June of last year he showed us a "Simple" collaboration example using Google Maps, Flex 2, Flash Media Server, and Ajax.

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There was a lot of focus the last couple of days on Adobe Elements express as well as the release of the Linux AIR Alpha but the release of Alpha 3 Flex Builder slipped by relatively unnoticed (at least by me).

Some new features have been added but I still have some bad news...the list of unsupported features is, in my opinion, still pretty big.

Unsuported Features

• Design view
• States view
• Refactoring
• Data Wizards
• Cold Fusion - Data Services Wizard
• Web Services introspection
• Profiler

It's still in the Alpha stages and I would expect that most of the unsuported features will be available before moving from Alpha to Beta. At least I hope so for the sake of the Linux developers. I personally don't think I could work without Design view. This new Alpha release added the ability to build and debug AIR applications as well as bug fixes.

Happy Coding...

I signed up last week to be included in the Beta of SearchMe and received my invite Thursday.

If you haven't heard of SearchMe it is a Flash (probably Flex) based visual search engine. I gave it a test drive and while there is abviously room to improve (there is always room to improve) The basic functionality is pretty good.

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I'm a bit late on this but I figure I will jump on the Adobe Photoshop Express Online edition band wagon as well.

The entire site is a flash based application (probably written using Flex 3). It looks like they spent a bit of time with the user experience folks as the signup process as well as the overall usability of the site is smooth and intuitive.

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I've been thinking of buying the Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source book but naturally there isn't any user reviews yet.

Has anyone bought the book yet? If so what are you thoughts on the content is it worth $60? I planned on buying the book as a supplement in my studies towards the Flex Certification.

Thanks for your comments.

I have been thinking for some time now of persuing a certification in Flex and would love to hear from those of you out there that are Flex Certified how you prepared for the exam.

I am particularly interested in which, if any, books you used in preparation for the exam.

For the Coldfusion Certification exam I used Ben Forta's study guide to round out my preparation for the exam. I haven't been able to find anything quite like that for Flex so your suggestions are appreciated.

I am attending the first Munich CFUG meeting of 2008 on Wednesday 12 March at 18:00. The company I work for has graciously donated space to hold the meeting.

The focus will be on Flex/AIR with CF as the natural choice for the backend. Christoph Schmitz has promised some Adobe sponsored give-aways, and I have promised to present a "proof of concept" AIR Application written in HTML/Ajax that connects to a backend system written in Coldfusion.

I haven't quite decided yet if I should attempt to give the presentation in German or stick to what I know best, English. The good thing is of course that the Germans us 90% English IT terminology so I should be good-to-go in that regard should I decide to give it a try in German.

I hope this CFUG meeting will be the start of something somewhat regular where we can get together and exchange ideas. Actually now that I think of it this will be my first ever CFUG meeting.

"Hi, My name is Gary and I am a CF Junky"

Happy Coding...

I could have downloaded a free trial of the new Flex Builder 3 to replace my beta version thats about to expire, but eventually that too would expire and I would be left with trying to get around actually buying the software.

I don't have any problem buying software I actually do it quite frequently my problem was/is that I will most likely not be using the Flex builder at home for any professional paid work. I will most likely be using it to build examples, experiment and write about here on my Blog.

I don't have to worry about the version of CF8 I have on my machine here at home, it's a free enterprise version (developer edition) but that's another story.

Then a thought occurred to me while I hovered over the 'purchase' button on Adobe's website. It's only $250 bucks (168 Euros)! what am I complaining about?

It's currently downloading now, fully legal and ready to go, except without charts, advanced datagrid or profiling. Perhaps I can talk work into getting the profi version.

Happy Coding...

On Sunday Feburary 24th Adobe announced the release of Flex 3.

Flex 3.0, Adobe's Flash-based RIA development platform continues to mature and has seen increasing adoption as the RIA development choice by companies such as: Discovery Channel, American Cancer Society, and Master Card.

Additionally Adobe has released the Flex SDK open source under the Mozilla Public License.

Happy Coding...

When I first heard about LiveCycle Data services and that it has the ability to page large datasets I though cool how do I make it do it?

The idea here is to use Coldfusion as the Assembler. I already had a working sample using LiveCycle with CF on the back-end and Flex on the front-end all I needed to do was add more data to the Contacts.mdb file and then turn paging on. At least everything I read so far indicated that I wouldn't need to do anything special in my fill method in order for paging to work.

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