Adobe MAX day 3

Well I am back home and the excitement has begun to die down. I’ve begun running trough my notes on new idea’s and products to try out and my wife is probably sick of me talking about Adobe, Coldfusion and Flex for a while and I’m actually looking forward to heading back to work.
Day 3 was still a fun day where I participated in the Coldfusion/Flex/Live cycle lab. Some of what we went over I was already currently using but I did pick up few tricks one of those was that while there is a connection limit to the included LCDS services in CF 8 standard the limit is around 1000 which is more then I need for the current app, but still good to know.
I spent some more time at the CF Unconference where I sat in on the CF Uber panel which will be on the CF Conversations podcast. I also got to meet Joe Rinehart the creator of Model Glue. He talked about Broadchoice and the technologies used. He actually spoke a bit on Groovy which I already have been thinking or looking at but after some of the quick demos I intend to take a closer look. I also sat in on a session where I was introduced to the webserver stress tool. A mid priced web stress testing tool. http://www.paessler.com/webstress/download ( I’m sorry I forgot the name of the presenter ).
I also went to the very last session on what’s new in Flex 4 and there are some nice new things, the integration of Flex Unit for one, 2 way data binding ie

testInput.text ="{@myValue}"

the separation so a designer can do there thing and the dev there’s, the tighter CF intergration and more.
I hope I get to attend next year and catch up with everyone I met but I definitely intend to keep in touch with you all.

My new look macbook courtesy of the CF Unconference :)
I'm not a sticker guy but I'm proud to show this one.

Adobe Max 2008 Day 2

Well it’s the end of Day 2 at 2008 Adobe MAX and I have to say I was impressed. I really like the look of the new ColdFusion IDE “Bolt” and it really looks like its gong to work well with CF9 and Flex, which to me is a huge plus. Ive been using CF Eclipse for a while now but a true ColdFusion extension its going to be great. The ability to type datasoure=” and have a lookup to available data sources is really nice. The right click and generate a CRUD from the IDE looks like what we can do in Flxbuilder already but is still nice although with all the noise of Hibernate ORM integration it surprises me that we didn’t see right click of a table, from a datasource and a CRUD generation using hibernate and CF. Although Ben did mention “Other frame works” I can only assume this is still to come.
I’m also really looking forward to Adobe Catalyst ( formerly Thermo ) as I’d really like to be able to produce some more applications that don’t look like standard Flex apps.
I attended 2 labs High Powered ColdFusion by Dave Watts and Extending Flex components with Matt Boles. Both were great sessions but it was the Flex session which in the first 10 mins I saw a solution that would help me cut down code by fixing some hacks I used to get around things I wasn’t sure you could do.
Lastly the sneak peaks did show a server side implementation of actionscript as a .sas file that is compiled on the fly and includes but the usual Flex code for displaying the data and the server side code for retrieving the data from the data base. This is interesting but I don’t think we will see this available for some time as currently CF and AS are a really nice fit.
Bolt information/Beta signup: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Bolt
(shame about the .php ? )
Oh and I forgot to mention there are plugin’s for Flex support into Visual studio 2008: http://www.ensemble.com/

Adobe Max Day 1

Well MAX is definatly bigger then I initially thought. It was the biggest turn out at any MAX event topping 5000 attendees. The opening session was full of Flash and the recent Flash 10 release ( including many mentions of AIR 1.5 ) and even included a visit from Arnie’s wife Maria Shriver ( First Lady of California ). Strangely absent was any news of ColdFusion although Flash being Adobe ‘s best known product ( other then Acrobat ) its not surprising that’s what they focused on.
I was almost sad as they talked about Flash on the iPhone ( as I just got a new Blackberry ) and while they say they don’t have it yet I highly doubt Adobe haven’t done there part and actually have it running on the device.
I was impressed with the CF un-conference and got to meet, in person Ben Forta, Ray Camden, Sean Corfield and Brian Meloche.
I finished the night with the Meet the CF team and the CMFL BoF’s which was great to meet the team and hear Ben give away some hint’s relating to CF9. Not really hints but anything cool he refused to answer I took as a hint ? It was great to hear Gert from Railo and other members of the committee discuss the standardisation of core cfml functions as choice gives freedom and I hope the 2 big open source CFML engines ( Railo and Open Blue Dragon ) can help promote cfml as a alternative to php.
I’m really looking forward to tomorrow key notes with Ben regarding Centaur.

Oh and I got this neat CF shirt.

Adobe Max 2008

From the first moment I learnt of Adobe Max ( Vegas 2006 ) I wanted to go. It wasn't until this year that I became as big a fan Adobe due to a position change and working with Flex and Coldfusion. San Fran is a gret city its the second time I have been here and the weather is just great. I'm really excited and can't wait to see/meet some of my internet idols and look forward to news regarding Coldfusion 9 and Flex 4.

See you there.

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Looping over objectElements in an arraycollection

I asked a simple question on flexcoders today:
I have a simple array collection. Ie. a ColdFusion query being passed back to Flex eg:

select  firstName, lastName, age
from    person

So in flex it's:

Ac[0].firstName = Paul  ect

But I don't know ac[0].columName so is there a way to loop over the properties of the object at ac[0]?
Thanks to Fotis Chatzinikos who game me this answer.

for (var key:String in object)
{
data = object[key] ;
}

where object is your arraycollection item ie. ac[0]

This was a simple solution that I just overlooked. I’m going to mock up an example of what I was using this for in the next few days.