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Comments(1) I know the ColdFusion community has been paying attention to the open source CFML servers that are either already out in the wild or are going to be released soon. One of the coolest ones that have have gotten to play with is Rail 3.0 Beta, soon to be Rail 3.1 by the end of the year.
Now just for the record I am a very new CFML coder. I mainly work in Flash or Flex all day and don’t really care to much for the backend development at all. One of the best things I learned with in the past 6 months or so was how to use AMF and Remoting with ColdFusion8. The down side to the other CFML server where at the time AMF was an Adobe thing and none of the open source server where able to put it in.
Once Open BlueDragon came out I was excited but the did not have AMF and they are still working on getting it in there in the form of BlazeDS.
Here was my experience with Railo. I went to the site, http://railo.ch/, downloaded 3.0, put it in my home directory, launched the server, created a Flex hello world project, created a CFC, set up the NetConnection to the gateway and “HELLO WORLD” it worked. This was Freaking awesome!
Right now Railo 3.0 is using OpenAMF witch is AMF0. Before the end of the year Railo 3.1 will be out and the team has said that they will be replacing OpenAMF with Adobe’s BlazeDS witch will be AMF3.
In the following video I will show you how simple it is to get set up and running.
Comments(1) There has been a lot of buzz about Flex and Flex Builder. This is the IDE for Building Flex RIA’s and also for building pure actionscript 3 projects. After discovering the power of Flex Builder’s coding environment it was clear to me that this would be a great Actionscript 3 editor for my Flash CS3 projects.The following video will walk you through the setup that I use on all my Flash projects. I hope this will help out with your work flow. Let me know what you think.
Comments(0) Bigspaceship uses Flexbuilder for a couple of big AS3 and Flex projects and once you start to develop in Flexbuilder (Eclipse) you maybe don’t wanna go back and use a normal Text Editor. So i was looking for a way to use Flexbuilder for heavy graphical sites that also need the Flash 9 IDE.BigSpaceShip thinks…. http://labs.bigspaceship.com/blog/?p=76read more | digg story
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So I have been at Adobe MAX 2007 in Chicago all week. The whole experience has been really great. What was even better than that was a sneak peek at a new application that Adobe says that it will be releasing sometime in 2008 - code name “Thermo”.
I can not tell you how excited I was about this app. What is Thermo you ask? Well let me tell you from my perspective what Thermo is….
Just a week before MAX I was finally wanting to write my first project completely in Flex Builder. This was a really really frustrating thing from a design standpoint. I would be what the industry is referring to as a “Devigner” Half Designer / Half Developer. I can write some code when it comes down to it and I really enjoy figuring out the functionality of an app but I have always done all my sites or apps in the Flash IDE and laid them out in Photoshop before I move everything over to Flash for animation and coding.
When it comes to doing a project by setting up your design in Photoshop and then getting that design into Flex Builder….. well …. let’s just say it. IT IS A PAIN IN THE ASS! As far as I am concerned.
I am totally not a coding guru just yet, but I have my eyes on the prise and I hope to one day know my stuff, but for now I will admit that I have a little trouble understanding some simple tasks that most programmers would not have any trouble with. We all know and love Textmate. The great text editor for the Mac. Heck I even use it to write my blog posts. You have to check out the blogging bundle if you have not used it for that it is great.
As soon as I got Textmate I started using it for all my actionscript. At the time the bundle was only for AS2. Now that I am starting to dig into AS3 and Flex it would be great to start coding using this editor. It launches way faster than Flex Builder or Eclips. There are some draw backs. The biggest being that you do not get the code hinting quite as much as you do with Flex Builder, but still it is a great tool to work in. In the next few steps I will show you how to install SVN (subversion) client for your Mac so you can utilize all the bundles and updates that are currently being developed for Textmate and most importantly there is an AS3 / Flex bundle that you can download.
Adobe put out actionscript 3 (AS3) this year. There are a tone of books and tutorials out there now. So do you dive in or not? The short answer is….Yes. If you want to be able to do some really cool things on your flash or flex projects then you need to start digging in.
AS3 will give you a tone of performance improvements and some are the new features are just great. If you are a new user to actionscript don’t start with AS2. Everything is headed for AS3 in a hurry. There are quite a few changes to the code and the way you code buttons and events are totally different in AS3. If you are a big AS2 user you will feel like this takes a lot longer but you will see and understand the benefit after you start using the new code.
So I guess I am updating my goal. It is Always to “Learn Actionscript” but now it is to Learn Actionscript 3.
There are some great books out there. Check out http://oreilly.com. I would say you need to pick up Essential Actionsript 3.0 and Actionscript 3.0 Cookbook ASAP.
learn more at Adobe Labs
Good luck and keep coding.
See more progress on: learn actionscript
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Three new cheatsheets for developers using and getting started with Apollo. All of the new Apollo Classes are on the sheets (and a few updates to existing AS3 Classes). There are definitely some cool new Classes including but not limited to: Apollo Application, HTML, HTMLControl, File, FileStream, Shell, JavaScriptObject, Shell and more.
Although I have been developing in Flash and ActionScript 2.0 for a wile now, I am totally new to Flex, Apollo, and ActionScript 3. These cheatsheets will come in handy for everyone, not just the newbie. Hope to see a paper back in this to keep on my desk sometime soon.
