Interesting that i got an article from a co worker recently about flex not for every CF developer Viewpoint: Not Every ColdFusion Developer Should Be A Flex Developer".

Then another coworker asked if i had any flex books, i explained that i have been relying heavily on other flex/cf blogs to find answers to questions as i would encounter pushing the flex envelope.

He said something about wanting to connect a record set to a datagrid, which made me think a little more critically about the complexities of flex. Was he getting his recordset from an XML file, from a web service (wsdl) or was he getting a query set returned via a remoting call. Probably the latter, I did not ask. I have experimented with each technique and have found the remoting, once it was configured properly, to be the cleanest and preferred method of getting data from the back end. Since i am using ColdFusion, there is lots of detailed help about using remoting to call a CFC that returns the familiar query type and assigning the result to an ActionScript variable of type ArrayCollection. This allows a fairly painless handoff of data to then be displayed to a datagrid or other MXML control.

Sample code

So you wanna flex?

Flex, the ultra popular tool from Adobe that allows developers to create swfs (previously the exclusive domain of the designer folks) is here to stay but is not a back end database tool nor is it trying to replace ColdFusion. Flex is a IDE that provides developers with tools to create swfs or movies that are played by the equally ultra popular Flash player.

Flex is a GUI design tool, not a database tool.

Adobe has a real trifecta with ColdFusion, Flex and Flash player.

Finally, we have a development environment and language that allows developers, not designers, to create amazing Flash applications and front ends to their ColdFusion applications. Most CF developers will want the Flex Builder 3 IDE, which, like the traditional Flash IDE, compiles code into a SWF that must then be uploaded to your server. Flex allows programmers to use MXML and ActionScript to build code that compiles into swfs.

It should be noted that while the Flex IDE is well designed and it pretty easy to get started in, there is a pretty steep learning curve once you get going, especially with the ActionScript side of things. Find some good simple tutorials, blog spots or books and dig in.

Here is a list of Flex concepts

Flex Concepts

• Flex applications are Flash applications.

• Flex is a programmer-centric way to create Flash-based rich internet applications.

• Flex applications are rendered using Flash Player 9 or later.

• Like all Flash RIAs, Flex SWF files are processed by the client, rather than the server.

• The Flex framework contains the predefined class libraries and application services necessary to create Flex applications.

• Flex builder3 is a stand alone IDE (free to educational developers) and is also avail as a free SDK plugin for Eclipse

• Flex applications are written using MXML and/or ActionScript.

• MXML is an XML-based markup language that is primarily used to layout application display elements.

• ActionScript is an ECMAScript-compliant object-oriented programming language that is primarily used for application logic.

• MXML and ActionScript code are compiled into binary SWF files.