It's been months since I last blogged. During that time I've taken up Flex application development. We recently upgraded to CF8 at my work (I work for a state agency in Austin, TX in the Information Resources Department), and I've developed two applications using Flex 2.01 with a ColdFusion back-end. Coming from a CF, ASP, and an ASP.net programming background, with a small amount of JAVA thrown in for good measure, I have to admit that the learning curve was quite steep. However, after about six 65-80 hour weeks, it's getting easier.

I've been reading everything on the web I can find about Flex and ActionScript programming. I've spent a considerable amount of time reading the posts on the FlexCoders mailing list. I've learned a lot, and now I'd like to give something back to the Flex/Coldfusion community.

I've noticed several posts on FlexCoders from people who are in the same position I was in three months ago — a noob. One post concerned the best way to do data binding between data entry objects, value objects, and remote objects. This stumped me at first, too, and I couldn't really wrap my head around the concept at all.

So, after reading the email on FlexCoders, I decided to put together a little demo application to demonstrate this concept as I understand it. Well, the little demo grew into a full-blown, windowed application with searching, data entry, saving, deleting, etc. A little more than I planned, but what the heck.

Here it is, complete with view source. It utilizes the WindowManager component that was written by Mike Nimer — the one that gets generated by the Coldfusion Application Wizard. It's a great little window manager, very easy to use, and very reliable. I've also included the SizeableTitleWindow component from the same ColdFusion Application Wizard. There are also several other components from various sources thrown in for good measure.

The source code includes all the Coldfusion back-end CFCs, and the SQL table creation code for MS-SQL 2005. There's also a stored procedure that does the searching. It's included in with the CFCs. To run this on your computer, you'll need to define a database named contacts, and then run the SQL code to create the table and the stored procedure. For all you MySql people, you'll have to modify the MS SQL code for yourself.

You can open as many windows as you want by clicking the buttons on the application control bar. When you're in the search results grid, you can double-click an entry to edit it, or click one of the icon buttons to add, edit, or delete an entry. I've also included a modified index.template.html file that allows exiting the application by clicking a button on the enterface. The contacts database is hosted on my SQL server, so feel free to play with the app as much as you want. Any feedback, good or bad, would be appreciated.

So, without further adieu, click here for the demo.

I'll explain pieces of the code in future posts. I also plan to do a version of this little app using the flexmdi library by Ben Clinkenbeard, Brendan Meutzner, and Brian Joseph. I've used this library in two projects, and I can tell you first hand that, well this is going to sound trite, but flexmdi — Man, it Rocks!

So, until next time…