Dennis Baldwin

Flash MX 2004 Pro Web service classes or Flash Remoting components for ActionScript 2.0: Which is right for you? This article offers some guidelines. In just three years we've come a long way. It seems like an eternity since the days when I used to code CF pages with dynamic content served up to Flash, but let me stress how rudimentary it was. Flash back to December 14, 2001, when a little site called FlashCFM received Macromedia's Site of the Day designation. On several occasions I received e-mails asking me how on earth FlashCFM received this prestigious award. There was nothing spectacular about the site, no fancy graphics, Flash animation, or anything out of the ordinary. Yet the concept behind it was brilliant, or so I believed. As you can probably guess from its name, this site introduced the marriage of Flash and ColdFusion. FlashCFM was a community site th... (more)

Web Services in a Flash

Of course the latest buzzword in the world of Internet applications is Web services. So we're assuming that you already know what a Web service (WS) is and we're not going to worry about creating one. This article will focus on accessing a Web service using Flash Remoting, and displaying the information in a rich Flash UI. We'll be looking into the emfusion.com Web service which supplies the latest news and information to many organizations. The emfusion engine gathers up-to-the-minute content and makes it accessible to developers and Web administrators through a WS. Although th... (more)

Let Macromedia Flex Consume Your CFCs

In previous articles I've written about the power of integrating Flash and ColdFusion to build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). In this paradigm Flash provides the user interface while ColdFusion is responsible for handling the business logic and sending data to Flash either through Flash Remoting or Web Service calls. In this article I'd like to shift focus a bit and provide a more programmatic approach to building RIAs. By this I mean using XML to create the Flash interface. The answer lies in Macromedia's Flex. This article will walk you through a simple application that retr... (more)

Flash Up Your Forms with Components

Flash MX has hit the streets, and some amazing applications are already under development. Macromedia has gone above and beyond by providing us with this fully functional Web development tool. Now with drag-and-drop components such as scrollbars, list boxes, calendars, and much more, developers can harness the power of reusable code. This will dramatically enhance the development process as well as cut down the time it takes to maintain and debug Flash applications. No longer "just an animation tool," as it has been labeled in the past, the new Flash has given rise to more full... (more)

ColdFusion Meets Flash

Most developers use Flash for animation and Web site introductions, but aren't aware of how powerful a scripting environment it is. Now in Flash 5, ActionScript is larger than life and is here to stay. It's pretty much a programming language with access to variables, expressions, arrays, objects, and user-defined functions. ActionScript is very similar to JavaScript and both are based on the ECMA-262 specification. Developers rave about how great ColdFusion is for rapidly developing e-commerce sites and its ease of use. Flash advocates can't get over its small file sizes, cross-b... (more)