Dennis Baldwin

I wanted to write an article that would be useful to the developer community. Since Flash is gaining ground as a powerful development tool, this article will focus on using Flash to create a rich UI hooked up to a ColdFusion component. An effective Web site cannot exist without content, so this article will show you how to pull dynamic content into Flash. Pulling content from across the Web into Flash may be much easier than you expected. We're going to look at utilizing Macromedia's Designer & Developer (DesDev) XML feed. This XML feed will be pulled locally to our server, and then loaded into Flash. To accomplish this we'll be utilizing ColdFusion Components (CFCs), Flash Remoting MX, and Macromedia Flash MX components. Before starting, please be sure to download the necessary files from www.devmx.com/cfdj/mm_desdev.zip. Once you've downloaded the files, unzip t... (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 MX Web Services vs Remoting

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 nothi... (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)