Interested in learning how to connect Flex and ColdFusion? Well do not miss out on my upcoming Adobe Connect Presentation for the Orange County ColdFusion User Group this Thursday September 20th 2007 at 6:30 p.m. PST.

My presentation will include a walk through of a simple CRUD application that will demonstrate creating, reading, updating and deleting content from a database via Flex and ColdFusion. Beyond the connectivity portion of the presentation and time permitting I will also try to cover some key Flex concepts and design patterns such as the use of a Events and Value Objects. Understanding these Flex concepts will greatly assist in learning how to build great Flex apps that hook into ColdFusion for server side connectivity.

To attend in person or online check out the Orange County ColdFusion User Group website for details. I believe there will also be a recording available shortly after for those who cannot attend.

Hot off the press, is my ColdFusion 8:Articles:A Preview of Image Manipulation in ColdFusion 8. In this article you will will learn how to use ColdFusion 8’s new image tags and functions to create a micro image gallery application that creates thumbnails from uploaded images and watermarks the originals using the new CFImage tag and related functions. Additionally you will also learn how to create and use a CAPTCHA image in the form space to ensure that a human and not a bot is trying to upload images.

You will want to download the demo files with the application to follow along with, and of course you will also need a copy of the ColdFusion 8 Public Beta also available on the Adobe Labs. One last thing about the demo application, it is not a full featured image gallery. Its intended purpose is to showcase some of the new ways to manipulate images in ColdFusion 8. More specifically it does not contain functionality to delete to images once added to the gallery. To delete images you have to manually remove them from the application's images directory and thumbs sub-directory.

That said enjoy the article and demo.

ColdFusion 8 is finally available on the Adobe labs as a public beta.

Some of the new features:

• Server monitoring to help identify server bottlenecks, allowing for tuning and improved performance.
  
• Step through code debugging in a new Eclipse plug-in debugger.
  
• Adobe Flex™ and Ajax features that let ColdFusion power personalized, multimedia-rich applications to enhance users’ experiences on the web.
  
• High-quality, dynamically created on-demand multimedia presentations.
  
• PDF document and form integration for a printable, portable way to intelligently capture and share information.
  
• Image creation and manipulation with more than 50 new CFML tags and functions.
  
• Native support for .NET objects to easily integrate ColdFusion applications with enterprise data and infrastructure services.
  
• Significant application runtime and server performance improvements.

Be sure to check out my article (A Preview of Image Manipulation in ColdFusion 8) showcasing some of the image manipulation functionality that is brand new in ColdFusion 8.

What are you waiting for? Go download all the ColdFusion goodness.

 

Join me for an introductory Apollo session at the MiniMax 6 Conference in Toronto on Saturday April 21st 2007.

MiniMAX 6 is a series of 15 minute tutorials provided by some of the best experts in the web, print, broadcast and interactive design and development community in the greater Toronto area and across North America. Expect to see sessions on Flash, After Effects, Flex, Photoshop, Dreamweaver as well as other Adobe related applications mixed in for good pleasure.

Additional Speakers at the Conference:

• Adam Bell of dataTv
• James Cullin of Humber College
• Tom Green of Humber College
• Bill Klengensmith of Rochester's Institute of Technology
• Patti Russoti of Rochester's Institute of Technology

Admission is free (as in beer) however space is limited and registration is required. To register for MiniMax 6 Click Here

Location | Date and Time

April 21, 2007 @ 3:00 pm

Resistor Gallery
284 College Street 2nd Floor
Toronto
416.849.3975
Directions

April 11th 2007 I'll be at the CFUG Toronto meeting giving a demonstrating on how to access a CRUD cfc using Remoting with Flex. This will be the first of a series of Flex/ColdFusion integration tutorials suitable for Flex and CF newcomers.

Also Ray Camden will be chiming at the meeting with a presentation on Adobe's Spry framework for Ajax.

Meeting details:

April 11, 2007
Tippet Room of the Metro Central YMCA
20 Grosvenor Street Toronto
Presentation starting at 7:00pm

This meeting will be broadcast and recorded using Adobe Connect at this url: http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/cfugtorontoapril2007/
Adobe schwag will be raffled off to the people who physically attend the meeting.

At the office we order allot of pizza and while we found ordering online preferable the actual ordering experience was lacking to say the least. So back in 2005 I used the scenario as an R&D project with Flex 1.5 and later ported it Flex 2 back in May of 2006. My plan was to build a pizza ordering system where you could drag and drop pizza toppings on to a pizza and actually see whatever combination of toppings you selected appear photo realistic in real time. Although the system is really an unfinished symphony I think might help stimulate others to think creatively about what they can do with flex. One small thing I'd like to mention about the app is that we did all the photography (even the icons) in the office ourselves with real ingredients.

To experience the Flex Pizza Builder click on the images below:

The Front End Customer View

The Back End Order Taker View

Hey good news Adobe Apollo has hit the Adobe Labs. If you are into building rich internet application via Flash , Flex or Ajax then Apollo is up your alley. I'll be posting some of my own Apollo example by the end of the week.

Anybody looking for a great free stat tracker for their web site should check out www.statcounter.com. StatCounter logs variety of metrics like:

• Country and city of origin
• IP Address
• ISP
• Referral Pages
• Keyword Activity
• Search Engine Popularity
• Entry Pages
• Exit Pages
• Browsers and operating systems
• Hits, uniques, returning visitors
• and many more..

Unlike some free statistic trackers you can deploy statcounter without showing a banner on your site. Below is an example of the code

Myself and Byron Bignell will be giving a presentation on server virtualization on March 14th 2007 for the ColdFusion User Group Toronto chapter. If you live in the Toronto area come on by and you will learn how to create virtual development servers that you can use to development and test against without having to deploy new hardware.

We will be focusing primarily on VMWare for the windows platform and Parallels for the mac crowd. The presentation is in the Tippet Room of the Metro Central YMCA, at 20 Grosvenor Street and we will be starting at 7PM sharp. After the meeting we will likely go to a nearby pub for post meeting beverages.

See you there.

If you cannot attend the presentation can viewed online at the follwing address: http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/cfugtorontomarch2007/

Update

For those who could not attend the meeting live you can check out the recording here https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a200985228/p58155459/

Why I will never buy from TigerDirect ever again.. read on to find out why.

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