I am presenting how to use ColdFusion, ColdSpring, and Flex together to the Kansas City Adobe RIA User Group on March 25, 2008. ColdSpring is a framework that helps developers manage the dependencies between ColdFusion Components (CFCs). ColdSpring has a feature that enables it to create a remote facade for any of the CFCs that it manages. A Flex application can connect to the remote facade CFC to get data, save information, or to perform other server side operations.

Introduction Mach-II is a ColdFusion framework that can help you build complex web applications. Recently, the Mach-II developers (see reference 1) released version 1.5. I had previously used the older version of Mach-II and also recently took over a very large web application that uses Mach-II so I want to learn how to use the new features in Mach-II version 1.5.

Introduction In this part of our grade school ColdSpring primer, let's discuss providing default values that ColdSpring may use when creating the CFC objects it will manage for us. In the example code for this entry I've added a new CFC - UserGateway. This CFC contains functions that work with more than one user. However, this CFC, like the UserDAO CFC, must know (is depending on) a value for the datasource that connects ColdFusion with the database.

Introduction: One of the web applications I'm developing for the Kansas City Adobe User Group uses a Flex front end. The backend CFCs are managed by ColdSpring (see part 1 Naked ColdSpring). Since ColdSpring is managing the CFCs and their dependencies, I cannot just call my UserService CFC from Flex. My Flex application needs to connect to the UserService object being managed by ColdSpring, which has all of its dependencies resolved.

Introduction "ColdSpring is a framework for ColdFusion Components, inspired by the Spring Framework for Java, and its core focus is to manage the dependencies within your CFC "model." (2). ColdSpring has been around for several years now, but I'd not really used it on a project yet.

Introduction Spry now supports the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data format. You can use ColdFusion to generate JSON formatted data that can be used by Spry. One advantage of using the JSON data format over XML is the JSON format enables a smaller file size and quicker processing (see references 1 and 2). I wanted to test using JSON formatted data instead of XML with a project I was working on so I researched how to use ColdFusion to create JSON formatted data and use that data with Spry.