ColdBox Beta 2: Flex/AIR Integration
Posted by
Luis Majano
Oct 26, 2007 00:00:00 UTC
Well, my secret project is out of the bag today. I have been working in embedding a remote proxy into ColdBox in order to enable remote applications like Flex and AIR to communicate with ColdBox and provide an event model for our model. If that makes sense!! Well, so what do we get? This feature lets you create an event driven model that can easily be called from any flex/air application. Not only that, but you can reinitialize the entire application, get settings, and yes, announce custom or core interceptions. You can create custom interceptor chains for your model that can be executed asynchronously when a user hits a save record button for example. The possibilities are endless.
Not only that, but this enables you to actually create two front ends using the same reusable ColdBox and model code. The code is the same, you create event handlers, you interact with a request collection, with core and custom plugins, but you don't set views or layouts because the framework is now a remote framework for your model. So what do you do, well, return data, arrays, xml, value objects. Anything, right from withing the event handlers.
Tags: ColdBox
Russ Johnson
Luis, this is fabulous! I love the idea of using existing model code in a ColdBox application for a Flex front end. This is great! I cant wait to start playing with this.
Sana
I don’t have words to say thanks for such a great development toolkit you are offering. Its toooooo awesome man: you are really rocking! Anybody you dare to test new incredible features can download bleeding edge code from SVN: svn co http://ortus.svnrepository.com/svn/coldbox/coldbox/trunk
or via https://secure.svnrepository.com/s_lmajano/coldbox/coldbox/trunk
username: nightlybuild pass: nightlybuild
Again thanks so much for these great features. You made the development so easy-peasy; so nobody would have excuse that coldbox does support RIA. I think coldbox is a must have a tool like cfeclipse
Sean Corfield
I demo'd Blackstone (CFMX7) at Fusebox 2004 and showed a proxy for Fusebox that worked like this but I didn't recommend people did it because it really just forced the Flex/Fusebox communication to use a query string, albeit as a method call.
However, it does appear to be a very appealing approach to a lot of people and that's why I started Edmund recently... Maybe I'll have another look at ColdBox now you've added this and see whether it's even worth me continuing with Edmund!
Luis Majano
Hi Sean,
The proxy works by method calling via a remote object or treating the proxy as a webservice. So you can call the different methods on it. The idea was to use the "onMissingMethod" approach, but since we still have to support cf7, the proxy is based on cf7 capabilities. However, the release will include also a cf8 proxy, which will be based on cf8's capabilties. I truly welcome your input, and check out the sample app. Maybe we can come up with more goodness for the proxy.
Sami Hoa
Well done Luis. You keep pushing things to the limit. Keep it up!
Rob Gonda
Ok, I give up. I've been trying to comment for a couple of days and it fails silently.
Follow this link to read my comments: http://www.robgonda.com/blog/index.cfm/2007/10/30/ColdBox-Beta-2-FlexAIR-Integration-comments
Andychou
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Busycode Inc. is a top Adobe Flex shop who develops Flex/AIR applications for clients. For more info, please visit http://www.busycode.com