CF Air Compiler

I was inspired by Ben Forta’s post on creating AIR application from ColdFusion. I felt like there had to be a better way than just copying the source of ColdFusion generated HTML files. So I started working with it and came up with a proof of concept project on RIAForge: CF Air Compiler.

I wrote a simple application called “testapp” that just binds a CFGrid to the results of a CFC call that returns a CFFeed of coldfusionbloggers. This is the application that will be packaged into an Air application.

I used CFHttp to grab the ColdFusion page outputted as HTML and move them to a repository. Then I used ReMatch to find all of the used CFIDE javascript files, css files, and images, and copy them to the repository. Then I used ReMatch to grab all of the cfc calls and convert them to fully qualified url calls.

The second part was a little easier. All it required was wrapping the adt.bat in a CFC wrapper. It just has two methods: certificate and package. They correspond to the options for the adt.bat file. I used that to compile the application into AIR.

There were a few challenges with it. I haven’t figured out a way to get to the images used in CSS. I could just grab them indiscriminately, but I want to do a little better, expect an update after I think about it for a bit. Also the CF JavaScript evidently tries to do some things that violate the security model of the Air Runtime. It required wrapping the ColdFusion generated html in an iframe. To read more about the issue, you can check out the Air Wiki.

It’s not perfect code, but I figured I would at least get it out there and maybe someone smarter could take it a little further. Check it out, please feel free to offer suggestions and criticism.