A First Step Towards CAFE Development
June 26, 2007
CAFE development — thats my name for developing with:
- ColdFusion
- Air
- Flex
- LiveCycle Data Services Express Edition
Part of my job at work is to evaluate future technologies and to see how we may use them in the future. This week at FlexManiacs and CFUnited (which for personal reasons I can only attend for one day unfortunately) I am going to take a look at these technologies. With all of these technologies currently in beta its quite an exciting time especially with, depending on your install selections, LiveCycle Data Services Express Edition running inside of the ColdFusion server.
Today, I had four sessions with the founding partners of Tapper Nimer Associates and two others that covered CF, Flex and Apoolo. So, briefly, what did I learn?
- ColdFusion and Flex talk very well to each other with automatic data type conversion and a whole bunch of configuration/code layout options that I need to investigate more. There are also some very good debug options including the ability to get all the CF debug data in Flex and, I believe, these options exceed those available to other back end languages.
- Its important to do garbage collection and/or do some memory management with Flex. Not so excited about this part...
- AIR applications have a unique id (in the format of com.domain.name.etc) and a version number. Only one version of an Apollo application can be installed on a computer at one time.
- AIR has full File I/O access including a bunch of functions in ActionScript (and possibly in JavaScript as well but the html method of creating AIR has barely been covered).
- Updating AIR applications is fairly straightforward now but a little clunky and probably will be improved before release (but certainly don't hold me to that!).
- There's a lot more but I can't remember it all right now.
I'm starting to sketch together some ideas where we may want to use CAFE instead of HTML and AJAX though I really need to hear
Tom Jordahl's session to get an understanding of LiveCycle Data Services Express Edition (could Adobe make that name longer?) and CF.
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