Flex Layout: Absolute or Relative Positioning, Which is Better?

In Adobe Flex, there are at least 3 distinct ways of laying out (positioning) the elements of your application:

Absolute – using X and Y coordinates Relative – using nested HBox and VBox controls Constraints – using element attributes such as “top” and “bottom” to anchor controls within parents

How do you know which [...]

Good Adobe Flex Design is Hard to Find

But not if you look on Theresaneil’s Weblog. This is a great summary of Flex tools and applications sporting modern non-flex design.

Here is another website (merhl.com) that features a lot of great Flex designs.

Flex 3 Fade Transition Requires Embedded Fonts

I recently added a fade transition to a Flex app and was surprised to find that the Flex elements faded nicely as expected, but the text… the data of the application, failed to fade in or out. Needless to say, this looked quite strange.

After a bit of searching I discovered that I needed [...]

Flex Debugging Stopped Working – How to Fix

About a week ago, when I upgraded to Firefox 3 from Firefox 2, Flex Builder debugging completely stopped working without a blip on the Flex Builder radar. Trying to debug an app resulted in nothing out of the ordinary except that no debugging information was displayed. Breakpoints were ignored without a peep. Frustration!

I [...]

Flex 3 Validation – Make up your mind Adobe

Just found this funny bit of text in the Adobe Flex 3 docs regarding form validation. These 2 paragraphs appear in this exact order in the docs:

By using Flex validators, you eliminate the need to transmit data to and receive error messages back from the server, which improves the overall responsiveness of [...]

CFObjective 2008 – Full Google Notebook

Here is a link to my full CFObjective() 2008 Google Notebook. It has a little nicer format than the BlogCFC posts.

CFObjective() 2008 Google Notebook

CFObjective 2008 – Day 3 – Clustering and Distributing ColdFusion Applications

Mike Brunt – Alagad

Clustering is becoming more and more important in the CF world. Think about it from the beginning. For example, think about paths, locale issues, etc. Software Clustering (Java, CF, JRun), Hardware Clustering Consideration, Hardware and Software Clustering, Load Testing Different Algorithms. Simply going from 1 server to 2 servers in [...]

CFObjective 2008 – Day 3 – Cairngorm for ColdFusion Developers

Building Flex apps using Cairgorm

Why does Cairngorm seem so difficult? Tends to over explain the patterns in CG. Forget that and just focus on easily-repeatable approach. MATE is another potential Flex framework to check out.

DL from labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Cairngorm. Add it to the Flex Project Build Path > Add SWC.

The FrontController determines where [...]

CFObjective 2008 – Day 3 – Prototyping Apps with Flex

WireFrame Viewer/Editor 5.0 from RIA Forge – Pretty good wireframing tool, but it requires Fusebox 5. Still though, this could be really big for us. We might want to try it out.

Styling vs. Skinning Flex apps. Styling will keep them looking like Flex apps. You can, however, completely skin Flex apps by using [...]

Flex 2.0 and CF Integration

Overview of Flex

Flex 2.0 SDK > (compiles) > SWF Flex Builder (SDK, Design View, Debugging, Wizards) > (compiles) > SWF Flex Data Services

Flex replaces HTML.  Still need server side logic.  CF provides database services.