be one and the open source community should be composed of people willing to volunteer their time to contribute to the future of mankind. And I am as guilty as anybody else, since I use many open source software that I've never paid for. The open-source-it-and-sell-support model doesn't make sense to me (at least as an individual). You spent thousands of hours developing your product so that at the end, you can sell support hours. I don't see the point, since I could sell the same hours, but doing development instead of support for the same amount of money —or more— without having to invest those thousands of hours in advance.The problem is that I enjoy it and I can't find enough hours in the day to work on my personal projects. In the weekdays, I stay late at the office or go home to find myself working on them until midnight. In the weekends, I choose to stare at my computer —in my Cave— rather than sunbathing at the beautiful Laguna Beach, choices that don't seem to be helping lowering my stress level. Maybe it is all about personality. It looks like I am a geek. Normal conversation with your spouse should be: "Honey, would you fix our car's oil leak?" But my normal conversation with Nahuel goes more like: "Honey, would you fix the memory leak that the listeners are causing in the Flex app?." I think this passion is in the borderline of addiction: I can't get enough of it, I get mad when I don't do it and I am starting to think it is impacting my finances. Maybe it is all about recognition. You see, I am not as beautiful nor talented as Cate Blanchett, I can't sing or dance and I don't have an IQ that will let me to come up with a physics theory that will get me a Novel Prize. So I am simply satisfied by people telling me: "Laura, thank you so much for your help on that piece of code", or that people recognize us in conferences as the "AsFusion guys". |
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Doug McCune speaking at OC Flex
Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:50:33 GMT We are delighted to have Doug McCune coming down from San Francisco to present at OC Flex this Thursday.Besides being an exceptional Flex developer, Doug is one of the main contributors of FlexLib, a collection of open source Flex components and libraries. It is no surprise then that he will be talking about taking advantage of open source ActionScript libraries to use in your own projects. The fact is that there is a lot out there that you might not know it exists, or even if you did, you might not know how to use it. Doug will be giving examples of how to use these libraries and even combine them into cool applications. You can find more information at OC Flex's website and Doug's post about the meeting.This is a meeting not to miss! |
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Speaking at cf.Objective() and WebManiacs conference
Mon, 24 Dec 2007 17:27:34 GMT It seems that 2008 will bring a lot traveling for us. First, I will present a session at cf.Objective() in early May and then I will present at WebManiacs towards the end of May. We also hope to attend 360 Flex in Atlanta and most likely 360 Flex in SoCal closer to home. This will be our first time at cf.Objective(), but from what we have heard, it is the best conference for advanced ColdFusion topics. They have added a track for RIA development too, so I thought it was the perfect opportunity to give a session about our new Flex framework (Mate) to broaden the Flex framework horizon in front of such great audience.It is also our first time at WebManiacs. The opposite has happened with this conference, since it used to be called "FlexManiacs", but now they have added a whole new conference for ColdFusion topics and added AIR sessions to the mix. I would actually recommend to attend to both (CFManiacs/AirManiacs and FlexManiacs/AirManiacs) with a great 5-day pass at a discounted price. Session information: Using Mate, a tag-based event-driven Flex frameworkMate is a Flex framework that leverages the tag-based MXML language to provide an easy to read map that defines how your application handles its events. It solves the common problems developers encounter when creating Flex applications, from small to enterprise, such as retrieving data from external services and handling business logic. In this session you will learn what Mate is, when to use it and how to use the debugging tools provided. This session will also cover best practices and real world examples. Although Mate can be used with any server side technology, emphasis will be placed on how to use Mate to communicate with a ColdFusion backend and LiveCycle data services. I hope this gives you some curiosity about Mate. We'll be posting more information about it in the coming weeks, so stay tuned! |
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Transitions added to Photoshow example
Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:13:45 GMT I added some transitions and a progress bar to our Photoshow example. For the transitions, I wanted the previous image to fade out and the new image to fade in. But in the original code, the image was binding to the currently selected image, so whenever the selected image changed (by clicking on next or previous buttons), the source of the image would change. The biggest problem with this is that if I changed the currently selected image as soon as the user would click the buttons, the image would change without waiting for the fade out to complete. One of the main changes made to the code is that before I can change the source of the image, I need to wait until the previous image has completely faded out. I do this by using the effectEnd event of the Fade effect to know when this happens, and only then make the change in the image source. <mx:Fade id="fadeOut" duration="1000" alphaFrom="1.0" alphaTo="0.0" effectEnd="updateCurrentPicture()"/> The updateCurrentPicture() function changes the currently selected image.To trigger the effect, I used the hideEffect property and when the user clicks “Next”, we set the picture.visible = false: <mx:Image id="picture" [...] hideEffect="{fadeOut}" /> Adding the fade in effect is simple, and I used the showEffect property of the Image: <mx:Fade id="fadeIn" duration="1000" alphaFrom="0.0" alphaTo="1.0"/> Another issue was that if I set picture.visible = true as soon as the previous image has faded out, the fade in effect would be applied on a picture that may still be loading, and I would miss the effect. To avoid this, I must wait until I am sure the image has loaded: <mx:Image [...] complete="picture.visible = true" /> Next update would be to add a timer for autoplaying. View example Download the source |
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OC Flex User Group off to a great start!
Tue, 06 Nov 2007 02:18:40 GMT The Orange County Flex User Group just had its first meeting, and it was standing room only! We had a dozen RSVPs but over double that number actually showed up! Space was tight, but everyone was excited at our kickoff meeting, which went over 2 hours. Laura gave an introductory presentation on Flex, which was a springboard for a lot of lively discussion and debate throughout the night. What made the discussions interesting was hearing different perspectives from our diverse audience, which included people from Flex, Flash, ColdFusion, Java, .NET and other technologies. Of the 24 questionnaires returned that night, the majority, 18 people, indicated they were new to Flex, and this really confirms for us why we started this user group. We are excited to see this tremendous interest out there in the developer and designer communities for Flex, and we want to keep this momentum going. If you missed our meeting or were unable to attend, we will have the video posted online soon, and in the meantime you can view the presentation slides at the OC Flex UG site. There was overwhelming interest in covering Adobe AIR at our next meeting, which will be December 6, so don't miss out! |
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Thermo, sneak preview of Adobe's new RIA design tool
Sat, 20 Oct 2007 03:04:22 GMT The coolest new tool showcased by Adobe at Chicago MAX had to be Thermo. From everyone I spoke to at MAX who saw it, the consensus is clear -- Thermo is HOT! This is a design tool that lets designers instantly create a working rich internet application from their artwork and wireframes! With a few simple clicks of the mouse, the Flex source code is instantly generated from their artwork. For example, you can import content from Adobe Photoshop and Thermo will instantly generate the mxml for it. To really appreciate what a powerful took this will be for designers, take a look at the sneak preview I shot. |
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