I've completed (kind of) duplicating a Flex application in AJAX with ease of code maintenance and functionality as my primary goals. For those that think I'm crazy refer to my earlier post. Bear in mind our project development environment: 1) single developer projects.

In earlier posts I discussed the trials and tribulations of creating my first extensive Flex application. Nothing was easy but I have a working application ready for testing. As with most of our projects, this is a single developer project. As I near retirement (years not months) I become more concerned about the ability of others to maintain my code in the future. At this point I'm the only one doing Flex but we have a number of CF developers.

As previously posted, I had significant difficulty with the recent upgrades to CF 8 on my production server and of late even my test server was behaving a bit strange until I'm all of a sudden having jrun connector problems. Both servers started out with CF5, then to 6 with various patches and upgrades, on to CF 7, and finally to CF 8.

I've finally been able to successfully install CF 8 on my production server with some pain and effort. You can view the original problem by looking at some of my earlier posts. This is being done on a Dell server running Windows server 2003 and IIS 6. After the first failure and some research there seemed to be a trend toward uninstalling CF 7 after backing up the settings into an archive file, doing a clean install of CF 8, and then importing the previous saved settings.

As mentioned previously, my temporary solution to getting the server back up and running was to uninstall CF 8 which ran smoothly but there was one problem. The uninstaller also removes the CFIDE directory from the web root. At a minimum this causes the CF administrator to not be available. As well, the flash forms created with CF would not appear in my pages. Luckily I had another server with CF 7 and copied the CFIDE folder into my production server and everything appears to be working correctly.

This morning I attempted to upgrade our production CF server from CF7 to CF8. This is a procedure that was successfully performed on a test server several times while in beta. It was also a simple 15 minute procedure on our development server a week ago. I had no reason to suspect that we would have any problems in the production environment and I sure was wrong about that.

It's now the Tuesday before MAX and the hotel reservations are confirmed, travel tickets in hand, made a couple visits to IntroNetworks, and my personal agenda is set for the moment. I think this is the first MAX in the last 5 or 6 years that I haven't signed up for a certification test... Too much to learn to little time to explore. Although I've now completed a couple of Flex applications I'm looking forward to the pre-event session on integrating Flex 3 with ColdFusion.

I've spent some time over the last several months trying out many of the new features of CF8 and I must admit that I'm a bit overwhelmed. With each new version of CF the tools available to the developer increase dramatically. Certainly this allows us to create better and more complex applications but.... I used to feel that I had a good handle on 90% of the functionality of CF. Now with 8 I'm comfortable with maybe 50% of the product and dropping.