Some of the little things that will make life easier for component developers in Flash 2004
- Auto Live-Preview: As long as your component knows how to redraw itself, converting a component to an swc will give it a live preview automatically.
- Meta tags: Using special Meta-tags in your class file of your component, Flash can automatically pick up the parameters rather than you needing to specify it in the component inspector (example: [Inspectable(name=”Title Position”,enumeration=”top,bottom”,defaultValue=”top”)])
- Easy event dispatching: The component framework has built-in support for broadcasting events. All that you would have to do to is “dispatchEvent({type:”click”});” and the rest is taken care of for you. No more AsBroadcaster.initialize(this)
I’ll try to post some more when i get the chance.
I ran into an interesting problem while developing two custom debug templates. The CFMX debugger provides information on all the templates executed in a request, including the execution time for the template and the “parent” or caller for each template.
Interestingly, there is one situation with ColdFusion Components where the parent template itself will never appear in the template list, seemingly to indicate it’s called from a template that is not executed within the request.
Continue reading ‘How is a CFC called from a template that itself is never called?’
Macromedia announced Flash MX 2004, its latest upgrade to their Flash development environment. With this release Macromedia has also announced Flash MX Professional 2004, a version of Flash specifically targeted towards professional.
Rather than re-hash everything you are going to see out today about the new product, I will highlight a few of the new additions…
Continue reading ‘Macromedia announces Flash MX 2004!’
I’ve always assumed that working with lists was far slower than working with Arrays. It just seems obvious since with an array you have a series of values that are indexed sequentially, whereas with a list you have a string that has to be parsed every time you want to work with it.
I was therefore very surprised to learn that looping over a list is much faster in ColdFusion MX than looping over an array. On average, looping through a 500 item list took one quarter the time required to loop over an array containing the same 500 items. This is certainly counterintuitive and besides, didn’t everyone always say string operations were slow in Java?
After reading the generated Java code I found that when you loop over a list by specifying the list attribute of a cfloop statement, ColdFusion optimizes the code by tokenizing the list only at the outset. If you were to use an indexed loop and listGetAt() each element, then ColdFusion would retokenize the list on each call and you’d start to get serious performance degradation.
So what’s the conclusion? Looping over lists is good, but list operations whenever you’re making more than one call to the list function is bad. At least that my new opinion, subject to change without notice. 
Position Title: Flash Developer
B-Line Express (http://www.blinex.com) is seeking an experienced Flash Developer in the Washington D.C. area to join our team in supporting a large non-profit educational organization for a large data analysis Rich Internet Application including complex tables, graphs, and maps of large statistical database. If you love working with Flash and are looking for the environment to exercise your talent then this is the right place for you!
Requirements:
1. Computer Science degree or equivalent experience 2. In depth knowledge of Flash, ActionScript, OOP, XML and Component Development.
3. Ability to learn quickly
4. Be a team player in a highly innovative team
Pluses:
1. Knowledge of Flash Communication Server or Java
Please send resume and salary requirements to thuy@blinex.com
We received some preliminary statistics on attendees signing up for our MAX sessions. My session, Integrating ColdFusion with Microsoft Office, is ranked number 5 right now for ColdFusion sessions.
I’m really excited about this session since I’ve been given approval to depart from the traditional “this is how you use CFOBJECT” session to do a real comparative analysis of different access methodologies. I’ll review and provide code samples for interacting with Microsoft Office through automation, document properties, HTML, XML, and Jet, including options available for Linux servers and the brand new options for Office 11 users.
The session is available in three different time slots so there’s no excuse to miss it. See you at MAX!
We noticed recently that if someone posted a comment on our blog with a really long URL it wouldn’t wrap and as a result it would throw off the whole template. To address this we wrote a custom tag that uses regular expressions to search for long URLs in the comment area and cut off the text portion.
Continue reading ‘CustomTag: ShortenLogUrls helps save your blog layout’
The question of what is supported Java usage in CFMX came up on a mailing list today. When is Java fully supported and when is it not? Can we expect our applications to continue to work in future versions of ColdFusion if we take full advantage of Java? What about the wonderful ColdFusion internal classes?
Here’s my $0.02…
Continue reading ‘Is Java supported in CFMX?’
Microsoft dropped the price for MSSQL Developer edition from $499 to only $49. You can find it at some locations even cheaper. This is a great buy so anyone working on a Windows box has no excuse not to have MSSQL.
It’s also great for people on a production budget. While MSSQL Developer is only for developer use, it does include the client tools. That’s important because MSDE can be used in production but doesn’t include any client tools. You can use MSDE in production and buy MSSQL Developer for the client tools to manage your production box.
Continue reading ‘MSSQL Developer for $42!!!’
