Thinking about coming to the talk on August 7th about Flex and ColdFusion Applications the Easy Way with Coldspring? This primer will provide a rough guide to ideas that you might want to familiarize yourself with prior to the presentation. The idea is that by getting an idea about the supporting features, you’ll be able to focus on the topic at hand while feeling familiar with it.

Flex and ColdFusion Applications have a heavy focus on application design with the idea in mind of reuse in a front-end that may be ColdFusion, Flex or even Ajax. This presentation will use an application that adheres to a simple model-view-controller architecture with reusable model components being shared across views. The great advantage of this is that you can reuse the bulk of your code, your model, with only minor changes in how data is obtained through it. Although the talk will use ColdSpring, no prior knowledge of ColdSpring will be needed to make sense.

Flex can consume data in a variety of different ways. You can access XML, simple data files, the AMF Gateway can transform objects in CF (or Java/Ruby) to ActionScript, or you can go the easy way and use ColdFusion web services. Although the AMF Gateway is the fastest way of passing data to Flex via remote objects, web services are one of the easiest solutions for a shared hosting environment mainly due to how easy they are to configure.

In this presentation I will use web services. For those unfamiliar with creating web services in ColdFusion, it’s an absolute walk in the park. All you have to do is create a CFC (Object) and create a function with attribute “access=’remote’”. That’s all it takes! The function can now be called as a SOAP web service from any client including Flex. In our case we’ll be using Flex to call functions that were generated by ColdSpring rather than scripted manually. We’ll be expanding on this topic to show how you can create different delegates for different consumers (Flex, ColdFusion, and AJAX) using ColdSpring and little work.

See you at the presentation!