Michael Givens

Whether it's in factories or workshops, in mines or forests, in offices or homes, or even in our sacred ColdFusion Administrator, anything that impairs the efficiency of workers is always worthy of improvements in the process or changing the way of doing things. Levering ColdFusion ServiceFactory to get work done is one example. Figure 1 is a screenshot of an example Flex-ColdFusion hybrid application that allows manipulation of ColdFusion mapping without having (or even needing) access to the ColdFusion Administrator. Look at the code. The Flex UI code is shown in Listing 1. The initialize attribute in the main MXML file calls the getIP() function during initialization of the Flex application. This function triggers a RemoteObject invocation of the roMapping.getVisitorIP() method. The getVisitorIP() method is the first function shown in Listing 2. ( Listing 2 can b... (more)

Video Rock 'n Roll With Flex 2

Flex 2 and the Flash Media Server are a match made in heaven. By combining the two technologies, streaming Flash videos at my office has become a nice part of my daily routine and a good excuse to add another monitor to my desktop. Whether your musical genre taste is classical or rock 'n roll, it's relatively easy to quickly create a desktop library of Flash videos. In this article, I'll describe one approach that will have you streaming in no time. You will need the Flex 2 Builder (with Flex 2 SDK), the Flash Media Server (the Macromedia Communication Server works as well), and a... (more)

Creating a Flex 2 Signature Grabber

By the time you read this, another MAX will be in the history books. In fact, with a record attendance of around 3,500 developers and designers, this MAX in Vegas will also be in the record books. Along with the usual great conference sessions, this year there was a special event referred to as the "BarCamp - The unconference event" called MAXUP. I presented a MAXUP demo, A Flex 2 Signature Panel at MAXUP, where I showed the audience how easy it was to combine a Flex 2 UI for capturing a mouse-created signature with the ActionSript 3 Drawing API and a remote object call to a Col... (more)

How I Saved Some Money With A Flex 2 DVD Library Application

I have been collecting DVD movies for years now and, on some occasions, I have forgotten that I already owned a particular movie. More times than I hate to admit, I have ended up with two copies. At my wife and budget's insistence, I created a Flex 2 application with a ColdFusion, CFC-based back end that allows me to store a DVD inventory with the expected data inputs (see Figure 1) into a mySQL database. This Flex 2 application displays the inventory in a DataGrid (see Figure 2) with an itemRenderer that displays the DVD cover art, and it utilizes an Amazon Web service (http:... (more)