The No-Dans Club - AIR

Why You Should Register for CFinNC before Sept 4th

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:13:00 -0700

As you know, we are hard at work planning the CFinNC.com conference. CFinNC is 2 days of jam packed training and sessions on the Adobe platform (CF, Flash, Flex and AIR) and other web development topics. In this time of evaporating training budgets and non-existent funds for conferences, our free conference is the most compelling way to get trained and fired up. We've opened registration yesterday and are pleased with the results of the last 24 hours. A big goal of the conference is to reach and strengthen existing users of the Adobe platform by offering all levels of content. We have another goal, which is to reach and impress students and developers of alternate platforms on the power and potency of the Adobe platform. So to reach the first goal, we've opened registration and are initially promoting through the usual Adobe-centric information channels to reach the existing user base. We want to serve the needs of the Adobe platform users as this was our original driving force to start this conference. To reach the second goal, we'll begin heavy promotion through user group channels, social channels and through a registration drive partnership with DZone.com. This second wave will likely push us to capacity and give us a large attendee base that will be getting their first exposure to the Adobe platforms. So, if you are interested in coming, and happen to read this post, please decide and register soon. The floodgates open somewhere around September 4th. -DW

Free ColdFusion, Flex AIR Conference in North Carolina

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:05:00 -0700

The organizers of the CFinNC 2009 Conference are proud to announce the ColdFusion in North Carolina 2009 Conference to be held October 17-18, 2009 on the Centennial Campus of NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The conference will be aimed at ColdFusion and Flex developers and others who are interested in web design using these technologies. Registration for the event will be FREE which includes entry to the weekend event and all presentations. In preparation for this conference, we would like to hear feedback from you and your members on what types of content you would be interested in hearing. We hope to make this conference relative to all levels of developers, so your input will be invaluable. Please visit our website www.cfinnc.com for more information. We are currently accepting submissions for presentations. If you have a topic you would like to speak on, please go to www.cfinnc.com/page.cfm/presenters for more information. Please announce this to your members. We are really excited at the opportunity to organize this conference and hope that it will be a useful resource for you and your members. Sincerely, The CFinNC 2009 team

I Flunked the AIR Practice Exam

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:51:00 -0700

I'm going to soon be AIR 1.5 certified, though it is going to take a little longer than I thought. I took the free AIR based mock exam and scored 58%.

Definitely nothing to be proud of, yeah? The good news is the practice exam pointed out a few areas of study for me to focus on and I'll have it all nailed down shortly.

So I have a little more work to do, but I'll be AIR Certified soon! See how well you'd score!

CFObjective Session: Build a ColdFusion powered AIR application

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:56:00 -0700

I'm putting the finishing touches on my upcoming presentation, Build a ColdFusion powered AIR application, for CF.Objective() and wanted to pass on some interesting news.

A couple of weeks ago, Terry Ryan, invited me to expand my presentation to cover AIR+ColdFusion functionality to be released in CF 9 Centaur. I'm totally thrilled to present a few CF9 features and am busy redoing the presentation so we can all get a better look at what CF9 brings to Rich Internet Applications. The illustrious Dan 'Big Pipes' Vega was also tapped to present some CF9 content at CF.Objective() so I'm pretty interested to see what he's going to show.

The upcoming CF9 brings many game-changing features to the table and adds a lot to the ColdFusion+RIA equasion. CF.objective() 09 is turning out to be the first public discussion on CF9 Centaur features and you don't want to miss these sessions, do you?

What? You've not registered for CF.Objective() yet? You can still take advantage of historically low airfare and the extended Early Bird Special, just do it before March 31st, ok? Check the sessions if you still need more convincing!

I present You Got Your ColdFusion In My Adobe Air! to TACFUG March 18th

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:48:00 -0700

You Got Your ColdFusion In My Adobe Air!

Meeting: 3/19/09 6:00 PM SRA International

Come see how to use ColdFusion to power an Adobe AIR desktop application.

Adobe AIR is quickly gaining momentum as a pioneer of the Rich Desktop. ColdFusion is a rapid development platform providing rich services and timely functionality for business applications.

When the two come together, it is the greatest combination since Reeses Peanut Butter Cups...

More info at TACFUG

Last Day Of Stockholm AIR Browser War Competition

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:48:00 -0700

Today is the last day of the Stockholm AIR Browser War competition. Put on by the Stockholm Multimedia User Group, entrants create cool browsers using Adobe AIR technology and compete to win some cool Adobe software like CS3 Master Collection and CS3 Web Collection.

As I said, the last day to enter is June 25th. Get your submissions in!

Listen to 7 CF geeks talk about Flex and AIR

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:36:00 -0700

The first installment of the ColdFusion Round Table was released today. A ColdFusion Round Table is a collection of Motley ColdFusion geeks talking about the relevant issues of the day. I was a participant along with Sean Corfield, Peter J. Farrell, Brian Meloche, Terrence Ryan, Brian Swartzfager, Matt Woodward. This round table focused mostly on the recent release of Flex and AIR and we covered quite a bit in an hour and fifteen minutes.

Being on a podcast is pretty cool. Matt and Peter made it very comfortable and easy for us all to participate. Once I got over the "Do I really sound like that in real life?" bit, I felt fine.

I'm pretty amped on Flex and AIR. Really, platforms like this will drive the next wave of application development. Web applications that remain HTML+CSS based will begin to look more dated in the next few years and there will be much resources and energy expended to upfit applications with the latest in features and branding. As I mentioned, this is a very exciting time to be an application developer and now, more than previous, it is important to update your skills. There are no hungry Flex developers right now :).

Anyways, the finished podcast product turned out rather well. Give it a listen and tell me what you think.

Meet The Man Who Set Twitter Free Of The Browser

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:32:00 -0700

I interviewed Aaron West for DZone.com recently. Aaron is a long time ColdFusion, Flash and Flex developer. Aaron is the author of twitterAIR, the first Twitter/RIA integration based on the Adobe Integrated Runtime platform and he has a host of community contributions and accolades to his credit. In this interview, we get to know Aaron, find out how and why he built twitterAIR and hear his thoughts on the direction of Rich Internet Applications.

Give it a read at the RIA Zone

On CSS, HTML and Boiling Frogs

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:13:00 -0700

I've just released an article at the RIA Zone titled CSS3: A solution for applications, or are we the boiling frogs?. The article is about CSS and HTML for applications and begins like this:

I've made countless web pages using HTML + CSS and have no complaints about the technological combination for Internet documents and pages. The rub comes when trying to make an application. Note the distinguishing factors. HTML + CSS is a horrid combination for making applications.

To be true, the HTML + CSS isn't truly the problem, the problem lies in inconsistent rendering by the clients (browsers). However, a large part of my job is making sure an application works, not debating with users which browser renders 'correctly'.

When building an HTML + CSS based application, there will be some unanticipated time required to track down and hack around a strange edge case or rendering bug . The time spent to track down the source of the error, which by the way only happens in IE version 6.0.23234234 and in Firefox 2.098435 and not Firefox 2.102309, is lost time. I've even spent 8 or 9 hours tracking down the source of a CSS related problem, googling around, reading blogs to find a solution and then testing all the various browsers using various user interaction permutations to verify the fix didn't break another client implementation. While spending this time was necessary for the success of the application, I would have preferred to spend that time towards building another useful feature for the users.

The article is a lot longer. Give it a read and let me know if I am off base.

Give your take on "Why Flex?" at 360|Flex

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:02:00 -0700

Thanks to Adobe and Ben Forta, I am the proud owner of a fancy Flip video camera. I've been tasked with recording 10 segments from the community answering the questions:

Why Flex?
Why ColdFusion?
Why AIR?
Why Flash?

Since I'll be at 360|Flex next week, finding 10 people to share will be easy. Come on over and let's hear your answers to these questions. Support your favorite platform!

360|Flex, be there or be square!

Flex 3 Release World Tour Hit Raleigh/Durham

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:25:00 -0700

Last night, Ben Forta came to Cary, North Carolina to showcase the soon to be released Flex 3 and AIR products from Adobe.

Flex Builder 3 is a compelling upgrade for the product. The IDE offering has actually gone down in price even while adding nice new features like Improved Designer/Developer workflow, a memory profiler, advanced components, and support for the AIR platform.

For more complete information on Flex 3 Features see the labs.adobe.com page.

Also soon to be released is the long awaited Abode Integrated Runtime product. AIR, as it is known for short, offers a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

This means your application can now access the local file system, accept drag and drop assets from the desktop, run outside of the browser and actually run completely offline. The product even contains the SQLite database to help handle offline data.

Many people have not fully grasped one of the most interesting features of AIR. You can write a desktop application using the AIR platform, HTML and Javascript. This will level the playing field by allowing existing web developers and designers to use their current skilling to create functionally relevant desktop applications.

Honors of the night go to the Anthropologie demonstration. The premise of the application is to show how the Anthropologie catalog of apparel can be displayed in an offline mode. The user can search for an article of clothing based on standardized parameters. The user can also drag an image onto the application and use a color dropper to select a color and use that color as search criteria using very intuitive workflow. When Ben actually drug a picture onto the application, selected a color and the search results automatically filtered, the collective breath left the room. See for yourself at this video of the Anthropologie Catalog AIR application.

Are you prepared for the upcoming RIA arms race? It promises to be interesting!

Note: I've been keeping up to date with the blog chatter on the meeting. A local TV station even interviewed Ben Forta! See my article on ria.dzone.com for more content./p>

ColdFusion style List Functions In ActionScript

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:19:00 -0700

Shannon Hicks just released an ActionScript library that makes working with delimited lists in ActionScript as easy as working with delimited lists in ColdFusion.

Now you can operate on delimited data with such familiar and handy functions as:

listAppend
listContains
listFirst
listLast
listLen
listToArray
and More!

Thanks Shannon!

Flash Security with Off-Root CrossDomain.xml files

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 08:13:00 -0700

Bruce Phillips (You should check out his interesting Flex posts) let me know that my Surfing Stats data didn't load when the swf was located off my http://www.nodans.com domain. I want others to take the code and do with it as they please so I need to make the data available across domains. This is done through the use of a crossdomain.xml file. The file I used looks like this:

This is a very promiscuous file. It allows anyone anywhere to load any data in the containing directory and all subdirectories. Such a promiscuous file also opens up security vectors. In the words of Lucas Adamski on DevNet:

As an example, a user is logged in to an e-commerce site that uses cookies for authentication. On the site is a user account settings page where you can see information such as your mailing address and other personally identifiable information. If this site has an overly permissive cross-domain policy file like *, a SWF file that is hosted on another domain could silently load the account settings data and send it elsewhere. This is because the browser appends the cookies for the e-commerce site to the request from Flash Player.

By default, the SWF looks for the crossdomain.xml file in the root of the website but with a little code, you can put it anywhere you please. I used this command to tell the SWF where to find the crossdomain.xml file: Security.loadPolicyFile("http://www.nodans.com/custom/surfingstats/crossdomain.xml");

Now, only the directory containing SurfingStats is enabled, reducing the surface area of attack. If you want to read more on the security issues with crossdomain.xml files, check out these links:
Poking new holes with Flash Crossdomain Policy Files
Cross-domain policy file usage recommendations for Flash Player
The Dangers of Cross-Domain Ajax with Flash

Fix for annoying Where is the Debugger or Profiler running? popup

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 13:46:00 -0700

Shannon Hicks, who is a wealth of Flex Knowledge, gave me the solution for this problem. Apparently, an earlier version of the Flash Debug player incorrectly assumed debugging mode.

The solution is to use an updated Flash Debug player. You can find a suitable version inside the installation for Flex Builder 3. Mine was located here: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\Player\win

I am using Flex Builder 3 Beta 2 and it works. Later beta versions of Flex Builder include the correct version of Flash Player as well.

Thanks Shannon for helping me with this. It was DRIVING ME NUTS!

Where is the Debugger or Profiler running? Flex Builder Debugger

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 08:10:00 -0700

Where is the Debugger or Profiler running? Why, localhost, I presume.....

Recently I installed Flex Builder 3 on a new machine and experienced an error when running/debugging Flex applications. What would happen is:

I run a Flex application
A popup loads asking "Where is the debugger or profiler running?"
I select localhost
The popup briefly disappears
The popup returns asking "Where is the debugger or profiler running?"

Another message that showed up is "A connection to the debugger or profiler could not be established by Adobe Flash Player 9"

Clicking the cancel button removed the popup and continued running the Flex application. The debugger was not working properly.

After some searching and some trial and error, I found the Flex Debugger runs on port 3434. Unblocking this port in the firewall allowed the debugger to connect on localhost.

Surprisingly, this wasn't documented very well. I hope this helps someone else. Programming in Flex without the debugger makes Homer something something...

Update The popup has come back! Oddly enough, the debugger runs now. I am very glad for that. However running any compiled Flex/AIR code brings up this silly "Where is the debugger?" popup. If anyone has an idea how to supress this, please let me know.

Update: This has been solved. Details are located here. Thank You to Shannon Hicks for giving me the solution.