If you would like to build compelling applications that dramatically improve user experience and revolutionize the way people interact with the web, there's no easier way than with the combination of Adobe® ColdFusion® 9 software, Flex, and the Adobe AIR® runtime. Flex enables you to create expressive, high-performance applications that run identically on all major browsers and desktop operating systems, and ColdFusion lets you link those applications to virtually any enterprise data source or service quickly and easily. Additionally, you can use AIR to easily extend these applications to the desktop.
New ColdFusion features and two products currently in beta support building rich Internet applications (RIAs) with ColdFusion and Flex:
ColdFusion 9 features
ColdFusion 9 introduces an exposed services layer for many enterprise services that can easily be accessed from a Flex 3 application; or, if you're working with the Adobe Flex® 4 SDK currently in beta 2 you can use prebuilt MXML tags that use these services. Additionally, any ColdFusion component (CFC) can be called from a Flex application with ease. This means that logic you've previously written for traditional HTML applications can power RIAs without any changes required to your server-side code.
ColdFusion 9 also provides AIR integration, enabling you to offer users applications that can be accessed both online and offline, with reliable data management. Using SQLite in the client and object relational mapping (ORM) on the server, ColdFusion 9 manages conflict resolution and data synchronization when your AIR application comes back online. For more information on developing applications with both Flex and ColdFusion, visit the Flex and ColdFusion section of the Developer Center.
ColdFusion Builder Beta 2 and Flash Builder 4 Beta 2
ColdFusion Builder, the new Eclipse™ based IDE for ColdFusion development currently in beta, and Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 have many new data-centric development features that make it a snap for ColdFusion developers to create data-driven Flex applications. Included are:
- Eclipse Remote Development Services (RDS) support, which lets you access files and data sources on a ColdFusion server
- An ORM wizard, allowing you to create a CFC Value Object for any database table without writing any code
- An ActionScript® to CFC wizard, which lets you create a CFC based on an ActionScript class file, and a CFC to ActionScript wizard, which lets you create an ActionScript file based on a CFC Value Object
For more information on developing applications with both Flash Builder 4 and ColdFusion Builder, visit the Flex and ColdFusion section of the Developer Center.
