Author: tpryan

ColdFusion Case Study

We just posted a new case study about Alcatel-Lucent using ColdFusion to power their new business to business social media tool. They used ColdFusion as part of a total solution that leveraged AIR and Flex as well as ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder to power it.

My favorite quote:

“We often deploy ColdFusion as a middle tier between business logic and web services on the back end and the presentation layer on the front end. The ready-made hooks make things happen very quickly”

Add this to your list of resources to answer the question “Why ColdFusion?”

Adobe Success Story: Alcatel-Lucent

RIAUnleashed Will Unleash the Awesome

That’s right, there’s a whole heapload of awesome coming at you from Boston this November.

RIAUnleashed is the last East Coast Adobe developer conference of the year. It will also be one of the first post Adobe MAX events. Meaning it will be a great opportunity to question and discuss all of the new things Adobe’s unveiling this year.

To help with that, notable Adobeans will be on hand, including: Ryan Stewart, Adam Lehman, James Ward, Greg Wilson and Christophe Coenraets.

Also Community leaders from the Flex, Flash and ColdFusion community will be on hand: Jesse Warden, Jesse Freeman, Raymond Camden, Mark Esher, Simon Free, Charles Schulze, Brian Diette, Jeff Tapper and Chuck Freedman plus more.

So come to Boston this November 11 and 12 and get in on the awesome.

 

 

ColdFusion Cookbook Contest

Ed Sullivan announced on the ADC blog that they are starting a new contest around the ColdFusion Cookbook. Every cookbook entry will get you a piece of Adobe schwag. So check out the contest, get the rules, and start writing some recipes.

Now you may be thinking to yourself, “Self, I would like to do that, but I have no idea how to participate. I have no recipes.”

First off, stop speaking to yourself in the third person, that’s creepy.

Second, I have some suggested ideas. You are not required to use them, you may use them, or you may use them to inspire one of your own:

  • How can you detect if a browser supports HTML 5 semantic structures like header, footer, and nav?
  • How do you build a RESTful service in ColdFusion using GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE HTTP verbs.
  • How can you call ColdFusion services from PHP?
  • How can you call ColdFusion services from Ruby?
  • How can you call ColdFusion services from the language of your choice?
  • How and why do you run ColdFusion from the console?

So go, get going, write some recipes.

ZDNet highlights the Adobe Education Exchange

ZDNet just released a great article about the Adobe Education Exchange. Chris Dawson highlights the value of the content as not just feature How to’s:

What impressed me the most about the lesson was not the focus on CS5. Sure, there were instructions for using specific features, but more than that, the focus was on the design process and teamwork and used the various views available in Dreamweaver to teach Cascading Style Sheets.

He goes on to point out that the content there could be helpful to educators at all levels to help build classes.

So check out the article, and make sure to check out the Adobe Education Exchange.

Lanyrd – Awesome Idea

Lanyrd.com launched last week. It’s a site that basically tracks conference information via twitter. So you use your twitter credentials and sign up for various conferences as an interested party, an attendee, a speaker, or an organizer. Lanyrd.com then presents this information about conferences along with hash tags and other information.

That’s what it does today. In the future there are plans to do real-time tracking of conferences, posting of materials, etc., etc. They also have some features around book and speaker promotion. The future stuff sounds interesting, but the present features are what really got me. How many times have you been to a conference only to find out that people who you talk to all the time on Twitter were there and you missed them because you didn’t see that they were there until the conference was in full swing? This single-handedly sells Lanyrd to me.
Here are are some upcoming conferences I’m going to/tracking so you can see what I mean:

Definitely check Lanyrd.com out. And if you’re going to any conferences, participate. If you find me at a conference due to Lanyrd, I’ll buy you a beer.

 

Quick AIR Development Trick – Send to Second Monitor

I’ve been developing and debugging an AIR app for an upcoming demo, and running into the same problem, I start debugging the app in ADL, and immediately have to move it over to my second monitor so I can see code while looking at the app.

Or I could just set the X and Y coordinates in my application manifest file. Now it launches on the second monitor every time.

Just have to remember to switch back before production.

Students: Joint Adobe/Motorola Event in San Francisco

On September 16th, Adobe and Motorola are hosting a mobile Flash meetup. They’re looking for designers and developers, student or otherwise to come and maybe show off some of their work.

There will be networking, pizza, beer, and froyo. (As well as Froyo.)

 

Date/Time: Thurs. Sept. 16, 2010, 6:00-9:00pm PT
Location: Adobe SF offices, 601 Townsend St, San Francisco
Free event – Pizza / Beer / FROYO served
Space is limited. RSVP at http://flashmeetup.eventbrite.com

 

ColdFusion from a Console

I’ve been working on a little proof of concept idea and wanted to see
/blog/admin/assets/editors/tinymce_3/jscripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js
if other people liked it and perhaps wanted to see it go further.

I’ve heard a couple of calls for command line ColdFusion. I wanted to see if it could be done. My first experiment was trying to use AIR new native processes to make a command line client for ColdFusion. It didn’t pan out. But the api I used to make it was easily adaptable. I combined it with a socket listener event gateway to make a ColdFusion telnet server.

The video shows it in action.

CFConsole from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.

Like it? Want more. Let me know.

In the meantime the project is available on RIAForge.com and github, please feel free to fork it and play with it.

Students: Flash Jobs Pay

One of the best ways to get a jump start on paying off those student loans is getting a good paying job after college. (Duh, you all know that.) One of the best ways to get a head start into that good paying job is to find fields or subfields where demand for spots outweighs available workers. (Duh, again.) If you can display knowledge in one of these fields right out of school, you can usually beat out the starting salaries for your classmates. (Duh… oh wait, that would be awesome.)

Good news, right now one of those fields is Flash according to the Wall Street Journal. Flash developers are in demand, especially in the subfield of Flash Gaming. Also of interest is Flash for mobile and AIR for Android.

So how do you get in on it?

For a broad overview, check out the Adobe Developer Center.
Then check out the Gaming Technology Center.
Also get yourself some Flash Builder for Students. (It’s Free.)

AIR Launchpad

Greg Wilson announced yesterday the release of Adobe AIR Launchpad.

These days, I get inundated with new projects, releases, plugins and helpers, so it’s hard to catch my eye. However, let me say, if you are interested in AIR development, you need to take a look at AIR Launchpad.
There are things that many of the cool AIR applications do:

  • Install via a badge, which handles both AIR and app installation
  • Run an automatic updater
  • Have icons for multiple purposes
  • Store configurations locally
  • Use local storage
  • Use a local database
All of these things are relatively easy. However you have to wade through lots of API specific code to get started with it. Each of those bullet points is easily a blog entry. In many cases the blog entry is needed just to wrap your mind around these things.
However with Launchpad, you can create an application with any of these features and more already wired up with very well commented code. In short, why read about it, when you can just do it.
Hats off to Greg and his team for creating a major productivity jumpstart for AIR developers. If you are interested in AIR you need to download Launchpad now.