Well I didn't get to write this until this morning, but I wanted to reflect briefly on the first day of Max. This being not only my first Max but my first conference in general. I've got to say that overall I have been pretty impresed.
As we push ahead with our app using ColdBox and LightWire, we have been configuring our Dependency Injection as we go. DI is one of those things I'm pretty certain I see the benefit to, but I'm not sure how sold on it I am. At this point, we may only have 50 to 60 CFCs so perhaps we're just not deep enough in to see the real profit yet. The only real advantage I've seen to date is having all of our dependencies spelled out in one configuration file (with the exception of the stuff you are auto-wiring). Other than that, I don't know that I have really saved any code. That being said, I don't have any circular dependencies, and my dependency levels don't get much more than 2 or 3 levels deep right now so maybe I just need to be patient.
James Ward has a little tool called "Is It Flex" that will tell you if a given SWF file was made with Flex providing you know the URL to the SWF. James uses the SWFDump utility from the SDK and looks for some header info that the Flex compiler places in the SWF. A while ago I experimented with an ancillary tool on my site which attempted to find the URLs to all the SWFs in the page for you and check them all at once.
Here's a little tidbit that will be old-hat to any Flex/Flash people out there, but as a CF guy, I found it pretty interesting. Most ColdFusion programmers have probably heard of implicit getters and setters as a pattern some have adopted in CFML (and others seem to vehemently oppose). While learning Flex, I have found that ActionScript 3 also supports implicit getting and setting but it means something completely different that what I had expected.
Christine and I, having settled into our new jobs, are rolling up our sleeves to dig in and start some hardcore re-factoring. The legacy applications we are dealing with run smoothly and quickly for the most part, but are teetering on the edge of being un-maintainable. They suffer from the standard trademarks of any legacy code which has seen many programmers over the years-- lack of code reuse, absent standards, poorly normalized data structures, and minimal separation of view, business, and data. Don't think I'm knocking it too hard though. It's probably not much different than a lot of the code bases out there. We believe it can be better though. Easier to maintain, understand, and extend. Enter our plan for world domination...
I came up with a ColdFusion-only hackish solution for the whitespace problem caused by query of queries. Brad suggested I hardcode a temp table into a random SQL database on our server, which is also a good hackish solution, but required database access. Because I was doing all of this work without accessing the database, I wanted to come up with a solution I could implement just in ColdFusion.
I've been working on modifying the QueryParamScanner to have a new screen that will allow me to fix the queries and update the files automatically. I finally seem to have everything working and I have the code setup so I can edit the suggested changes to fix anything that the regular expression didn't guess correctly. Last night I was running a final test and I noticed that I had lost all of the whitespace at the beginning and end of each query.
I feel dumb saying this, but I am having a heck of a time finding consistent information about Flex 3 classes. I am just starting in Flex and it isn't TOO hard to find an example out there that is close to what you are doing, but often times examples don't cover all the bases, and I'll need to look up a method to get its exact signature. (How many arguments, what type, etc) Generally, I'll turn to the livedocs for this, but I have been wasting a lot of time Googling and I don't think it should be this hard.
I have been enjoying my dip into Flex so far. Sometimes you don't notice habits until you have to change them. One rut I've gotten into over the years is the procedural way web-based apps have gotten be thinking about programming.
Wow, I don't know if I have ever been so happy to get such a simple piece of code working. I have jumped into Flex 3 with basically no knowledge in order to make some charting functionality and I can confirm that I hate learning new stuff. I mean, I love it AFTERWARDS; but that time at the very beginning when you don't have a clue why your code won't work, Google isn't your friend, and you swear you're the first person in the world to have just received that weird error message-- yeah, that is the part that sucks.
