derrick grigg

Coldfusion 9 and AS3, a perfect match made better?

Sep 26, 2008

Just came across this snippet of information on Seans Corfield's blog regarding Coldfusion 9.

Then he said that Adobe is considering how to expose all of the "services" inside CF as SOAP and AMF remote services. The idea is that it would allow clients to access the engines that drive CF's query, mail, document (PDF), imaging, charting, Exchange services etc. They are considering making AS3 libraries available that would allow Flex developers to easily call any of these services directly, making CF the back end of choice because of the rich functionality it adds to Flex. An interesting approach. He also said they are considering integrating BlazeDS more deeply into CF, not like the current optional LCDS Express install, but as a core part of CF which would open up the possibility of direct message handling via CFCs as well as potential improvements to AMF performance (since it would be tightly integrated with CF).

One word. WOW. As a developer who primarily uses Flash/Flex for front end development, and loves to use Coldfusion for backend development, this would be fantastic. Integration between Coldfusion and Actionscript is already pretty tight with AMF and much of what is mentioned above is doable through calls to Coldfusion. But to be able to directly access them, especially the charting, pdf and direct messaging engines, from Actionscript would be great.

I'm afraid of what the new security measures could be like though. The sandbox keeps getting more and more restrictive. You give client access to things like database queries and exchange services, that's just asking for a full straight jacket from the Flash player security.

Regardless, something to keep tabs on. It certainly is a great time to be a Flex and Coldfusion developer.