Whoa, what a journey its been, Flex & ColdFusion a partnership made in heaven???? hmmmmmm, all I can say is its wicked once its working. So, I am writing this post so it must be working, so far mac and pc both like it which is cool, further debugging is needed but thought I would get it up and blogged.

CURRENTLY UNDER RECONSTRUCTION!!!!

A client wanted a site for providing potentially shed loads of data, videos and downloads, so I thought Flex could be fun for this one. Only problem was that I also needed a content management system for the client to update and add to the site as there may be a quick turn around of information. The bible for me was Adobe Flex 2 Training Source and I cannot recommend this enough for getting started. One aspect I wanted to avoid was the utilisation of soap.WebService for sending and retrieving information from a database purely for the reason that I want to use ColdFusion. So implemented RemoteObject instead and found it awesome.

So now in full swing with Flex and ColdFusion, what I really like is building custom event classes and custom components like a file uploader and for the actual site a flv player. Its nice to spend loads of time to create these components knowing that the next project you need similar functionality you can just plug your custom component in piece of cake.

One silly problem I had was getting the whole lot to work on my shared remote server, a few things that I had to check and support at my webhost provided include (please note I cannot say that the webhost support is the root to things working or whether they should are correct, they simply worked for me):

-The server is running version 7,0,2,142559. -Amended your Jrun wildcard filter such that IIS passes requests for “missing files” (ie gateway calls) through to coldfusion. -To resolve error: access denied (coldfusion.tagext.GenericTagPermission cfobject) I’ve enabled CFObject.

And I set up the project by creating the flexappfolder in my personal website located in my ColdFusion root (i.e. C:\CFusionMX7\wwwroot\mywebsiteroot\flexappfolder) and then created a project in Flex choosing:

ColdFusion Flash Remoting Service Used the default for:- use ColdFusion server Once the project was created I went into project properties and in Flex Builder Path put the output folder URL as http://localhost:8500/flexappfolder/bin The Flex Server settings showed Root Folder as C:\CFusionMX7\wwwroot and Root URL: http://localhost:8500/ Ensure that the note notation paths to the cfcs include the flexappfolder e.g. flexappfolder.cfcs.mycfc Then uploaded the whole shiznit to me remote server.

Oh, and it certainly did not work str8 away, a lot of trial and error, my main (or maybe not mine) fault is that there seem to be many different bits of advice and information on how to do this online. All I can say is persevere, its well worth it.

P.S. If you would like a similar Flex Content Management System developed for your site please contact me on simon@newtriks.com