Quote from “Developing Rich Clients with Macromedia Flex” Chapter 20

“Direct Invocation on .NET Infrastructure
Macromedia announced that the roadmap for Flex will include a native .NET port of Flex. We are assured that the aim of this native port is to ensure a “write once, deploy anywhere” approach with MXML. Consult the documentation for the .NET port of Flex when it’s released, for details of how to perform tight Flex and .NET integration. We’ll endeavor to update the accompanying Web site for the book with additional notes on new product features in future versions of Flex.”

Does anyone know if this is still true?

Well, if you don’t ask, you don’t get….

But why I hear you cry (those of you who aren’t converts anyway) ? Well, I’ve been a windows user for some years now (although a lot less than most), having started my web development career on SunOS and Solaris. Since then Windows has grown and stuff has happened. Apple have brought out OSX and the Linux community has moved on leaps and bounds.

Currently I have Windows XP on my laptop and it does me fine (for the moment) but to be honest I am getting fed up with “Windows Rot” to the point where I have must have reinstalled Windows onto a clean disk over ten times in five years. Now, I’m not your average user - I try to keep things as tidy as possible, yet within a couple of months, the rot sets in.

So, upgrade to Vista I hear you cry. Well, no, never in a million years. I managed to get hold of a copy which I used for a couple of weeks and then promptly un-installed when I heard about the DRM “functionality” that Microsoft have included in it. If you even consider this practice to be a good thing, I really think you need to have a deep think about what you are letting happen. As far as I am concerned, the only person who should be telling my computer what to do, is me. Just Me. No-one else. Especially Microsoft.

So, this leaves me with Linux or Apple. I’ve taken a good look at Ubuntu of recent, as it’s really my only alternative considering I already have PC hardware (a HP ZD8000 laptop). Ubuntu (and Linux) promises the world in terms of stability, security and speed, but what I have found in practice to be a very different story. Now, Ubuntu (I can’t really comment on other distros - suggestions welcome) installs really nicely, it’s a really clean interface but is let down by silly things - mainly to do with hardware. Now, my laptops nothing out of the ordinary, but installing Ubuntu leaves me a wireless network card that requires wires, a video driver that works without any 3d and a mouse that randomly stops after around half an hour requiring a reboot to fix. For me, this is a killer. I’m sure I could fix this with some random config file tweaks and endless surfing of forums (as everything in Linux seems to be) but to be honest, I want stuff to just work and not take all my time just to keep stable. Another thing is software. I use a library of software that works on all three OS’s (Windows, OSX and Linux), but there is some software that I would find hard to live without and Linux doesn’t support: namely Photoshop (can’t stand Gimp) and iTunes to name two.

Which leads me onto OSX. Currently this platform is way ahead in my eyes in terms of ability and support. I can run all the software I want on it with no problems, and I can also even run my windows software on it via parallels. I get the stability and security of Unix via the FreeBSD underpinnings, but I also benefit from the intuitive clean UI’s that Apple are famous for. For me this is the perfect system.

Almost.

Remember, I mentioned I had an HP ZD8000?
Yup, around a year ago this cost me over a thousand pounds, I’m not really in the mood to spend the same again just to let me loose on OSX, which is why I am still a Windows user. There is no way I can justify spending out a grand for another OS, let alone being able to afford it. I often wonder what would happen if Apple were to open OSX to the masses, distributing it shrink-wrapped to everyone - regardless of the fact that they might not be using Apple hardware. Sure, in a couple of years when my current laptop dies a death I will inevitably replace it with a Mac, but for now I’m stuck in Windows with no way out along with potentially thousands of others. Which leads me to my original question…

Does anyone want to give me a Mac?

Long ago few could realistically imagine the future history of laptops that was to come.

This is where I work every day:

It’s a dual head PC with 2720 x 1024 pixels to play with…So, why is it I need feel an urgent need to get double that whenever I open Eclipse (either as CFE or Flex Builder?) Yes, I realise that it’s easy to minimize parts of eclipse to give me a nice big window to work in, but I’m not a big fan of having to keep manipulating my IDE while editing.

Am I the only one? Does anyone want to send me a mega-big monitor for me to work on? Do I need this?

I’ve just been nosing around a few of my not-so-regular sites that I like to visit and have noticed that the UKCFUG has been very quiet of recent.  Anyone know anything about the future plans?  It’s been a while…

After my earlier post remarking on the complexity of the current crop of CF frameworks (whilst realising their benefit 100%) I thought I would open up to the masses the framework that I have used for approximately the last six years that currently powers several heavily used sites hacross the net. Therefore, I have created the YACF (Yet Another Coldfusion Framework) project on Google code.

The project can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/yacf/

YACF is so stunningly simple, you’d almost be forgiven for believing that it is even a framework at all, it requires no installation, no configuration and can do anything you want it to. Not a single line of the framework is required and can be changed however you see fit. I will leave the details to the project page, but if you are desperate you can download the entire framework code from here:

http://yacf.googlecode.com/files/YACF_v0.1.zip

Currently YACF supports CF4.5 and up. If anyone has an earlier box still knocking around, I’d love to know if it works.

I’ve just been taking a look at a well-known framework that deals with command-driven code. Whilst having a read of the docs and seeing what’s what, I was thinking “this sounds handy, this could solve a lot of problems”. I then installed the framework, and was stunned when I was then looking through a multi-file/component lump of code that did a “Hello World!” example. Sure, these frameworks don’t shine when doing simple examples - but I am having trouble seeing where most of the benefits of frameworks lie.

A lot of these frameworks deal with abstraction of code so that code A doesn’t directly use/know about code B etc etc, when in reality what you end up with is the big bunch of files passing all sorts of variables and objects around to acheive things that could be written in Plain Ol’ Coldfusion (POC) in a matter of a couple of lines.

For instance, proxy objects. Why create code, that wraps other code when you could just make the location of the original code a configuration variable? Another one - why spend ages making a framework understand complex objects in configuration when again, you can just write it in POC nice and quickly without having to get bogged down in a framework?

Personally, I think we had it right around Fusebox 3-ish times. A load of MVC code all based around a central controller, and a config file (which was CF). No XML, no gateway objects, no framework loading, just a straight forward bunch of code that was easy to read and understand, simple enough to be Agile, and best of all extendable in whatever way you wanted (you just had to write the code).

Now, I’m not dismissing frameworks completely - Model-Glue for instance has it’s benefits, but personally I’ve never seen why anyone would want to get as complex as Mach-ii etc. Half the time, a lot of these frameworks appear to be code for code’s sake - a way of satisfying a coder’s needs as opposed to those of a more pragmatic programmer….

Bring on the flames….