Yesterday I went to the ColdFusion User Group meeting in Düsseldorf, Germany. Kai König had invited me.

It wasn't a formal meeting with speakers and listeners, but rather a discussion group over drinks. I met some really great people, most of which were Flashers as well as ColdFusion coders. This made for some very interesting discussion topics. One person brought to the table the challenge of wanting to create a .cfc which handles shopping cart logic and then being able to swap out the front end between HTML and Flash without it breaking or having to write additional code. The problem was that Flash can't access session variables referred to as this.mySessionVar in the CF code, this being the .cfc. The best solution we were able to come up with was to have one CF function that is called every time the contents or state of the shopping cart changes (caused by both HTML or Flash) and to use SESSION.mySessionVar instead of this.mySessionVar so that Flash may access the session variables.

Kai also made an interesting statement about Flex. He said that Flex/MXML is to Flash what ColdFusion is to HTML. If you understand German, you can read the longer version of his analogy in his blog.

If you're going to be at MXDU in February, be sure to check out Kai's session titled ColdFusion Components From The Ground Up. He definitely knows what he is talking about.

 posted by Vera Fleischer (12/16/2003 08:12:42 AM);