Oscar Trelles

Last night at LIFUG’s meeting.

As promised to the boys and girls of the Long Island Flash Users Group, Ben Forta‘s presentation was not for seasoned ColdFusion developers, but intended to show the beauty of ColdFusion’s markup language and how Flash designers/developers can take advantage of its ease of learn.
After some introductory concepts around the differences between web servers and application servers (ColdFusion is inside the last category), Ben aimed to shatter the misconceptions that prevent non-programmers from using Cold Fusion. He showed us how to progressively transform our static plain-vanilla web pages into modular applications using ColdFusion Components, making our code resusable for multiple interfaces, including our Flash application! By modular I mean separation between design, data and processing structures. Ben explained with examples how useful this development model could be when integrating Flash and ColdFusion: the same structures can be used to process data and pass the results to either an HTML document or a Flash interface.
Special ActionScript instructions are needed for this task, they are called Flash Remoting Components. In a nutshell, Flash Remoting Components are tools that extend the standard Flash MX authoring environment, adding the ActionScript APIs needed to invoke remote services, process dynamic data from external sources and monitor events across client and server. Time didn’t allow for many examples of how it works, but I think the core concepts were discussed to the satisfaction of the attendees.