All posts by : Macromedia MXNA: WS, Ajax and XSLT

1 of 804 | Amazon Web Services: Health Dashboard - Amazon sent out an email earlier this week announcing better technical support for their AWS products. They have had a few glitches the past few weeks and are proactively addressing those and providing a “Service Health Dashboard” for you see the current statuses of the AWS system. You can find the dashboard at [...]...

2 of 804 | Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA Part 14: Services and Delegates - Last time we looked at Cairngorm and its role in our application. This installment of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA, we're going to look at Cairngorm’s business delegates and how to set up a service oriented architecture in Flex. Join us every Monday for the next installment in our series: Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA....

3 of 804 | The Flex Show - Episode 31: Advanced Flex Development Author Interview - This is the last episode of 2007. In this episode we talk to the authors of Advanced Flex Development: Chris Charlton, R Blank, Omar Gonzalez, and Hasan Otuome. The book is a case study detailing the Rich Media Exchange Application built for Adobe User Groups. Thanks for your support during this year, and I'll 'hear' you in '08. Notes LA Flash Web Site LA AIR Web Site Rich Media Exchange PHP Drupal (Open Source Content Framework) Openads (Open Source Ad Serving Engine) Ted Patrick on FXT Ted Patrick on FXSL Adobe AIR Motion XML Papervision 3D Flash in the Can...

4 of 804 | Flex Applications and 10 Mistakes to avoid while developing - - Using an RIA framework to build Web 1.0 applications (aka. New technology same old stuff). - Breaking standard browser experiences. - Slowing the application down with the use of too many containers. - Slowing the application down by using XML for data transfer over optimized protocols. - Trying to hire Flex developers. - Over use of animations - Not setting [...]...

5 of 804 | Foundation Expression Blend 2 - From the Back CoverThe only real tool available for creating Rich Media Applications, web-based animations, and games has been Flash? until now! WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight have opened the door of Rich Media Application development to Microsoft .NET developers. With Microsoft's new Blend 2 and Visual Studio 2008, you can now create compelling Rich Media Applications complete with animations and even 3D! Foundation Expression Blend 2: Building Applications in WPF and Silverlight book shows you how to take full advantage of Blend's new interface, together with and Silverlight's vastly improved designer-developer workflow, guiding you through every step of...

6 of 804 | GSM Cracking: Coming Soon to a Computer Near You via a Web Service - A new web service, based on specialized hardware, will make cracking the GSM A5/1 protocol fast and cheap....

7 of 804 | Webservices Change in CF 8.0.1 - It seems with the change to 8.0.1 there is a difference in the way CF generates the stubs for a CFC called as a web service. I had a CFC called webservices.cfc and on 8.0 it was working fine calling the methods, but with the 8.0.1 it started throwing a "duplicate file name" error. This seems to be because CF creates its own stub file Webservices.java and also a [cfcname].java file. CF couldn't create both so it threw an error. The solution was to rename my CFC. The stubs can be found in C:\ColdFusion8\stubs\ on windows, and if I remember...

8 of 804 | Mini-review & Competition Foundation Expression Blend 2 - From the Back CoverThe only real tool available for creating Rich Media Applications, web-based animations, and games has been Flash? until now! WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight have opened the door of Rich Media Application development to Microsoft .NET developers. With Microsoft's new Blend 2 and Visual Studio 2008, you can now create compelling Rich Media Applications complete with animations and even 3D! Foundation Expression Blend 2: Building Applications in WPF and Silverlight book shows you how to take full advantage of Blend's new interface, together with and Silverlight's vastly improved designer-developer workflow, guiding you through every step of...

9 of 804 | TACFUG April 22 Meeting - This month, Doug Hughes, President of Alagad Inc. presents on Patterns and Techniques for Data Persistence and Access. Virtually all web applications depend on storing and retreiving data of some sort. The most common place this data is stored is a database, however developers also may use other systems such as flat text files, web services, and more. Furthermore, the ways in which data are stored tend to be different from what our applications require. The way in which we interact with this data can have a dramatic impact on our applications. As a result, a number of design patterns...

10 of 804 | Persistant Storage for EC2 is coming - I received an email from Amazon Web Services this morning about a new service that will be coming out later this year that AWS is dubbing Persistent Storage. This is great news for flex developers who want to target utilize AWS as a backend. For those of you that are not familiar with some of the problems associated with developing in the cloud, I’ll explain it as this: It’s easy to create an instance on EC2 and get BlazeDS, MySQL and java up and running, develop your backend code go, but as soon as you shut down your instance, your...

11 of 804 | Flash Player 9 April 2008 Security Update affects me too - So here I was, thinking that the Flash Player 9 security update (version 9.0.124) wasn’t going to affect me. A silly assumption, of course—I should have tested with the beta, regardless—but since I didn’t do anything fancy with sockets or web services, I thought I would be fine. Ha! I missed this section: “You have SWFs that [...]...

12 of 804 | Google App Engine - Google Web Services - On 7th of April Google has launched Google App Engine. The project offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform....

13 of 804 | Reprint: Consuming Web Service complex types in ColdFusion - In previous posts I have referenced an excellent article written by Doug James and Larry Afrin from the University of South Carolina. The link for that article has since gone dead, but someone helpfully posted a link to the article via a web archive. I am going to reproduce it here so I have an easy reference for it and so its close to my earlier post on array types.Notes on Interfacing ColdFusion MX to External Web Services Requiring Complex-within-Complex XML Documents as InputAuthors:Doug James (jamesd@musc.edu)Larry Afrin, MD (afrinl@musc.edu)Hollings Cancer CenterMedical University of South CarolinaMarch 31, 2005The authors would like...

14 of 804 | Tom Jordahl Explains Arrays In ColdFusion Web Services - A user e-mailed me to ask about how to create or use web services that use arrays of objects in ColdFusion. I forwarded the question to Mr. ColdFusion Web Services himself, Tom Jordahl. He responded to the user, and also posted the response on his blog for future reference. Thanks, Tom!...

15 of 804 | Array types in ColdFusion web services - I get asked questions about publishing web services in ColdFusion often and this is one that many folks run in to that I wanted to post about as I just got asked this. Usually people send mail to Ben Forta, and he just forwards them on to me. :-)Question - How do I create a function that has an array of custom made objects as an argument or return value?First, let me recommend reading the ColdFusion 8 Developers guide chapter on web services (http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/htmldocs/webservices_01.html). I would also recommend reading Ben Forta's (et al) book, the Web Application Construction Kit Volume...

16 of 804 | Flex and FileMaker - There are some tutorials by Soliant Consulting posted on their FlexFM web site about integrating FileMaker database into your Flex projects. To allow Flex applications to connect to the FileMaker Server Web Publishing Engine, Soliant Consulting has created a simple open source ActionScript class which can drive commands/queries to FMS and parse the results. Once data has been retrieved by the FlexFM class, it is available to all Flex objects as any other data retrieved through a Web service....

17 of 804 | Google AppEngine : First Responses - These are my first responses as I read through the documentation in relation to Amazon Web Services. The AppEngine is exactly that, based off Apps. With Amazon EC2 you have to create an image, develop your code, then launch your ami. With AppEngine, you can skip the image creation and get straight to creating an app. That’s much more my style. I don’t know much about managing Linux servers. Built in Scalability rocks. With Amazon EC2 you need to handle this yourself. AppEngine handles this for you, based off traffic.. (I think) Python Only Support sucks. Python is great yeah....

18 of 804 | Google Application : Code Formatting Service Example - I was lucky enough to get an invite to the new Google Application service beta, and have been playing around with it. I just put together a simple code formatting service application. This provides an html and web service for formatting / beautifying code. You can find complete details on the about page for the service. I will [...]...

19 of 804 | Google's appengine is up and running. - Appengine is Google’s answer to Amazon’s web services (ec2, s3, ...). I just signed up and got the following message: “Thanks for checking in! When space in the Google App Engine preview release becomes available, we’ll notify you by emailing…” While waiting you can read there doc or download the SDK. They have some demo apps. Also, the runtime or development language of choice seems to be Python…hopefully Ruby is next on the line....

20 of 804 | Google's new AppEngine - Google just released their version of cloud web servies called AppEngine. Only the first 10k first beta testers got in. I hit refresh for 3 minutes past deadline and still didn’t get in, so I’m hoping you guys all had better luck. Some notes on the differences between AppEngine and Amazon Web Services. With AWS you can pick and choose the services you want to use. Everything is independent. With AppEngine it looks like you get to download the SDK, learn python if you haven’t already, build and then upload your app to google. All the demo apps have a...

21 of 804 | Ask a Jedi: Is my site slow because of Ajax or something else? - Paul asks: I've been working on a project using Mach-II and Spry, which can be viewed at here. I'm using a Spry master-detail layout on each pages. All of the content is stored in xml files. So, I have Spry datasource configured for each page ......

22 of 804 | Flushing a cached web service - When you use WebServices with ColdFusion, the WSDL ’stub’ is cached in CF Administrator (presumably for performance reasons). This can be a pain when you need to change the WSDL and you don’t have access to CF Admin to flush the service which is the scenario I found myself in today. Luckily for me I sit near [...]...

23 of 804 | Taking Advantage of Closures in ECMAScript - I usually avoid nested functions (aka closures) like the plague. They just seem messy and there’s ample opportunity for memory waste. However, there are times when it makes perfect sense to use closures, such as when using them as event handlers for web service calls. Using closures makes understanding event flow, and therefore application logic, [...]...

24 of 804 | Adobe to open Flash Cast Development for Dashboard Verizon Wireless - (via Bill Perry) Adobe is now inviting developers to participate in Flash Cast channel development for Dashboard, which is the Verizon Wireless version of Adobe Flash Cast. Dashboard will provide an ecosystem for Verizon Wireless consumers to enjoy rich and interactive services by leveraging the proven content authoring tools and workflow that Flash developers are familiar with. The wide range...

25 of 804 | Components Flexigrid - Lightweight but rich data grid with resizable columns and a scrolling data to match the headers, plus an ability to connect to an xml based data source using Ajax to load the content. Similar in concept with the Ext Grid only its pure jQuery love, which makes it light weight and follows the jQuery mantra of [...]...

26 of 804 | Lightroom 2 beta Available - Adobe released the public beta of Lightroom 2, allowing the the photographic community to provide feedback on new features and workflow enhancements. The new version comes with many enhancements on localized corrections, organizational tools, package functionality and more. Lightroom 2.0 beta is a workflow application that allows photographers to quickly work with raw format images. With Lightroom they can manage all of their photographs; showcase them in print, dynamic slideshows, and interactive Web galleries that are a simple to produce....

27 of 804 | Spending two days teaching AIR and Flex 3 for Adobe Italy's Partner - These days I'm teaching my first Adobe AIR 1 training course at Adobe Italy's headquarter. This is a 2 days course offered by Adobe Italy to some Adobe's Partner. I'll repeat the same course on 16th and 17th April due to the high number of requests. It has been a big success ! I'm having great time with attendees that are all skilled developers (.NEt and PHP mainly) and very interesting in the Flex 3 SDK and AIR development. Tomorrow I'll show the RPC classes of Flex 3 and how to consume Web Services through an AIR application....

28 of 804 | Verizon and Adobe to open Flash Cast (Dashboard) development to all developers - (via Bill) – All developers can now start partecipating in developing channels for Darshboard which will be the brand name of Flash Cast for Verizon Wireless. Dashboard will provide an ecosystem for Verizon Wireless consumers to enjoy rich and interactive services by leveraging the proven content authoring tools and workflow that Flash developers are familiar with. The [...]...

29 of 804 | Linux Flex Builder Alpha 3 - There was a lot of focus the last couple of days on Adobe Elements express as well as the release of the Linux AIR Alpha but the release of Alpha 3 Flex Builder slipped by relatively unnoticed (at least by me). Some new features have been added but I still have some bad news...the list of unsupported features is, in my opinion, still pretty big. Unsuported Features Design view States view Refactoring Data Wizards Cold Fusion - Data Services Wizard Web Services introspection Profiler It's still in the Alpha stages and I would expect that most of the unsuported features...

30 of 804 | Updated: crossdomain.xml fixes amfphp for april flash player release - This updated crossdomain.xml example fixes all of the issues that people were having with the last post that I had. Please update your server with the following file. Remember that you need to remove any spaces as this has to be well formated xml! Make sure that you place the file in your web root [...]...

31 of 804 | Bpel 4 people / Bpel 4 newbees - One of the main goals I'm trying to reach is to advise customers on how to start implementation of SOA in their organisation by using a coaching approach instead of implementor approach.In other words, guide and coach the development teams of each customer in getting familiar with SOA concepts and getting their hands dirty ;o))The developers themselves are tought BPEL, Web Services, XML and XSD through basic hands on session, workshops in a practical way and then they start designing bpel processes.What's very important is this process is that each person needs to do the brainwork, in other words always...

32 of 804 | Amazon EC2 Now with Great New Features - Amazon EC2 just received two very important updates: Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones. Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing, and now make it easy to host web sites, web services and other online applications in Amazon EC2. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your AWS account, not with your [...]...

33 of 804 | minoccurs=0; nillable="true not interpreted in Web Services - In one of the previous posts I've defined a workaround concerning the nillable attribute being ignored when invoking web services using xsd's defined in the following manner.Because in bpel you're not able to define the xsi:nil-attribute at design time, you need to define this manually.The xsi:nil=true-attribute is the solution to tell web services that this attribute, if empty, needs to be ignored. In this way serialization and deserialization will work, otherwise you will always run into NullPointerException.What's the cause of our problem when talking about bpel [metalink Note:403586.1]:The XSLT transformer used by BPEL was not originally designed to pass xsi:nil...

34 of 804 | Photoshop Express Has Arrived And It’s HOT, HOT, HOT! - Being awake and trawling the web at 3 AM sometimes means you get an early jump on tomorrow’s big announcements. Here’s a snapshot of the Photoshop Express uploader. Great workflow with a sophisticated and understated UI. I dig it, MUCHO. Looks like they will be using a tiered model with a free basic version and a [...]...

35 of 804 | Playing around with 11g - Playing around with Database 11g features and SCA 11g functionality (technology previews), I've came across some issues which you may find interesting to now/comprehend:Native PL/SQL WebServices (11g Feature):Procedures or functions need to have in- and output-parameters when using 11g webservices in 10.1.3.1 bpel processes You can’t work with rowtypes as return variables => not supported XDB Username & Password authentication is needed for native pl/sql web service calls, when invoking native pl/sql webservices from BPEL. Add following properties to your partnerlink: Jdeveloper 11g Tech Preview:You can’t connect to AppServer 10.1.3 (it will be applicable in the production release)You can r......

36 of 804 | Death to Sign Up Forms - Luke Wroblewski with a new article in A List Apart about why most sign up forms suck, and how you can make yours better. Here are his best practices: When planning a customer’s initial experience for your web service, think about how you can avoid sign-up forms in favor of gradual engagement. If you do opt for [...]...

37 of 804 | Books of Luke and Aarron - In Issue No. 255 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Sign Up Forms Must Die – Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal of Product Ideation and Design at Yahoo! and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008), calls for the abolition of sign-up forms where web services are concerned. Via "gradual engagement," says Luke, we can get people using and caring about our web services instead of frustrating them with forms. And in Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, Aarron Walter, author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond (New Riders,...

38 of 804 | ColdFusion, Axis, Windows .NET and Web Services - We have done a number of projects integrating with clients’ systems which have required either publishing or consuming web services. In the past we did this using Apache Axis. Since CF7 we have switched to ColdFusion which provides a very convenient way of developing Web Services. When using web services in general Methods passing simple types are [...]...

39 of 804 | BlazeDS enables developers to productively build real-time data-driven applications - Adobe releases an open source AMF solution: BlazeDS is the server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Adobe® Flex™ and Adobe AIR™ applications for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences. Remoting simplifies the reuse of existing server logic automatically marshalling calls between the Flash client and the Java methods on the server. In addition, the use of a AMF binary data transfer format increases performance, allowing applications to load data up to 10 times faster than with text-based formats such as XML or...

40 of 804 | Acrobat Connect Recording: NCFUG and Zach Stepek on ColdFusion Powered AIR - The Acrobat Connect recording for Tuesday nights ColdFusion Powered AIR meeting with Zach Stepek is now available. Zach gave an excellent talk with tons of great information on powering your AIR applications with Flex using Web Services or Flash Remoting (AMF). The recording is 1 hr and 25 minutes and includes all Q&A. Watch it here: http://mmusergroup.adobe.acrobat.com/p83838845/...

41 of 804 | Gaia Flash Framework 2.0.7 - Gaia 2.0.7 is here, and with it some great new features to speed up your workflow.  More and more developers around the world are using Gaia everyday and it's been getting fantastic reviews on the web.  Some of these new features came from developers like you, so head on over and join the project!  [...]...

42 of 804 | MD5 Hash values: Be aware of uppercase/lowercase - These days I had to deal with a web service which needs a parameter as MD5 hash. I played around with for some time but authentification always failed, I did everything according to the documentation, however. Then I found out that the other service is checking the hash value case-sensitive, so I had to add a lcase to the string.Some further research shows that almost every other service I know produces lowercase only hash values, ColdFusion produces uppercase values. Be aware of that! ;-)...

43 of 804 | More Help Wanted (coldfusion, xml, java, flash, ...) - Albany, NY - Once again we are hiring @ Albany Med. I'm looking to expand our team with the addition of two full-time positions:We seek talented individuals who have broad experience with web technologies. The role is a blended one, in which development, pr......

44 of 804 | Facebook Developer: Sitemaps for applications - Starting today, you can serve XML sitemaps off apps.facebook.com domain, and notify search engines about changes on your pages. Naturally, this works better for pages that display content without requiring logins. The best way to showcase your Facebook application to search engines is to register your site with appropriate services: Google Webmaster Central Yahoo! Search Site Explorer Live Search [...]...

45 of 804 | Mini-review & Competition Microformats - Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 - From the Back CoverMicroformats burst onto the scene a couple of years ago and are fast becoming an essential tool for all professional web designers and developers. Imagine being able to integrate all of your web-based contact details, tagged articles, and geographical information seamlessly in web and desktop applications, without having to add anything extra to your websites except a little specialized HTML markup. Microformats provide a more formalized technology for adding commonly used semantics (such as contact details, location, and reviews) to today's Web. Unlike XML or the semantic Web, microformats use ubiquitous technologies like HTML and XHTML, existing...

46 of 804 | Web Services in AIR (Flash CS3) - I have been banging my head against a wall for days. I am trying to get web services to work in an AIR app built with Flash CS3.  My co-workers use a solution that works for Flash only http://labs.qi-ideas.com/2007/12/25/using-flex-compiled-code-within-flash But every time I tried to use it with an AIR app it would crash. I then found  [...]...

47 of 804 | Cool Flash Portofolio - Today i’ve choose this nice portfolio from flashden. It’s very cool. With a nice interface, it provides a cool way to deliver video. Features: Fullscreen xml based Creative Flash Website Template for an elegant presentation 4 fully customizable sections (home, services, portfolio and contact) Fullscreen switching feature The code is very well commented Code is very centralized so you don’t have [...]...

48 of 804 | ColdFusion Positions In NC And OR - Two ColdFusion positions this week: East Carolina University (Greenville, NC) is looking for a ColdFusion developer. Requirements include extensive object oriented experience, as well as experience with CF8 Ajax integration, SQL, Flex, and ColdFusion frameworks. Apply online (search the "Staff-Information Technology" category for "Business & Technology Applications Analyst - Advanced"). LaCie (Portland, OR) is looking for a ColdFusion developer. Requirements include 4+ years of ColdFusion experience (or ASP, PHP, JSP, but must be willing to learn ColdFusion), as well as experience with Oracle and SQL Server, CSS, XML, and more. Details posted online....

49 of 804 | Drag and Drop Web Application Testing With Automator - If you’re looking for a simple, free, drag and drop way to do automated testing of web applications checkout Ottomate. Ottomate is a set of automator tasks that let you fill in forms, click buttons, and do simple asserts without writing any scripts (though you can add a script task). Here is an example login workflow: It’s a [...]...

50 of 804 | CFMX - SOAP vs REST benchmarks - One of the applications that we have developed relies quite heavily on web services and I've been doing some benchmarking to figure out how we can improve the performance of it. Currently the application consists of a AIR/Flex frontend and a CF backend which is using SOAP web services to communicate. I wanted to understand the level of overhead that the SOAP layer added to each coldfusion request and understand if it would be beneficial to move away from using SOAP to using a REST type direct XML format. Test 1: SOAP CFC vs REST CFM Initally I created two...