The No-Dans Club - Flex

Why you should submit beginner/intermediate sessions to NCDevCon

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:18:00 -0700

NCDevCon is a free two day conference on ColdFusion, Flash, Flex, AIR, HTML, Javascript and CSS. We've been building on the success of last year, and making bigger moves to grow the community. We are a victim of our own success. What I mean by that is, we've taken some big strides to find developers who aren't typically at Adobe conferences. Last year we held a free ColdFusion training day and also a free Flex training day. These training sessions were well received by the audience and much good was done. This year, the interest for these classes has already quadrupled. We have many more developers who have no exposure to either ColdFusion or Flex. As such, we'd like to ask the community for help. Many of the speaker submissions for NCDevCon are advanced sessions. We want those sessions to be included in our conference. We also want some good beginner/intermediate content as well. Of particular interest to us would be sessions that teach newcomers to ColdFusion, how to do common tasks with ColdFusion. The format for these would be 2 hour hands-on blocks. You provide the content and a step by step process, and we'll provide Teachers Assistants to help you keep the class on track. We'll also take care of making sure the attendees have the right software installed. This is a great way to help your fellow developers and future developers. We promise to give you the star treatment while you are with us! Some examples of sessions we'd like to see are:

How to build a contact form
How to build a dynamic product list
Building a data driven JQuery widget with ColdFusion
Reusing layouts in ColdFusion
Whatever else you can think of

So, if you would like to take part in this unique opportunity, let us know. We thank you in advance for the consideration.

Vote for Adobe Napalm

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:52:00 -0700

Go vote right now on the name of the next Flash Based RIA Framework. I voted for Napalm. Think about it. Listen to the ring of the syllables. Imagine the really cool icon. Now vote for it. Adobe Napalm belongs with awesome product names like ColdFusion, AIR, Catalyst....have you voted for it yet? Maybe we should have a role-play where you introduce the framework to your boss... Me: Check out our ultra-cool, elegant branded application that saves a hundred baby seals per hour. Boss: Looks amazing! You built that in a week all by yourself? What powers it? Me: Adobe Napalm. Boss: (in Neo Voice) Whoa! Can I Vote for it? P.S. I didn't come up with the name, but I'm kinda partial to it. P.S.S Have you voted for it yet?

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

Senior Flex/AS3 Engineer Wanted In Research Triangle Park NC

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:20:00 -0700

I don't post too many jobs on my blog, but this specific job is with a really cool company and (more importantly) working for a really cool manager named Isaac. I used to work for Isaac and he is a really good manager who knows how to let technical people be superstars.

This position is full-time, full benefits and on-site so please keep that in mind when you apply. You'd be right in the thick of Research Triangle Park, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, which is a great area, even ranked in the top 10 by Rolling Stone for the music scene. Oh, and Hey! We'd be neighbors.

If you are interested in applying for the position, simply drop me a quick note and let me know. I'll make arrangements to get your resume. No agencies please.

Here is the information for the company:

Digitalsmiths provides the industry's only studio-grade, video monetization solution with an advanced metadata framework that empowers digital media companies to distribute and publish video content across multiple screens, open up new revenue streams for film and TV assets, build audience, increase viewer consumption and boost audience engagement.

Digitalsmiths full time employees receive comprehensive benefits including stock options, vacation time, sick time, paid holidays, Blue Cross and Blue Shield health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance and retirement program. We have a relaxed, open and collaborative work environment where both achievement and fun are valued and everyone plays a key role.

The Research Triangle Park area is a great place to live, work, raise a family, and enjoy life. The area is within a couple hours drive to both the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. Our natural beauty is a boon for the outdoor enthusiast. There are typically 220 days of sunshine per year with rain being well distributed throughout the year. There are award winning restaurants, as well as, a good variety of art, music and entertainment. Please visit http://www.digitalsmiths.com to learn more about the company.

Here is the information for the position and desired skills:

The Senior Software Engineer position reports to an Engineering Team Lead or directly to Engineering Management and is responsible for designing and implementing software products and services. Candidates should have a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science related technical field of study plus at least three years of work experience using Flex/ActionScript. Five years experience with software engineering and familiarity and desire to work with Flex/ActionScript may be accepted in lieu of three years of experience with Flex/ActionScript.

All candidates must be comfortable working in a fast paced early stage environment with tight deadlines.

The main duties of this position are as follows:

Deliver engaging, state-of-the-art, high quality products.
Design and implement product initiatives under general supervision.
Produce accurate estimates and participate in daily task tracking activities.
Adhere to core design, development and testing principles set by team and group leadership.
Produce clear and thorough technical documentation.
Other duties as needed.

Job Requirements and Qualifications include the following:

Demonstrated expertise in AS3, Flex, MXML, and the Flash runtime.
Demonstrated competence in at least one programming language other than ActionScript.
Experience with Object-Oriented Programming and Design.
Excellent written and oral communication skills.

Other Skills and Technologies that are desirable include:

Experience with MVC (e.g. Cairngorm, Mate, PureMVC, Spring).
Knowledge of software design patterns and architecture.
Experience writing Flex custom components.
Experience with Web service development using AMF, SOAP, REST, XML-RPC, and XML.
Experience with Unit Testing and Continuous Integration using Flex in a team environment.
Experience with media player design using Flash and ActionScript.
Experience with Digital media (FFMPEG, FLV, MPEG4, MP3, AAC, WMV, 3GP, etc.)
Experience with source control (SVN is a plus).
Experience with bug tracking/defect management (Bugzilla is a plus).
Exposure to agile development (SCRUM, Lean).

Want to learn more about Drag and Drop in Flex?

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 20:28:00 -0700

Douglas Knudsen is talking about Drag and Drop in Flex tonight on the Flex Meetup. If you are a Flex developer or want to learn about Flex development you should go watch his presentation.

You might remember Douglas from our interview on the CFConversations Podcast where Douglas shared lots of good information about how to hook up ColdFusion to Flex. He is an interesting guy, excellent presenter and really knows his stuff!

See you there!

Fix For Eclipse RCP Patch 2 for 3.3.1 (3.3.1.v20071204_331) requires feature "org.eclipse.rcp (3.3.1

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 03:34:00 -0700

I'm blogging this before I forget what I did. Sorry if this is jumbled.

I was trying updating Flex Builder (Eclipse) and got an error message:

Fix For Eclipse RCP Patch 2 for 3.3.1 (3.3.1.v20071204_331) requires feature "org.eclipse.rcp (3.3.1)

Clicking around, I also got this message:

The current configuration contains errors and this operation can have unpredictable results. Eclipse RCP Patch 2 for 3.3.1 (3.3.1.v20071204_331) requires feature "org.eclipse.rcp (3.3.1.R33x_r20070802-8y8eE8sEV3Fz0z0GlHJrXvTAUS)". Eclipse RCP Patch 3 for 3.3.1 (3.3.1.v20080102_331) requires feature "org.eclipse.rcp (3.3.1.R33x_r20070802-8y8eE8sEV3Fz0z0GlHJrXvTAUS)"

No matter what I tried to update/install, I'd get these errors and there seemed to be no way around them.

Sometimes I feel like an idiot trying to decipher these error messages because there is no clear way to find out how the heck to update the RCP stuff anyways. The good news is I did find a solution. Here's what you do to resolve this:

In Eclipse (or Flex Builder) go to Help -> Software Updates -> Manage Configuration
When the Product Configuration box pops up, expand the tree until you see the plugins listed. Some will have red error icons next to them. These are the ones we want to disable.
Click each product identified with a red icon, and click the disable link in the right hand pane.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

Once you disable the products with red icons, go try to run your update/install once again. It will work this time!

What can you code in 90 seconds?

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 19:36:00 -0700

I just finished reading an interesting blog post from Raghu, a flex evangelist at Adobe, and was left with the thought, what can I code in 90 seconds?

<CF_DayDream mode="begin" />

After daydreaming was over, I came to the realization that I can code nothing in 90 seconds. See, I am a terrible typist. Really really bad. So my 90 seconds would be filled with furious pressing of random keys, followed by several impolite words, then rapid jamming of the backspace key. Certainly nothing award worthy.

Thankfully, Raghu has more skills than I. He and Harish won an award for their 90 seconds worth of coding.

So how did BFusion and BFlex go, you ask?

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:25:00 -0700

I am back home now after a very lovely and stimulating weekend at the BFusion/BFlex conference. BFusion and BFlex are back to back 1 day training/conference events held in Bloomington Indiana on the grounds of Indiana University. While some poor misguided souls might think any conference in Indiana would be nothing more than a projector pointed at a sheet hanging in a cornfield, I assure you this was not the case. Far from it.

The BFusion/BFlex event was awesome. Hands Down. The hallmark of a good conference is good organization and the promoters of this conference really put a lot of time into sorting out details. The moment we checked into the hotel we were handed colour coded maps showing important town features like the nearest grocery store, local restaurants, local watering holes and of course, directions to the conference facilities. Registration was simple and efficient. All of us there as Presenters, Instructors and Assistants were given branded polo shirts to wear so students knew who to ask for help. Lunch choices were color coded with the name tag to make finding ones particular choice a little easier. It was clear that our hosts had thought of everything.

The presenters had all the latest equipment at their disposal from dual monster projection screens to the Crestron powered audio/video equipment. The training sessions were stocked with quality instructors and had plenty of helpful assistants floating around the room to help keep the pace. To facilitate the learning environment, each of the rooms had power ports and ethernet jacks available for every seat which means we avoided the typical conference double wammy of running low on batteries and cramming everyone on an overloaded wifi router. Not least to mention, the campus of Indiana University is just simply beautiful!

So frankly, the quality of the event was on par with some of the best run conferences in the business. I am still a little shocked that the crew was able to provide all of the coordination, service and giveaways for free. Oh, thats right, giveaways. I need to talk about the giveaways.

Thanks to the awesome sponsors, there was an immense amount of giveaways. Everyone likes to get ColdFusion and Flex stickers, hats emblazoned with CF and technology themed t-shirts and those things were in good supply. More interesting were the tons of tech books, learning CDs, Lynda subscriptions and the like that were also raffled off to the attendees. The theme of this conference was learning and that means even the giveaways were there to help facilitate the learning. I brought my friend Tim Montgomery from Dayton, OH. He has been designing and implementing websites for many years now and wanted to get some good ColdFusion and Flex training. He left the conference with:

a CF hat
a new copy of John Farrar's book "ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial"
a really snazzy CF8 tag poster set
some free software
a new laptop bag
an Adobe Air with Ajax book
a Flex shirt
16 new friends

...and 4 job offers. Everyone would have to agree that is some awesome conference loot!

All in all, the BFusion/BFlex series is impressive and of tremendous benefit to the community. Many people gained their first exposure to ColdFusion and Flex, others gained new skills and a good time was had by all. A big NoDans.com thank you to Bob Flynn, Prem Radhakrishnan, Michelle Buddie and the rest of the super cool staff for putting on a quality memorable show.

Free ColdFusion and Flex Training Sept 6-7 at BFusion/BFlex

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:43:00 -0700

I don't know what they put in the water in Bloomington, Indiana, but the people there are CRAZY. The excellent leadership over at the Bloomington Flex User Group, the Indiana University Flash User Group, and the Indiana University Multimedia User Group have put together a 2 day training/conference event on Flex and ColdFusion for free. That's right, 200 lucky people will get their skills expanded on the hottest technology powering the web today, and won't pay a dime for it.

The event organizers booked leading experts in Flex and ColdFusion to run the sessions. And when they ran out of leading experts, they send me an email asking if I'd help out. I'll present 2 CF sessions and assist in the Flex Hands On. Here are the descriptions:

Refactoring In Coldfusion - From Procedural to OO

If you would like to know how to migrate an existing procedurally programmed application into an object oriented one, grab a chair and sit for a while. We'll discuss some sensible guidelines designed to help you make incremental changes towards OO nirvana.
We'll also look at lots of code samples, we all like code samples, right?

Fun With ColdSpring

The secret ingredient to modular and maintainable OO applications in ColdFusion is the ColdSpring framework. Efficient and practical use of ColdSpring is easy. In this source code based presentation, we'll cover installation, Dependency Injection, Factories, Configuration, Dynamic Properties, Complex DI Strategies and also look at practical usage inside of production applications.

So if you can make it to Bloomington, IN, Sept 6-7, and want targeted training on Flex and ColdFusion, Sign Up for BFusion/BFlex today!

More than you wanted to know about Flex and 360Flex

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:00:00 -0700

I recently interviewed John Wilker. We talked about a variety of topics, his long ColdFusion career. His migration to Flex, His migration to Conference Co-Superstar... Snoop Dogg even gets a mention somewhere in there.

We even go behind the scenes at the 360Conferences series and hear some of the funnier things that go on in producing a top-notch technical conference. Even though he is busy preparing for the 360|Flex conference in San Jose, CA (August 18 - 20). John made time to talk with us. John is really fun to talk to and makes for a great interviewee. Listen to the John Wilker CFConversations Interview and let us know what you think.

Powered By Adobe Flash Spotted In NYC

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:52:00 -0700

While on a recent trip to NYC, I ran across a very large TV screen in Times Square. This thing was enormous, easily 40 foot square, if memory serves me right. At the bottom, I noticed a sign that made me proud, Powered By Adobe Flash

How do I make a distance traveled Maps (yahoo/google) feature

Tue, 27 May 2008 07:46:00 -0700

I've been asked to make a feature that works with one of the popular map APIs. This feature would take a Start Point, End Point and a distance value and would generate a map showing the progress from the Start Point to the End Point.

For example, if the Start Point was Seattle, the End Point was Chicago and the distance value was 1000 miles, the map API would be used to create a map showing both Seattle and Chicago, with a line about 1/3rd of the way there.

Ideally, the mapping API used would be a publically available API available without cost. Seems easy, right? I'm not sure where to start. I would appreciate all input at this stage.

Super Sexy Flex App for Managing Expenses

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:02:00 -0700

Michal Glowacki, I wrote a review of a preso on Cairngorm he did at NYFlex, contacted me to let me know his group released a new Flex based application that manages expenses. This has got to be one of the hottest looking Flex applications I have seen. Have a look at http://www.iexpenseonline.com/. Using this free application, you can manage your budget, track expenses, check out your personal financial position and also work towards self-established goals.

The application is really easy to use and takes care to provide good feedback to the user. The data is visualized using some sweet Flex charts and this application is a great tool to help you stay on the financial straight and narrow.

Michal told me this was a cairngorm application, no surprise since he is an expert Cairngorm developer. I tried to view source on the app but alas, no luck. (Michal, if you are kind enough to show me how you make this application work so well, I would be much obliged.)

So have a look at http://www.iexpenseonline.com/. Let me know what you think.

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.