Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Mystic public Beta 2 now available

The public Beta 2 of the ColdFusion/Flex Connectivity kit is now available over on the Adobe (f.k.a Macromedia) Labs site. Flex 2.0 Beta 2 is has also been released.

This beta has some great stuff in it. First, if you have seen any information about Flex 2 you have probably heard about the Data Services feature (not to be confused with the product name, which has been changed to Flex Data Services). This provides you with some really slick help in managing data on the client and server. For instance, if one client updates a data table all of the other active clients are notified (using the Flex Messaging feature) about the change and can update real time. I encourage you to read about this in the Flex materials available on the labs site.

New in Mystic Beta 2 is that you can now write the back end of this stuff with ColdFusion Components instead of Java. This allows you to use the RAD environment of CFML along with your Flex applications.

We have also updated the Flash Remoting (formerly the ColdFusion Adapter) to allow you to invoke CFCs from Flex/ActionScript3 applications. And the Flex messaging Gateway, which supports publishing and subscribing to Flex destinations from ColdFusion, has been refreshed.

Also new in Beta 2 are some really sweet Flex Builder/Eclipse wizards that make it trivial to create either Active Record or Bean/DAO CFCs from an existing database table, or even generate an entire set of CFCs to act as the back end to a Data Service application (these are called Assembler CFCs). To compliment these wizards, this is the first public beta release of RDS support for Eclipse. This includes both file and database table browsing. Combined with CFEclipse, these additions to Flex Builder make it a really nice IDE for creating CF and Flex rich internet applications.

Check it out!

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