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ColdFusion 8 and Adobe Flex

If you want to create personalized, multimedia-rich applications that dramatically enhance user experience, revolutionizing the way people interact with the web, there's no easier way than the combination of Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 and Adobe Flex™. Flex enables you to create expressive, high-performance applications that run identically on all major browsers and operating systems, and ColdFusion lets you link those applications to virtually any enterprise data source or service quickly and easily. For more information on developing applications with both Flex and ColdFusion, visit the Flex and ColdFusion section of the Developer Center.

The following elements support building rich Internet applications (RIAs) with ColdFusion and Flex:

• ColdFusion 8 features
• ColdFusion 8 Extensions for Eclipse and Flex Builder
• ColdFusion 8 and Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES

ColdFusion 8 features

A 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 rich Internet applications without any changes required to your server-side code. In ColdFusion 8, this data exchange with Flex has been improved in several ways:

• Performance, particularly when returning sets of data from ColdFusion to Flex, is much better.
• Data exchange is more flexible: ColdFusion query objects can be sent directly to Flex without manual conversion.
• ColdFusion applications can use an event gateway to synchronize information about data changes in a Flex application.

For more information on developing applications with both Flex and ColdFusion, visit the Flex and ColdFusion section of the Developer Center.

ColdFusion 8 Extensions for Eclipse and Flex Builder

ColdFusion 8 Extensions for Eclipse™ and Flex Builder™ is a free set of plug-ins that enhance the Flex Builder environment for ColdFusion development. Included are:

• Flex and Ajax wizards to generate a complete data management application without writing a single line of code
• ColdFusion Log viewer
• Services Browser, which lets you browse CFCs, manage a list of web services, and generate the CFML code to invoke a web service
• Database browser and visual query builder
• Eclipse Remote Development Services (RDS) support, which lets you access files and data sources on a ColdFusion server
• ActionScript to CFC wizard, which lets you create a CFC based on an ActionScript™ class file, and the CFC to ActionScript wizard, which lets you create an ActionScript file based on a CFC Value Object

The Extensions also include the ColdFusion code debugger, which allows you to set breakpoints, watch variables, and step through code, making it easier to debug all your application code.

The Extensions are available on the ColdFusion 8 product DVD and can be downloaded at the following page.

Download the ColdFusion extensions to Flex 3 ›

Use these extensions with Flex 3 today.

If you are using Flex 3, an updated set of extensions is installed automatically with your instance of Flex 3. To check out Flex 3 and the updated extensions, download a free trial of Flex 3 now.

ColdFusion 8 and Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES

ColdFusion 8 includes a copy of Adobe LiveCycle® Data Services ES, installed by default as the free Express version of the product. Customers who own a commercial LiveCycle Data Services license may provide that serial number to install that version instead.

The Flex Data Services assembler lets you use CFCs to provide the back-end data management for a Flex application that uses the Data Management Service.