New Year, New Presentations

Hello World!

It’s been sometime since my last post. It has been a very busy few months and that’s a good thing. However it’s now a new year and with it comes new opportunities, new presentations. I will have the pleasure of appearing in front of fellow developers in the next few months. I hope to see some on hyou there;

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Web APIs in AIR: Twitter-licious

Capital Area Flex Users Group Meeting
Date: Wednesday, January 07 2009

In this presentation I will demonstrate how to use some of the more popular web-based public data sources and open APIs in a Flex/AIR applications. I have created a sample Flex/AIR application that uses the Delicious and SnipURL APIs to create a Twitter-like app. I will show you the API methods available and how to call upon them to retrieve its data.

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MATE: A Flex Framework “Extreme Makeover”

Maryland ColdFusion Users Group Meeting
Date: Wednesday, January 13 2009

MATE is a tag-based, event-driven framework for Flex development. Using MATE in your Flex development can help you build powerful, loosely coupled applications. During this presentation I will take a simple Flex application and show how you can perform an extreme makeover that will greatly enhance the application’s architecture, allowing it to scale properly.

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Skinning Components in Flex 4 (Gumbo)

Maryland ColdFusion Users Group Meeting
Date: Wednesday, April 13 2009

Adobe has made great improvements to the skinning architecture and process since Flex version 3. In this presentation I will demonstrate how to use Flex 4, currently known as GUMBO, to skin your Flex components.

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In addition to the user group presentations listed above I am very excited to have been invited and selected as a speaker at the following popular conferences.

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Essential Flex and ColdFusion Integration

cf.Objective() 2009 CONFERENCE
Date: Wednesday, May 14-16 2009

This presentation is designed for the experienced developer who wants to learn how to create Flex 3 application that can connect to server-side data using ColdFusion. It is also for the Flex developer who wants to learn how to effectively retrieve, manipulate, format, and communicate with ColdFusion-based server-side scripts.

I will provide developers with the essentials of connecting Flex 3 applications to remote data services using HTTPService, WebService, and RemoteObject calls. You will learn how to create and use the various Flex and ColdFusion classes that can be used to provide a one-to-one mapping between the client-side and server-side data. In addition, you will learn how to accept and manipulate the data in various formats such as XML. This presentation will cover topics such as handling results and faults, understanding value objects, manipulating complex data.

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Skinning Components in Flex 4 (Gumbo)

CFUNITED 2009 Conference
Date: Wednesday, August 12-15 2009

Adobe has made great improvements to the skinning architecture and process since Flex version 3. In this presentation I will demonstrate how to useFlex 4, currently known as GUMBO, to skin your Flex components. During this special conference presentation I will also demonstrate how to use some of the other Adobe tools to help in the skinning process, including Flash and Fireworks.

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Well, that’s it – so far. This year already looks to be a very exciting year for all of us. Not only are we looking forward to a very exciting release of Flex 4, code named GUMBO, 2009 also promises the following releases:

Centaur – This is the codename for the next release of ColdFusion. As of this writing beta applications are current being accepted.

Bolt – This is the codename for Adobe’s new eclipse-based development tool. As of this writing beta applications are current being accepted.

Flash Cataylst – Formerly called Thermo, this is Adobe’s new design tool for quickly creating application interfaces without coding.

… and many more. We have a lot to look forward to this year – new tools to learn, more exciting conferences and user group meetings, and thus more opportunities for all of us.

Ciao 😉

Top Ten Reasons to Attend WebManiacs!

HELLO WORLD,

Have you registered to attend the WebManicas Conference coming to Washington, DC May 19th – 23rd? Why Not? Well maybe this will help you …

My Top Ten Reasons To Attend WebManiacs!

#10 – Over 100 separate topics covering ColdFusion, Flex, AIR, various frameworks, and other technologies.

#9 – A Ben Forta keynote on day one.

#8 – Several two hour hands-on sessions held in their computer lab.

#7 – My kids took all of tee shirts I got from the last conference I attended.

#6 – Very close to public transportation, many restaurants, and our nation’s capital.

#5 – My presentation titled; Consuming and Creating RSS Feeds (CFManiacs Track)

#4 – My presentation titled; Tweens, Behaviors, View States, and Transitions (FlexManiacs Track)

#3 – My presentation titled; Using Custom Events (FlexManiacs Track)

#2 – A “boat load” of presentation materials and source code that can help jump-start your development efforts.

And The Number 1 Reason to Attend WebManiacs!

#1 – Surround Yourself With Dozens Of Colleagues And Industry Experts Who Love To Talk About Battlestar Galactica And LOST As Much As You Do!!

See ya at the conference … then I’ll see ya at the pub.

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WebManiacs Conference – Presentation Preview

HELLO WORLD,

We are less than a month away from WebManiacs 2008, the ultimate conference for Adobe ColdFusion, Flex, and AIR developers.

During this 5 day conference there will be many session topics for beginning, intermediate, and advanced developers. I will be hosting two of the many presentations, one CF/AIRManics topic and one Flex/AIRManiacs topic.

Today I would like to give you a preview, a snippet, of my Flex 3 presentation called Using Custom Events.

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Using Custom Events

Exploring The Event Object

Each time an event is fired within your application, the Flex framework creates and passes a special object called an Event Object to your handler function. Every event object contains standard information about the event that occurred such as; the type of event that fired and its target.

If we take a look at the Flex Button control we can see that the component will dispatch to three standard events;

• buttonDown,
• change, and
• dataChanqge

The Button control also inherits many other events from its ancestors. Events such as;

• click, and
• doubleClick,

and several others are inherited from its parent class InteractiveObject. While events such as;

• dragDrop, and
• dragEnter

and several others are inherited from its parent class UIComponent.

These events are dispatched in response to either user interaction or programmatic change. The most common of these is the click event. Let’s take a look at an example.

[FLEX EXAMPLE]

(Full source will be available during my presentation)

In this example you get a glimpse of the information that is contained within the MouseEvent object. The click event follows the mouseDown and then the mouseUp events. One of the standard properties of the MouseEvent object is the currentTarget property. This property simply identifies the object (the Button component in this case) that is current recipient of the dispatched event. Other useful properties are as follows:

ctrlKey:

indicates if the CTRL key was pressed at the time the event was dispatched

shiftKey:

indicates if the SHIFT key was pressed at the time the event was dispatched

commandKey:

indicates if the COMMAND key (Mac only) was pressed at the time the event was dispatched

controlKey:

indicates if the CTRL key was pressed at the time the event was dispatched

Armed with information like this you are now ready to provide a greater degree of interactivity within your Flex application. But what if you needed to pass more information than the standard event object provides? You can create your own event object, populate it with whatever information you need, and pass it to your event handler. In the second half of this presentation I will show you how to create and use your own custom event object.

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It’s not too late to register for the WebManiacs conference, on May 19th – 23rd. Visit the WebManiacs 2008 website and see what it has to offer. You can also receive a DISCOUNT for the conference by using code TR50 when you register on the site or call 202.797.7711 extension 116.

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