Pushing data to Flex clients with Coldfusion event gateways with demo.

A few months ago I started looking at how I could "push" data from Coldfusion to Flex with Live cycle. I was able to get datagrids to sync among Flex client's but it took some serious modifications to several of the XML files and started as one of the code generated master pieces in Flexbuilder. Recently I decided to revisit this and approached this using event gateways. I started with this as a base: João Fernandes - Flex and CF.

So what is generally one of the most fun things to write, yep a chat application. I made some modifications to allow pressing enter to send data and a few bits of logic to determine what what to display. I also thought it would be fun to have a "Page me" button. This idea came from the widgets where you can embed mini versions of MSN and AIM into your website so people can chat with you without needing a long sign in process.

The best part of this is that the messages are being sent over rtmp so the data is actually pushed to the client. open 2 browsers and watch how quick the messages are sent and received. As this is setup to run over port 2048 if you are behind a strict firewall where the port is blocks it will automatically fall back to polling (every 3 seconds) over port 80.



I put some code in to eliminate people spamming me more then one per 10 mins. All this can be achieved on CF8 ( I think 7 aswell ) standard edition.



Code is available here: View Source

There is alot more that can be achieved but this is a simple example of how Coldfusion can push data to Flex.

Thanks to João Fernandes great blog and Dave Watts Max 2008 session for answering some of my questions.

The Gateway: