The Jacksonville ColdFusion Users Group (JaxFusion) is starting to get re-organized after some time off. One of the big changes is that the group will expand to not only cover ColdFusion related topics, but also Flex and AIR as well.

Another change will be the meeting location, we are looking for a new location near the Southside somewhere as Downtown was just out of reach for most people in the area after a long day of work. One of the requirements for a meeting location is a projector and preferably a decent internet connection. Since there are quite a few folks in the community now willing to present over Adobe Connect this will ensure some great presentations in the future.

So if you have a suggestion for a location or if you are a Jacksonville business willing to donate some meeting space once a month, please contact David Fekke at david@fekke.com.

A few weeks ago I posted about a mixup with my Amazon wishlist shipping address. Not long after posting that, Mike Potter of Adobe responded saying that he was the one that sent me the copy of the Flex book and that he would get it taken care of for me. Well, I wanted to publicly thank Mike for getting that straightened out for me!

Just having Adobe send me the copy of the Flex 2: Training from the Source book would have been great. However, Mike not only sent a Flex book, but the Essential ActionScript 3 book from Oreilly and a copy of the Total Training Flex 2 DVD!

All of this stuff is really good material! I am tearing through it right now and loving it! So thanks again Mike, hopefully we can catch up at a conference or something and I can buy you a beer!

Also, thanks to those at Adobe who take the time to support the developer community! Makes me proud to be a ColdFusion programmer!

One of the things that I have really wanted to focus on was learning Flex and AIR this year. I have been putting it off for far too long. So far this year I have been keeping that promise to myself as I have been working with Flex just about every night so far.

One of the ways I learn is by building applications. Not just "Hello World!" apps, I get too bored with that, so I have to find something that interests me and would be useful. So I decided to build a Flex based Subversion browser since I havent seen one around. Im making really good progress on it and learning some great stuff along the way. I have several blog posts started already covering several of the things I have learned along the way. I should be posting those starting next week.

Here is a screenshot of the part of the interface. Im using the Yahoo Flex Skin which looks quite nice and is a major improvement over the default look.

When Im done with this thing I will post the code over on RIAForge in case anyone wants to play around with it. I cant wait to get it done so I can start on something else!

I logged on to Amazon today to search for a few Flex 3 and AIR books since Im really focusing on working with the two technologies more this year. So I found a few books and added them to my wishlist and ordered 2 others. As I was managing my wishlist, I noticed that my shipping address for my wishlist was different than the shipping address on my account.

I moved back in June 2007 from the Orlando area back to Jacksonville and I spent several hours one day updating all of my addresses on my online accounts including Amazon. But what I didnt realize is that your wishlist shipping address is not updated when you update your accounts shipping address.

So I immediately updated my whishlist address and even though I have never received anything on my wishlist from anyone other than close friends and family, I figured I would just check to be sure no one had sent anything.

As I changed the pull-down to show purchased items, wouldnt you know it, someone had sent me something. So I called Amazon to see if I could find out who purchased the item and how it was shipped so maybe I could track it down. Of course since I didnt place the order, they wouldnt give me any information about it other than that the order was placed on December 12th, 2007.

The book that was purchased was Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source. Since I have read several other bloggers receiving this book from the Flex Team at Adobe, Im assuming thats who sent it.

So guys, if you are reading, I sincerely appreciate the recognition and effort you put forth! My apologies for not paying better attention to my wishlist stuff!

Amazon did state that if the package was returned to them as undeliverable, that you would be receiving a credit for the purchase.

Brian Legros has been sending the following info out about the Flex 3 Pre-Release Tour:

" The Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando (Adogo) user group has been selected as a stop on Adobe's Flex 3 Pre-release Tour. We're fortunate enough to have Ben Forta, Adobe's Senior Technical Evangelist, speaking to the group for this leg of the tour. The meeting will be held on January 21st, 2008 @ 7:00 PM in the Oleander Room at Westgate Lakes Resort and Spa (located at 10000 Turkey Lake Road, Orlando , FL 32819, parking at The Smokehouse). We'll be giving away a copy of Flex 3 and CS3 Web Premium, a pass to CFUnited 2008, as well as lots of branded schwag from Adobe and CFUnited. Food and drink will be provided to all in attendance while it lasts. Registration for this event is available at http://adogo200801.eventbrite.com/. Additionally, more information can also be found on our website at http://adogo.us.

Since this will be the only stop on the tour in the state, we would like to extend an invitation to all of the Adobe User Groups in Florida to join us for our meeting. We are attempting to promote this event as much as possible, but our channels outside of the Orlando area are somewhat limited. If anyone is open to helping, we are definitely grateful for any cross promotions you and your groups can provide for this event. "

Im seriously thinking about driving down for that! Im in Jacksonville which is about a 3 hour drive from Orlando so its not too bad. Anyone from Jacksonville interested in going? Maybe we could carpool and split the travel costs. I dont mind driving. I have a new 07 Nissan Titan Crew Cab 4-door truck that seats 5 adults easily so I have room for 4 people if they would like to go. I even have DVD players in the headrests for backseat entertainment during the trip.

If your interested in going, post a comment or shoot me an email and we can arrange the trip.

russ at angry-fly dot com

Luis Majano, the creator of ColdBox pinged me today with a link to a post on his blog about what I think is going to be one of the coolest features in ColdBox yet. The ability to utilize an existing ColdBox application and model code and slap a Flex or Air front-end on it! What makes this even cooler is how simple Luis has made it! You have to check out the post and get the details.

Im brand new to Flex and after my little fiasco last week, I decided to step back and start from the beginning and walk myself through this whole process again and look at it from a different angle. Post mortem's are a really good at helping you see where things went wrong in a project and what you learned.

I was thinking that there maybe some other folks who have been holding out on learning Flex like myself for one reason or another. Whether it be the Flash aspect or learning a new development tool, or just the cost. So as Im learning this Im going to be posting about my experience and try to help some of you out who may be like me, a little leary about jumping into the unknown.

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Well, as you could tell from my previous post here, I have been having some MAJOR issues getting this Flex Slideshow component rolled out.

With a lot of help from Brian Rinaldi and finally a comment from Brian Kotek, I managed to figure out my issue. Now let me first say that Im a TOTAL Flex newbie. I didnt have a Flex book or anything for reference other than what I could find on the web so resources were short.

The problem I was having is that the RemoteObject call was not returning any data to the Flex component. It always came back NULL. When I first discovered this I wrote a test fuseaction in my application that called that CFC and dumped the data and everything worked fine. Here's where I screwed up.

I didnt realize that I screwed up by doing this until Brian Kotek posted a comment asking if I had called the CFC directly in the URL and pass the method to it as an argument. When I did this directly, I didnt get any data. What gives? I could call that CFC in my fuseaction and I got data back everytime.

So I started thinking that maybe something in my Fusebox setup was preventing me from calling this CFC directly on the URL like that since it lived under a Fusebox app. So I created a blank Application.cfm file in the directory that held the Flex component and the CFC then called it via the URL again and I got data back! So this being the case, I called up the URL to my Flex app and it was working! I couldnt believe it. A solid week of fudging with this thing and all I had to do was create an Application.cfm file in that directory?

Well, I will chalk that up as a MAJOR learning experience. At least its done and working now and delivered to the client. Thanks again to Brian Rinaldi for all of your help and to Brian Kotek for taking the time to post that comment. Without that I may still be beating my head against my wireless Apple keyboard!!

Well the saga continues. I swear if I didnt shave my head I would be pulling my hair out by now! It turns out, after MANY hours of digging, debugging, and researching that the problem with the Flex Component being called into my Fusebox application has nothing to do with pathing.

The paths to the CFC are fine. But for some reason the RemoteObject call will not return any data to the flex application. I wrote a wrapper for the CFC that pulled the data just fine. I have even written a barebones Flex app that has only a datagrid and the remote object call to populate it and still, no records.

I was thinking somehow that the CFC may not be pulling data, so I even rewrote the method and created my own query and filled it with data so I could eliminate the database from the equation and I STILL didnt get any records back.

Im at wits end with this thing now. After finding several posts about the JVM version I decided to check it and the server is running CF version 7.0.2.142559 and JVM version 1.4.2_09 so that should be fine.

Im ready to hire a consultant to figure this thing out and be done with it!

To be continued...

DISCLAIMER: This post is more of me working out a solution than an informative post but I figured that someone may be able to get something out of this and the follow-up post when I finally figure this out.

Im working on a project right now that needed a photoviewer component and after looking over the requirement of the viewer, I realized right away that there were no "off-the-shelf" products that I could used so we made the decision to build the component using Flex.

The photoviewer component is working wonderfully in a standalone dev environment but when I try to call the swf into a display page of the Fusebox5 application, things start to come undone.

Basically the Flex component calls a remote method of a cfc that already exists within the application. Then uses the data returned to pull in the images and allow the users scroll through them. When the page loads, I can see the movie initialize and I can see the links that are built-into the movie for scrolling but none of the images will load. When I click on the "next" link to switch images, I get an error telling me tha the value of the object is NULL.

Now I know there are records that should be pulled by the CFC. So Im wondering, is the pathing wrong on the CFC call within the Flex component. It seems that if the component cannot be found it would throw an error but Im not sure if thats the case or not.

Is the path to the cfc relevant to the swf or the calling application?

Example: My folder structure would look similar to this:

-com
   -cfc
-controller
   -display
-view
   -display

The Flex component lives in the view/display folder and thats where the file that calls it lives as well. Of course the circuit.xml.cfm in the controller/display folder is putting all of this together.

The code in my Flex component that calls the CFC looks like this:

Should the "source" attribute be relevant to the location of the swf instead of the calling application? How would you denote a path going backwards from the view/display folder to the com/cfc folder if that was the case?

Im also wondering, how do you go about developing Flex components that will be called from another application? There are alot more factors to consider in this case than with a standalone Flex application.

The company I work for is sending me and a coworker to the 360Flex conference out in San Jose, CA in March!! I am so excited about this one. I am really wanting to get more into Flex and this will give me the opportunity to do so!

Maybe I will take a stab and writing a Flex frontend for my Trac_Fu application soon, that would rock!

If your going to be there, give me a shout and we will find out where the "after-hours" is going to be and have a few beers!!