One of the things that continually keeps me energized about my job is that Cynergy is always on the leading edge of the latest trends in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) world. As a former developer, I love the latest and greatest technologies, and in my current role on the Business Development team, it really makes my job easier. :)

A few months ago, Adobe approached us to get some feedback on Flex 4 and Catalyst and how they would fit into our design and development workflow (our workflow was recently covered by Forrester, if you're interested). Rather than just providing anecdotal feedback, we built out a real application without taking any shortcuts in our approach. To that end, we have just announced the first ever Adobe Flex 4 and Catalyst application called Cynergy.Congress. This application allows you to learn about United States members of Congress, including their terms, policies, committees, recent news and even videos of their testimony on the floor of the House or Senate.

I know I am aggregated by some tech-centric blog aggregators and if all I was passing along was a link to a Flex application, that wouldn't interest a lot of you. Well, as Dave Wolf announced in his blog entry, we will also be releasing the source code in the coming days so that you can download, explore, and extend the code to start getting familiar with the next version of Flex. Andy Trice, who is Cynergy's Principal Architect for Adobe AIR and Adobe Flex, was the lead developer on the project, so I can promise you that nothing but the very best practices were used during development and this isn't simply demo-ware. He has already started posting about his experience with the project and it provides some great insight into the new workflows that Adobe is introducing with the next version of the Adobe Flash platform. Have a look!

As their home page says, Forrester Research is a technology and market research company that provides pragmatic advice to global leaders in business and technology. Anybody who works in our industry has heard of Forrester just like they would have heard of their competitors such as Gartner. They are fiercely independent in their case studies and truly have a hand in boosting -- or busting -- trends.

Forrester has been trying to understand the rich Internet applications (RIAs) design and development process. While many firms like Cynergy have been doing this sort of development for so long that it seems like it's old hat, the fact of the matter is that building real applications with technologies like Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, and Microsoft WPF is still pretty new and lots of companies are trying to get their heads around how to set up a successful workflow. After a lot of research, Forrester essentially concluded that Cynergy's approach -- and what we have learned by approaching our projects this way -- is the template from which other firms should be modeling their workflows, and Dave Wolf, Cynergy's vice president has blogged a nice summary with a link to a free copy of the report (which usually goes for $750).

Now, I want to be very careful with the messaging here. I still (barely) maintain a separate blog from Cynergy's blogs because I don't want to be a shill for everything we do -- at least, not on my blog. :) That said, one thing I've learned in the time I've been at Cynergy is just how hard it is to set up a repeatable workflow for designing and developing successful RIAs. And by "successful RIAs" I mean real, enterprise-level applications upon which you can build your business. Trust me, if this workflow were that easy, a lot more people would be doing it, and it's one thing to do something once but another thing entirely to continually "rinse and repeat" it successfully.

I encourage you to check out the report and compare how we're building RIAs with how you're building them (or would like to). At 7 pages, it won't take more than 15-20 minutes of your time but it could provide insights into a process that will save you hundreds of hours down the line. Oh yeah, and if you'd like to see the output of having a sound process, check out CynergyTV for some examples of real apps built to solve real business needs.

So why have I been so quiet for pretty much the last year outside of some token posts? Well, our re-launched CynergyTV experience holds the reason, and I'm glad I can finally talk about it.

So Dave, you mean you've spent the last year re-building CynergyTV? Nope, not quite. That was done by an extremely talented team here at Cynergy that worked extremely hard to not only refresh the user experience but deliver the content in professional audio/video quality supported by lots of hardware and software upgrades in our data center. Incidentally, when I say team, I mean it in the truest sense of the word -- our president, Carson Hager, recognizing that we could and should present our accomplishments better and allowing guys to stop being billable in order to get this done; our Marketing group spending hours in the recording studio choreographing the audio/video; our User Experience group iterating through lots of potential look and feel options until it was nailed; our Rich Interface team implementing the user experience in Adobe Flex; and finally, our Enterprise Services and Network Support teams building out the services tier to support the streaming video content (not a trivial task as I've come to learn), notifying the appropriate people when the Let's Talk form is submitted, and then setting up the appropriate infrastructure to host it all in our data center. If that sounds like a lot of work, that's because it was -- and it was well worth the investment.

So back to my opening question as to why I've been so quiet. Well, if you head over to CynergyTV (after reading this post, of course), you'll see that one of the showcases is for an application we built called Quickcomm Enterprise, a telecom expense management (TEM) tool for one of our clients, Quickcomm. It is this application that has basically been most of the last year of my life. As the Technical Lead on the project (which is a combination senior application architect and project manager here at Cynergy), I have spent over 1,600 hours working with my team here at Cynergy and the team at Quickcomm to deliver the most disruptive TEM solution on the market and I'm extraordinarily proud and privileged to have worked with both teams.

Since the completion of that project a short while back, I have since made the transition for being a Technical Lead to Business Development -- yes, the dreaded "sales" guy. I was ready for a new challenge beyond coding and the growth opportunities here at Cynergy made this transition both seamless and a no-brainer. So now I get to put on my sales hat: If you're interested in speaking with us about an idea you have or have an existing application you want re-invented to provide a better user experience, drop us a line and we're happy to speak with you further. And of course, if you have any feedback at all about the re-launched CynergyTV, feel free to leave a comment and I'll make sure it reaches the right people immediately.

Lastly, if you're a developer who wants to work with a phenomenally talented team that continually delivers cutting edge applications, we'd love to speak with you about career opportunities at Cynergy. It's a great time to be building RIAs and we'd love for you to be a part of it!

One reason (OK, there are many, I admit) why this blog has gone bare lately is because I try not to post announcements that every other similar blog in the world has already announced. It's a waste of my time and being one of 2,000 posts on the same exact subject doesn't tend to interest me (anymore). However, today's announcement by Adobe that they are working with Google and Yahoo! to enhance the search capabilities of SWF files (Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex applications in case you don't know what a SWF file is) is a long overdue breakthrough for the rich Internet application (RIA) trend, and is yet another validation of technologies such as Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight for delivering public-facing, web-based applications.

Let's get one thing right out there though: Not all RIAs should be searchable by search engines. Many (most?) RIAs are not and should not be simple ports of HTML-based web sites over to these newer technologies. That would be a waste of time and money. RIAs really excel for true web-based application development -- think applications like Picnik, an online photo editor. There isn't any real value in Google being able to index the photo editing application itself -- that's sort of like indexing Microsoft Word.

However, an Adobe Flex-based RIA that captures the latest new stories and visualizes them -- i.e., displaying the titles in little bubbles and having more popular stories have larger bubbles -- is right in the wheelhouse of the utility of this announcement. The ability for Google and Yahoo! to be able to crawl the SWF itself for the content rather than having to expose the raw RSS feed, XML file, or whatever the source is incredibly valuable. A social network RIA that allows search engines to index public profiles -- think LinkedIn -- is yet another example of where the convergence of the sticky user experience Flex provides and the search engine power of Google and Yahoo! is extremely powerful.

Lastly, and this is a lesser point yet one I still wish to make, I've been to trade shows where AJAX-focused companies tout their products. Interestingly, I invariably hear them say as part of their pitch that one of the big distinctions between AJAX applications and Adobe Flex or Microsoft Silverlight applications is that AJAX apps can be searched by the major search engines. Well, the competitive advantage is leveled today. I certainly am one who is curious to see how Adobe's announcement plays out in reality (name the last technical solution you saw that worked flawlessly on the first try), but hopefully the AJAX vs. Flex/Silverlight debate can start to move back to what really matters: the user experience.

As we announced in early January, Cynergy is a platinum sponsor of the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week.

Of note, our Vice President, Dave Wolf, will be giving a presentation in Room 2016 entitled Sticky Eyeballs: How UX Wins Market Share. Dave has spoken at numerous conferences, including last year's keynote at AJAXWorld, and he's extremely engaging and passionate about this topic, so I highly recommend you check it out if you're attending the show.

Also, Cynergy continues to push the envelope to deliver stunning, engaging rich internet applications (RIAs) using Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, and Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and we'd love to show you what we've been working on. We'll have a large booth (#721) in the expo hall where we will be showing off our latest applications and we'd love for you to stop by and say hello.

If you can't make the conference, don't forget that we still have demonstrations of some of our applications online via CynergyTV and we also have our Cynergy Labs R&D site up, which includes a demonstration of our wildly popular Project Maestro.

Hope to see you in San Franscisco!

Tap, Tap. Does this thing still work? :) I have been heads down on a major project for several months now and the delivery is in the next few weeks. I promise I'm still alive and rearing to get back into blogging on a more regular basis. I can't wait to be able to show off the killer app I've been working on!

I just came across a phenomenal blog post outlining the different channel/endpoint options available in BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services along with a breakdown of the pros and cons of using each connectivity option.

I'm not a fan of link dumps like this, but, honestly, anything I write will just be a regurgitation of this excellent summary, so I'm going to break my own rule and direct you to Damon Cooper's blog instead. If you're doing any work with BlazeDS or LCDS, you have to read and bookmark this post!

This has come up several times on the flexcoders mailing list and since it's such an important change, I thought I would post it to help make sure it doesn't get missed.

With the release of Flex Builder 3 Beta 2 on Adobe Labs, when you now compile your application, Flex Builder only generates a debug version of the SWF by default. However, and this is the part that is tripping people up, there is no -debug suffix on the generated SWF file, so it will be named as if it were the release version. The big difference is that the file size will be much larger. This last point has raised a red flag with some developers, who mistakenly believe that the latest beta actually increases the file size of the release version of their application.

Why did Adobe do this? Well, if you've built a good size Flex application, you'll have likely noticed that the compilation time grows dramatically to the point where you can sometimes literally go and get some coffee in the time that it takes to compile your application. Seriously. This is (partly) because, prior to Flex Builder 3 Beta 2, both a release version and a debug version of the application were being generated in the output directory, so you were waiting roughly twice the amount of time for Flex Builder to do its job (OK, the delay is not quite that linear, but you get the point). Further, if you're using the Modules feature, you had to write some hack-ish runtime code to determine which SWF file to use between development and production. But when you're developing your application, you usually don't care about the release version of the SWF, right? Well, to reduce this "wait time," only the debug version of the SWF is created, and since the file name will always remain the same, your hack-ish runtime code is no longer needed.

OK, so this is great while you're developing, but what happens when you're ready to release your application and really do want the release version of the SWF? Well, the latest beta introduced the Export Release Wizard. Found in the Project menu, this handy wizard will create the release version of your application in a bin-release directory by default. It is in this new output directory that you will find a clean, compressed version of your application all ready to deploy to your production environment.

Mike Morearty and Tim Buntel of Adobe give excellent explanations of this change and I encourage you to take a look at their posts if you would like more information. It's a change that makes sense, but if you're a long-time Flex developer, then it's definitely going to take some time to get used to remembering it.

If you're following the Adobe Flex 3 release cycle, it may seem as if there hasn't been an update since Beta 1 was released back in June. However, there are nightly builds of the Flex 3 (aka Moxie) SDK and compiler module available for download. Further, there are nightly builds available for the 2.0.1 release as well if you happen to be using that and are having issues. Each build comes with a set of release notes (which just look to be an export of the comments from the associated bug base cases).

Big Disclaimer: Please be aware that nightly builds are not as rigorously tested for stability by the Flex engineering team before release, which is why you don't see them labeled with the official "Beta" tags. In fact, it is possible that some nightly builds may not work at all. Further, the nightly builds do not include further support for Adobe AIR, so you'll need to stick with the June release if using that technology.

Installation is as simple as backing up the "moxie" directory in your current installation (which is located under the "sdks" directory in the installation root) and then overwriting its contents with the downloaded zip (I also clean my projects in Flex Builder via the Project -> Clean...) option to make sure there are no lingering issues.

Unfortunately, there are no nightly builds of the Flex Builder 3 IDE available, but the Flex 3 Planning Guide indicates that a refresh will be available in early October (I'm guessing at MAX, even though it's technically at the end of September).

Adobe released Hotfix 2 for Adobe Flex 2.0.1 and an update to the now re-named LiveCycle Data Services on Friday afternoon for immediate download. Of particular interest in this hotfix are a couple of fixes specifically for memory leaks in high-use components:

• Memory leak in Accordion.
• ViewStack containers are not GC'd - memory leak.

In a somewhat questionable move when you consider that this is just a hotfix, please be aware that some classes specific to the LiveCycle Data Services product (formerly Flex Data Services) have been moved out of the SDK and may break existing code, particularly for those of you who use the Cairngorm framework. Specifically, the Consumer class has been moved out of the SDK and Cairngorm makes a reference to it in the ServiceLocator class. Alistair McLeod has posted more details on the issue and expects to have an update of Cairngorm available as soon as possible. Further, Matt Chotin has posted that the main installers will not be updated with the hotfix bits due to the lack of desire to update all the documentation, so if you need to re-install Flex Builder or are trying it out for the first time, you'll need to make sure you run the Hotfix 2 installer separately. Lastly, the update is cumulative, so you will not need to install Hotfix 1 first.

Also released was an update to the Flex Data Services product line. Perhaps most importantly, Flex Data Services is now named LiveCycle Data Services, though the Adobe site looks to have been not made the appropriate site updates as of this posting. Further, the links in the updater's readme file to the main product page, Release Notes, Installation Instructions, and Known Issues currently redirects to the Adobe.com home page, so there's no way of knowing what was addressed in this update. This isn't the first time that Adobe has released an update to a product without updating the supporting web site references for a noticeable period of time (i.e., days), and hopefully the disconnect is addressed in the future, as it's frustrating to not be able to get to the information we need to make important decisions about installing and/or updating a product.

There's been a big discussion over the last few days across mailing lists and blogs about the impact of Microsoft's Silverlight announcement. The loyalists from both the Microsoft and the Adobe developer camps have come out of their respective wood works to debate Silverlight's merit vis-a-vis Flex.

What's interesting to me about this debate is that, once again, with the introduction of a new, potentially disruptive technology, it always winds up being an "either/or" discussion rather than an "and" discussion. That is, the debate can usually be distilled down to why one would use technology X rather than technology Y when the discussion should really be how one can use both technology X and technology Y. As a real-world example, simply replace "technology X" with "Adobe Flex" and replace "technology Y" with "AJAX" in the previous example and do a simple internet search. I mean, I thought that we, as developers, were in the business of delivering the best product to our employer/customer/client rather than a product that uses a specific technology simply because that's their personal preference? Did I miss something?

Dave Wolf, Vice President of Consulting at my employer, Cynergy Systems, wrote an excellent blog entry this morning entitled Wake up and see the Silverlight, which discusses just how phenomenally important Microsoft's Silverlight announcement is to the Rich Internet Application (RIA) industry. As he notes:

...[T]his week's news that Microsoft has officially named Sparkle - WPF/E as Silverlight and that it is clearly and finally on its way to market truly is the tipping point that establishes that RIA's are real, RIA's are the future and RIA's will shape the way we are going to be developing software for some time to come. Microsoft just justified and legitimized RIA. That is HUGE.

Dave hits the nail on the head in his entry, and I won't try and re-hash it here, as I wouldn't be able to do it justice.

However, my point is that this isn't about how Silverlight is going to squash Flex, or vice versa. This is about how the RIA industry just became the focal point for future development, and that's an incredibly important validation of Adobe Flex and, by extension, Apollo. By recognizing that the equivalent of the Adobe Flash Player is the future of delivering engaging web applications, Microsoft validated the Player as that delivery platform. Hence, they built their own.

Did Microsoft declare that Adobe is officially in their cross-hairs? Absolutely. Is the first release of Silverlight going to knock the snot out of Adobe Flex? Absolutely not. But let's be honest here -- for anybody that used either Flex 1.0 or Flex 1.5, those initial releases left a lot to be desired themselves, so let's not be so quick to bash Silverlight as a failure waiting to happen. It'll likely have its warts, much the same as Flex 1.x did. But, in true Microsoft form, once they get that second or third release out and their development community on board, the RIA space is going to have at least two major players from which developers will be able to deliver rich, engaging applications. I don't know about you, but I couldn't be more excited!

Have a look at Dave's entry to get a more thorough analysis of the impact of the Silverlight announcement. Don't worry Adobe fans, Flex isn't going anywhere. In fact, I think it got just a whole lot stronger!

So Adobe quietly released an update to the Flash Player late last week on April 12th. Funny enough, I only knew about it because a co-worker of mine was prompted to upgrade his Flash Player when he went to run an application. However, I've come across a couple of issues with this release that I think are worth noting publicly in case you should run into them. Neither of them are show-stoppers, but number 2 especially is annoying.

1. You'll need to download the latest uninstaller (dated 11/14/2006) to get rid of the version 9.0.28 bits. You can likely just install the upgrade over an existing 9.0.x installation, but I know in the past that Macromedia-now-Adobe has recommended first uninstalling the existing Flash Player before installing the new version, so I tend to follow that to be safe. I had an uninstaller from the 9.0.16 release, and it threw a runtime error during the uninstall process for the 9.0.28 Player because a method was missing from one of the installed DLLs (sorry I can't be more helpful with the specific message because I resolved the problem before capturing a snapshot).
2. This problem I have yet to solve. I am using the Eclipse plugin version of Flex Builder 2.0.1 with the SDK Hotfix 1 installed and every time I go to launch one of my Flex applications, I now receive this lovely error message:

What really annoys me about this error is that it still launches the application without issue using the 9.0.45 Flash Player, but there's no way of turning it off via a "Remember this decision" error, so I now have to Click the "Yes" button every time!

If I happen to come across a solution to number 2 or if Adobe happens to post a workaround, I'll post an update back here.

One things that's annoying with Eclipse by default is that you have to install your plugins in the root directory of the IDE installation. The problem with that is if you need to run multiple IDEs because of plugin compatibility issues with whatever you're developing, you have to re-install all of your plugins or go through the built-in update mechanism to re-set everything up for each installation. That's really annoying.

A little over a year and a half ago, I stumbled across a posting on Javalobby that gave a step-by-step explanation as to how you can manage multiple Eclipse IDE installations. Using this approach, having to use multiple IDEs (or even just updating between, say, Eclipse 3.1 and 3.2) doesn't mean having to re-install your plugins for each one. I've been using this setup for a really long time now and have never run into issues with it.

Eclipse is a killer IDE that I still can't believe is free. Now you can enjoy using many of the rich plugins available without having to worry about re-installing everything between IDE updates!

This blog is becoming awfully barren as of late, and, despite my best efforts to stay active, it has been close to impossible to post entries due to the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day. However, I'm incredibly proud to finally show off what keeps me and my co-workers at Cynergy so busy.

Today we launched Cynergy TV, an interactive Flex-based channel where we will be publishing all sorts of showcases, flex tips, tricks, etc., that we hope will benefit the Adobe Flex community. As an employee at Cynergy, I'm incredibly excited to see where we take this, and I definitely plan on contributing as we move forward with the initiative.

So what's this about "Adobe Flex at its best?" Well, "episode 1" showcases some of our most engaging applications. I've noticed several flexcoders and blog posts from people who don't think Adobe Flex is verstaile-enough to be taken seriously or is limiting in its design. I simply disagree, and I hope that these showcases will provide some inspiration for you to create some truly interactive solutions. Our showcases really exhibit Adobe Flex at its best. From ColdFusion to Java to .NET, we've created high-impact solutions that integrate with all sorts of back-end systems.

Are you a developer who has worked with Flex or AJAX on some level and is interested in joining the industry leader in Rich Internet Applications? Shoot us an e-mail with your resume. We really want to hear from you. As it says all over our corporate web site, "Let's Talk." ;)

I've mentioned previously that I'm a fan of using the awesome Flash Tracer plugin with Firefox to debug my Adobe Flex applications. However, the latest Flash Player release by Adobe, 9.0.28 as of this writing, broke the plugin.

For a while, I just downgraded to the 9.0.16 version of the Flash Player that comes with the Flex Builder installer because that worked without issue. However, tonight I decided to investigate a bit further what exactly was breaking the plugin. As it turns out, it's relatively simple. To make the Flash Player compatible with Microsoft Windows Vista, Adobe changed the location of the flashlog.txt file that the debugger player writes to. It can now generally be located in this directory (on Windows machines...I don't have a Mac to test with unfortunately):

C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\Logs

Make sure a file call flashlog.txt exists in that directory (if not, just create an empty file with that name in Notepad), open up the Flash Tracer plugin, select the Options button in the lower right of the pane, and paste in the new location in the "Select output file" box, making sure that flashlog.txt is appended to the end. Now restart Firefox and you should be all set. I have had no issues with the 9.0.28 release since this change.

I honestly can't say enough about the productivity increase this plugin has afforded me since coming across it. If you're having problems, using the above instructions should sort them out.

Update: My co-worker, Keun Lee, passed on some helpful information to me with regard to getting the Mac version of the plugin to work and has given me permission to re-print it here:

[T]he tracer will tell you where to set the location of where your flash player debug log file is located. You'll need to be careful as the location is specified in a pretty non standard format.

Hope that helps out the Mac people!

This Security Bulletin was just posted to the Adobe site regarding a security exploit in the Flash Player. From the bulletin:

Adobe has provided an update to resolve vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player. These vulnerabilities would allow remote attackers to modify HTTP headers of client requests and conduct HTTP Request Splitting attacks. The flexibility of the attack varies depending on the type of web browser being used.

Apparently, Flash Player 7, 8, and 9 are all affected, but there is only an update available for version 9 at the moment. I should also note that the fix has been marked as "Important," which is one step below their highest severity level of "Critical," so definitely look into upgrading if possible.

For any Flash or Flex developers who rely on the Debug version of the player for development, Adobe unfortunately makes it hard to find the updated Players on their site, so here you go.

So there's this incredibly handy Firefox plugin out there called Flash Tracer that I have been using to develop my Flex applications. Essentially, it lets you view any debugging output (i.e., trace() statements) in a side panel of your Firefox browser during runtime without having to use the debug SWF file. Coupled with the tip that my co-worker Andy Trice posted a while back regarding using the ObjectUtil class to debug your code, this is an incredibly efficient and clean way to see what's going on in your code at run-time (for any ColdFusion developers reading this, it's the equivalent of a cfdump tag). I just keep the Flash Tracer panel open all the time because I use it so much.

However, one thing I have been noticing is that a lot of the commercial web sites that use SWFs to deliver some of their content (i.e, user polls, etc.) are leaving lots of trace() statements in their code, apparently on the assumption that since the user is not running the debug version of the SWF, they can't see the debug output. Well, that's no longer a safe assumption, and while I haven't seen any security exposures as yet, it does emphasize the point that you should always strip out your debugging code before deploying any SWFs to production. One site that I'll keep anonymous has so much debug junk in their code that it practically crashes my browser when I try and load their page!

Anyway, just keepin mind that debugging statements can be viewed outside of the debug SWF, and you'll be all set.

We've decided to use Cairngorm at work on a project that I'm on. While I had always known about Cairngorm via the blogosphere and the flexcoders mailing list, and even read the excellent six-part Cairngorm series written by Steven Webster, I was still a bit hazy as to how to actually code an application myself.

To that end, I want to point you to the excellent CairngormDocs.org site that was recently set up by the Cairngorm Documentation Group. While there are links to sample apps and the API documentation, I specifically wanted to highlight the interactive Cairngorm Diagram Explorer, which shows a visual flow as well as the supporting code sample to execute that part of the diagram. It has really helped solidify the process of broadcasting, handling, and sending a response to a user gesture via Cairngorm.

One tip though...do yourself a favor and save the SWF to your desktop and run it in the standalone Flash Player rather than through your browser. Doing it that way will allow you to view the diagram on the left of the page while displaying the related code snippet on the right side.

Changing jobs, a week's vacation to Mexico, and spinning up with my new company has made this blog awfully bare lately. However, I hope to get back in the saddle by posting some tips and tricks that I've learned while diving head first into Flex 2 development. To that end, here's a helpful tip if you decide to use the Cairngorm framework in your project with Flex Builder.

First off, it's important to make sure you have the Cairngorm SWC file properly added to your project. Since that's beyond the scope of this tip, you can check out Joe Rinehart's step-by-step instructions for doing so. After double-checking that I had the SWC properly imported, I couldn't get the Cairngorm-specific code to appear when I referenced the appropriate paths, and I certainly didn't want to have to drop the source code into my project. After a lot of digging, I was able to solve my issue by doing the following:

1. Right-click on the project in which you're using Ciarngorm and select the Properties option at the bottom of the context menu.
2. The fourth option in the dialog box that appears is the Flex Build path option. Select that to switch to that view.
3. Click the Library path tab to switch to the SWC in the project build path.
4. Highlight the Cairngorm SWC file and click the Up button at the right to move it to the top of the library path.
5. Click the OK button and wait for the project to re-compile.
6. Optional: You may need to close the project and re-open it to get the highlighting to work.

Truthfully, I don't know why I had issues getting the hinting to work. I dropped in the Cairngorm 2.1 SWC and it just didn't want to pop up any of the hints for me. If you're having this problem, hopefully the above steps with resolve your issue.

It is with incredible pride and a renewed energy that I'm happy to announce that I have officially accepted a position with Cynergy Systems starting later this month! In my new role, I will be a consultant working on Flex 2 applications integrating with Java backends. I have been on "Cloud Nine" since late Friday when I received the offer, and my brain is about ten miles ahead of my fingers as I type this out, so if I'm all over the map with this post, please hang with me!

Cynergy has quickly established itself as a leader in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) revolution, and I couldn't sit on the sidelines and watch while they had all the fun. Their collective talent and passion absolutely blew me away, and there was no second-guessing once I accepted the offer. You can see some examples of their expertise over on their blogs and the flexcoders mailing list (hint: search for "Cynergy" or "Dave Wolf" or "Andrew Trice" for some sample posts). In short: these guys know their stuff, and I'm hoping to uphold that level of expertise.

You may have noticed in the opening paragraph that I noted that I will be working with Java. Those of you who know me (or have read my other posts) know that I am a longtime ColdFusion developer (I just hit my ten year mark recently). This change means that I will be stepping away from ColdFusion for a little bit while I diversify my skill set with Java and Flex 2. I'm a bit sad, a bit nervous, but, most of all, I'm incredibly excited to be broadening my base and getting into areas of work that are new and challenging. Diversifying my skill set is something that I've been wanting to do for years, but just never found the time to do outside of reading books and playing around with personal projects. And while I firmly believe that ColdFusion will gain more and more traction down the road as more companies recognize its beautiful integration with Flex 2, the reality is that the lion's share of current Flex RIA work is using a Java backend. Further, it has been suggested they are open to eventually bring in more Flex/ColdFusion work down the road at Cynergy, so don't think I'm leaving the CF world forever. I look at it as a hiatus while I go cut my teeth with Java. Also, this site along with some other personal projects will continue to use ColdFusion as its backend as well.

OK, so I mentioned something in the title about the value of CFUNITED. Well, if not for the friends that I made down at the conference over the last two years, this opportunity likely would not have come to fruition. See, two years ago, I was fortunate to meet Adam Wayne Lehman (who is now a ColdFusion specialist for the North American Sales Team at Adobe). We have kept in touch since then, and, at this past conference in June, he introduced me to a good friend and then-co-worker of his, Cliff Meyers. We had a great time at the conference, and then caught up a few weeks ago. Cliff went to work for Cynergy just after CFUNITED and raved about them. At the same time, I was hitting a ceiling at my current job and decided to throw my candidacy out there to see what would happen. Fast forward to last Friday when the official offer was extended, and here we are! While I agree with Sean that there are more to conferences than just the networking, I have to say that there's no way that this opportunity would have come to pass as quickly as it did without CFUNITED. So if you're ever on the fence as to the value of this conference (or other conferences in your field), I'm happy to be a case study in their benefits! It has changed my life and I'm incredibly excited at the opportunities that lie ahead.

I'll be starting there towards the end of this month while I properly transition out of my current job. It may or may not be quiet on here until then!

I was reading through last week's eWeek magazine and came across an excellent case study highlighting the power of the Adobe® Flex 2™ platform. Admittedly, I usually only skim through case studies because they're mostly positioned as "product X is the greatest" and is usually filled with enough buzzwords to fill an entire "buzzword bingo" card (and this one has a bunch).

However, I did take notice of one particular aspect of this case study's implementation that I think gets glossed over in the Flex 2 vs. AJAX decision-making process: visualizing your data. (And let's be honest for a second: while I know you'll hear many who say that you can use both Flash and AJAX together, including the Adobe brass, that doesn't seem to be happening in most applications that I've seen (with perhaps a smattering of notable exceptions); most are in one camp or the other.)

While developers will likely note that the cross-platform features of the Flex 2 platform are its biggest strength, I respectfully disagree. That's an incredible convenience, but it's not why I'm going to use it in my work. See, I'm of the school of thought that I need to present my users with the best experience possible based on the presented requirements. Humans are, by nature, visual beings. If presented with a table of data or a chart that presents that same data, a user is going to more quickly and efficiently draw his or her conclusion from the chart virtually every time. It's how our brains work. I think of the old cliche that "a picture is worth a thousand words." That may sound trite, but cliches become cliches because they're true. To that end, the most differentiating feature of the Flex 2 platform, to me, is the charting suite. The Flex 2 charting components allow users to visualize their data in ways that previously required third-party vendors and lots of supplemental code to interact with it. Andrew Tahvildary, vice president of development and Primavera Services (the subject of this case study) notes that, with Flex 2's charting components, "...we were able to use a combination of charts and data grids to provide multidimensional views over a large set of analytical data." I just don't know of many AJAX libraries that come out-of-the-box with this capability, and at Flex 2's price point.

Have you seen the Adobe Flex 2 Component Explorer yet (Adobe Flash Player 9 required)? There are 16 default chart types, and all of them are extensible so that you can customize a chart to your needs. Want to see what a real-world implementation of the charting components might look like? Have a look at the Dashboard example (Adobe Flash Player 9 required) and watch how selecting data slices in one part of the application affects the charts in the other areas of the application without pages refreshes or xmlHTTP requests. The power to visualize data sets, whether simple or complex, is a mostly overlooked feature when building applications, and the Adobe Flex 2 charting suite provides you with the ability to make your users much more productive at minimal development cost.

Have a look!

Sometime over the last couple of weeks, I officially passed the "10 year" mark using ColdFusion. It's not like it's my birthday, so the exact date escapes me, but I remember that it was about a month or so into my sophomore year at George Washington University that I stumbled upon this relatively new scripting language that made building dynamic web sites easy. The rest, as they say, is history. OK, enough nostalgia.

Just over a week ago, Rupesh Kumar, an engineer on the ColdFusion development team in India, posted a great tip for handling J2EE sessions with cookies disabled. Since my company's site requires cookies to be enabled to work (it's part of the service agreement since we're a subscription-based data provider), I haven't had to really worry about appending the session token to URLs. That being said, Rupesh's tip for seamlessly handling J2EE sessions in either situation is a nice little gem, and one I plan to start employing as I move forward. And the best part about it? The solution is a function that is already built into the ColdFusion language!

The URLSessionFormat() function is smart enough to determine whether or not cookies are enabled in the client's browser, and then append the session token (in the proper format) to the URL that is passed as its argument. Here's an example:

Here's the output with cookies enabled:

And here's the same exact code snippet with cookies disabled (tested using the awesome Web Developer Extension for Firefox):

How cool is that? Most importantly, notice that the jsessionid value is properly appended to the URL using a semi-colon. A lot of developers simply append the jsessionid as if it were just another URL parameter ("&jessionid=xxxxx"), but, as Rupesh points out in his post (and as it came up on a cf-talk thread recently), you must use the ";jessionid=xxxxx" format after the file name for the web server to properly process the request. Simply using the URLSessionFormat() function takes care of that for you.

It's amazing... Ten years in and I'm still learning new tricks all the time!

Via Marco Casario's blog, I noted that Adobe has signed an agreement with O'Reilly Media "to co-publish and co-brand books and online learning resources for developers creating applications with technologies such as Adobe Flex, ActionScript, and Adobe Flash and Flash Video." -- but not ColdFusion. Sigh.

As a long-time ColdFusion developer, this announcement is one more point of frustration with the fact that ColdFusion seems to miss out on the larger audience exposure that its siblings seem to be enjoying. While this announcement seems to be in the context of promoting "Web 2.0" technologies (a Tim O'Reilly-coined term that I absolutely loathe, by the way), this seems like the type of agreement where letting ColdFusion ride the coattails of the Adobe Flex 2 marketing strategy could be a win-win for both sides.

Why? Well, you can't do a whole lot with Adobe Flex 2 if you don't have a server-side technology to do things like database querying, authorization/authentication, etc. It's a presentation layer technology (the "View" in the Model-View-Controller pattern for those wishing to be buzzword-compliant), and Adobe has been preaching for months now that the single easiest way to integrate Adobe Flex 2 with your back-end (the "Model") is via ColdFusion (in this case, the "Controller"). So why not add ColdFusion MX into this agreement and subsequently provide resources for showing just how smoothely integrated the two technologies are. You'd have the expertise of the Adobe ColdFusion team providing high-quality examples while the O'Reilly team provides the author/publishing/conference resources to expose this seamless integration to the masses. In return, O'Reilly gets an extremely passionate ColdFusion development community to support their efforts.

You almost literally can't find a competent developer who hasn't heard of or used an O'Reilly-published book -- they're everywhere and are usually excellent resources. While I know that they decided a while back not to publish a ColdFusion MX 7 book due to sluggish sales of the 6.1 version, there could have been alternative resources published with this agreement that might have focused even a small part of the spotlight on the power and ease of developing with ColdFusion (i.e., O'Reilly-backed articles, samples, etc.).

Adobe currently seems to have their marketing engine squarely focused on Adobe Flex 2 and ActionScript 3, as well they should. I just hope that the same zeal with which they're pursuing the growing rich internet application development community is equalled or surpassed with next year's ColdFusion 8, aka Scorpio, release.

Recently, I've been wrestling with the task of migrating our current source control solution from Microsoft® Visual SourceSafe® over to Subversion. Now, I know there are many of you who are cringing at the mere mention of using VSS. However, until recently, it has been an extremely stable solution for our source control needs. And hey, at least we have a source control solution, right?!

Our needs are changing though, and our team is clearly outgrowing the feature set that SourceSafe provides. From directory-level branching to better binary file compression and storage to concurrent editing, Subversion clearly fulfills our needs...and it's free to boot. I keep my personal files in a Subversion repository at home, so I'm familiar with it when working on one machine. However, now I need to set it up for a couple of our departments (we got some non-IT departments into version control!) and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do it. The requirements are fairly straightforward:

• All access will be internal. In fact, no public access will be granted to anybody. However, not all users will have an account on the repository's server.
• Must be able to fully migrate the existing VSS repository to Subversion.
• Must be able to support roughly 15-20 users concurrently accessing the repository. There may be more user than that overall, but that's the targeted number of actual concurrent use.
• Must be able to lock down certain projects such that users must authenticate themselves when trying to access the files.

OK, now that the requirements have been stated, I need your help figuring out the best approach.

First and foremost, where to physically put the repository. We have a shiny new development box (running Red Hat Linux 4.0) for our team with tons and tons of free space. I was thinking about creating a partition there dedicated to housing the repository. At the same time, I'm hesitant to put the repository on the same box as where most of the development is going to be taking place (we all have our own JRun/ColdFusion instances on this box, so we're separate, but sharing the same overall resources). I just don't trust all the banging that the box will be taking to house our core file repository, even though we'll be taking proper backups on a nightly basis. Should I phsyically separate the repository from the dev box?

With regard to the network protocol, from my research, it seems like the best setup is to install Apache on the server and manage the file access and user autentication using the mod_dav_svn module. However, this feels like overkill to an extent. I have the excellent book Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion 2nd Ed. by Mike Mason (and published by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt of Pragmatic Programmer fame), so I'm aware of the pros and cons of each of the protocol options (svnsserve, svnserve+ssh, and Apache). However, I'm looking for other real-world opinions on each, based on the stated requirements.

With regard to migrating the existing VSS repository, this is a biggie. The problem I have with a lot of the current presentations about using Subversion is that they all assume that you're starting with a clean slate. However, we have literally years worth of comments, tags, labels, etc., that are an absolute "must keep." To that end, I have been monitoring the open source project Vss2Svn with the hopes of using their solution for migrating our repository. However, it doesn't look quite ready for prime time just yet. Has anybody succesfully used it by chance? I also found a solution from Polarion called Subversion Pro that looks to be free for at least the migration aspects of the product. Has anybody used this one?

Lastly, are there any tips on the best way to set up authorization/authentication? Anything else I'm overlooking? We're currently using the amazing FogBugz project management system from Fog Creek software (it integrates with virtually all source code management systems, which is great), so we don't need things like Trac.

Thanks for any insights.

I've mentioned before that I'm a big fan of Joel Spolsky. He just "gets" how to run a technology company and treat his Fog Creek employees. Well, he has just set up a new Jobs site that essentially aims to take the annoying marketing and recruiting out of job hunting, while providing high-quality tech listings. Are you tired of vague job listings that ask if you want to work for a "well established, leading online company," but get no more information than that until you talk with a recruiter? Well, apparently, so is Joel (and me too, for that matter).

He's not aiming for it to supplant the gi-normous job boards like Monster or HotJobs. Rather, his goal is to keep it as a niche site where you can get the real job details for a given position without any hassle. Unique features include:

• For candidates, the site is entirely free, including not having to register for anything.
• Listings expire after 3 weeks. As he notes, most candidates don't apply for jobs that have been posted for longer than that.
• All job posts must disclose the company at which the position is located. No "Company Confidential" listings are allowed. Since there are no recruiters involved, you can do all the research you want for a position without being hassled.
• For a small $350 fee, an employer can post listings on the site. In comparison to the 15%-20% of base salary that recruiting fees that many recruiters charge employers for placing a candidate, this is chump change.
• He offers his standard 90-day money back guarantee. If you don't find anybody to fill the position, hire the wrong candidate, if they quit just after starting, etc., you get your $350 back unquestioned. (Charities and non-profits can get in touch with their customer support reps about reduced fees.)
• The job posting form contains checkboxes for answering each of the 12 questions of the Joel Test, which is his measure of the quality of a software team. This is a non-marketing way to really gauge the type of team you might be joining.

Since this is an experiment on his part, you'll note that there is no search functionality or saved profiles or anything beyond the basic listings. (This might expand if the site proves to be successful.) However, from Google to Six Apart to BEA to MySQL, there are a number of big-name company jobs currently listed, along with a lot of other smaller companies who I have seen are doing some great work.

I'm not sure how the site will hold up, if only because recruiters will always find a way to post seemingly legitimate job listings, and there doesn't seem to be a screening process for who is posting the job. That being said, I love the idea of side-stepping recruiters with no tech background who are seemingly the gatekeepers to a lot of great jobs.

Here's Joel's official announcement.

Has Adobe JRun finally gone up to software heaven (if you believe in that sort of stuff) to party with Generator and Spectra? Well, there's no definitive statement from Adobe, but this very quietly posted TechNote about the JRun 4.5 Beta status sure makes it sound that way. This sentence in particular is ominous:

Next steps for JRun and where it fits in the product calendar continue to be under discussion at the Product Manager level and such evaluation will be communicated to customers as soon as it becomes available.

I've felt for a few years now that JRun should have been end-of-life'd (is that even English?) as a standalone product. Frankly, it never has been terribly well supported (community-wise), and there was even one time where I called in a web connector bug and the engineer who literally wrote the code didn't understand what her code was doing!

I don't think it should be adandoned entirely though. Rather, I feel that any fixes and/or enhancements should be in the context of making complementary server products such as Adobe ColdFusion MX, Adobe LiveCycle, and Adobe Flex Data Services operate better.

If this is the end of the road for JRun, so long, and thanks. It's been a good (and sometimes frustrating) experience!