I spent a bit more time today trying to figure out my CFC/Flex problems. I have a hunch that I installed ColdFusion incorrectly, because it seems like I have everything working, it just isn’t looking in the correct directory for the CFC.
It also could be a problem with the ColdFusion Flash Remoting Gateway. I am not familiar at all with how this works, so troubleshooting and fixing it may be tough.
TweetI’ve been grinding away trying to use CFCs (via RemoteObject) within Flex. I thought it was going to be pretty easy. I was relatively sure I’d figured out how to invoke the CFC and how to actually use that data within the Flex app. Unfortunately, I couldn’t even test whether or not the code did anything because Flex has something called whitelists.
What are whitelists? I’m not entirely sure. In the flex-config.xml file, there’s a tag for all of the various data services (web services, remote objects, ect). So in order to USE one of these services, you have to add the object to the whitelist. Here’s the way I configured the XML file for remote objects:
<remote-objects>
<amf-gateway>{context.root}/amfgateway</amf-gateway>
<amf-https-gateway>{context.root}/amfgateway</amf-https-gateway>
<allow-url-override>false</allow-url-override>
<whitelist><unnamed>
<source>*</source>
</unnamed>
<named>
<object name="stocksCFC">
<source>cfc.stocks</source>
</object>
</named></whitelist>
</remote-objects>
For some reason, that doesn’t work even though according to the documentation the <source>*</source> tag should let everything through.
Here’s the happy error message I get:
Hopefully tomorrow I can work out the kinks.
TweetI prettied up the archive pages so they now look like the rest of the site and you don’t have to read the text from that horrible background. Next up is the comment pages.
My Friday nights are really exciting.
TweetBecause I had my CFC all coded up and ready to use in Flex, I thought I’d jump in head first. I’ve done a little Flex coding, including doing some linking to a SQL database so I figured I could muddle my way through it using some Google searches. It didn’t work out quite as well as I’d hoped. I got the layout down, but when it came to actually using the CFCs in Flex, I realized I didn’t know enough about how Flex handles data.
Luckily, Macromedia has a pretty good tutorial on using Data Models that I ran through tonight. I created some simple actionscript functions and played with the tag a little bit. After going through the tutorial I’m ready to tackle invoking CFCs in Flex tomorrow.
As a side note, I’d forgotten how really, really sweet Flex is. It’s a pretty easy language to pick up, and in very little code you can create some powerful, professional looking apps. I think Flex is going to do great things for Macromedia.
TweetI came across a really cool site today that was mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Education – http://www.businessplanarchive.org/.
The best way to describe it is as a museum of business plans and company information for all of the companies that came and went during the dot com bubble. The listing is very complete but they don’t have a lot of information on some companies (I tried to find Pets.com and eToys.com, but they didn’t have a business plan listed). If you had a favorite dot com that you were always curious about you might be able to find more information than you ever thought possible.
TweetThanks to Dan, I’ve got a Flex server running over the Cold Fusion server here at home so my plan for the weekend is to play around with it and bulid a few novice Flex apps. I’m hoping to do some of the interface stuff I had planned for Cold Fusion in Flex. I’ll post some screenshots this weekend on the progress.
TweetAny article that starts with the tagline “Sound economics may lie at the hart of humanity’s evolutionary success” is bound to get my attention, especially when it is in the Science and Technology section of the Economist. The article itself however, wasn’t the most exciting thing. The article covered a paper that is to be published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization by Jason Shogren, a University of Wyoming professor. I always love seeing my home state in the Economist, but to see it mentioned for an economics article is really great.
Dr. Shogren makes the assertion that Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens were actually quite similar in terms of intelligence and evolution, yet Homo neanderthalensis died out while Homo sapiens are now the dominant species on the planet. Once Homo sapiens encountered Homo neanderthalensis for the first time, they became competitors. People have said that Homo sapiens had better tools or that our mental capacity for symbolic thinking gave us an advantage. Dr. Shogren theorizes that in fact it was our economic system that gave us the advantage. Where a Homo neanderthalensis hunter would struggle to find food if he was a bad hunter, a Homo sapien would simply stop hunting, find something they were good at, and trade that good to better hunters for food. Our ability to trade and use a competitive advantage led to a more efficient system for retrieving scarce resources and Homo neanderthalensis simply couldn’t compete.
Dr. Shogren has created a model that factors in the most important variables for each species survival and given Homo sapiens an advantage in only the economic category. The model accurately predicts the time frame of the extinction of Homo neanderthalensis once they come into contact with Homo sapien.
When I read the article, I’ll blog about it again but I think a theory like this really makes sense. If you’re an Economist subscriber you can read the article here.
I just found another pretty good summary on the Catallaxis site. It’s got a link to the UW article as well as some text from the Economist article.
TweetThanks to some help by Chris..S over at the CSS Creator Forum, I’ve finally fixed the problem in Mozilla that was causing the main text to flow down into the background.
It was a pretty easy solution, one I should have thought of before – I needed a clear:both tag on my footer bar style so that it “clears” “both” of the floated divs. Looks pretty good now.
Oh, and IE sucks.
TweetI’ve set up the site in a new way, but it shouldn’t look any different to you (that’s a good thing). Before the change over, I had mostly disabled comments and trackbacks because of a small issue with them. That has now been fixed, so I’ll be turning both back on for every post. Feel free to make use (not you spammers).
TweetI’ve taken a small break from The Wealth of Nations because I read a good article (may require an account) in The Economist about Management and IT. The article mentioned a book published by HBS Press titled The New CIO Leader. In a lot of ways I’m fascinated by the role of IT in both management and business in general. Because I’ve grown up with the internet and the technology we use today, I’ve always considered it an invaluable part of everything; life, work, business, travel – it’s everywhere, and I think it’s also made everything better.
As I’ve gotten older, I have begun to get more of a sense of the role of technology in a business setting, and specifically as a competitive advantage. One of the things I love about working at Wharton Computing is that technology plays such a huge role throughout the school. From the Dean on down, everyone is concerned with getting the most out of technology and making sure that Wharton is the most technologically innovative business school in the world. I think if Wharton was a for profit business, it would be the epitome of how to use technology effectively.
The book splits CIOs into two categories. One is the “chief technology mechanic” and the other is the “new CIO leader”. The new CIO leader is the CIO that uses technology as a competitive advantage and sees the big picture. The former is a CIO who sees technology as a machine that helps move the company along, but does nothing in terms of creative output or added value. The book makes the argument that the CIOs who focus more on using technology as a strategy, as opposed to a tool, will become a more integral part of the management team and give their companies a real advantage.
I am still quite naive when it comes to the big organizational picture but I have always believed that technology can be leveraged in such a way that it will make a company better, no matter what the industry. The firms that have managers who believe that technology is part of the big picture will absolutely succeed over those that simply implement technology as a productivity tool or in response to a competitor.
Hopefully the book will prove me right.
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