Ben Forta

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Spring <br /> Keynote

I presented the opening keynote at Spring
this morning. The first half of the presentation covered Flex Data Services, I demonstrated practical benefits of using Flex Data Services (now known as LiveCycle Data Services) as opposed to just client initiated AMF calls via Flash Remoting. Less than half of the almost 300 attendees had any Flex experience, and less than a handful had any understanding of Flex Data Services, so I spent more time on this segment than I had initially planned.
Next came a ColdFusion Scorpio sneak. I demonstrated image manipulation, presentation creation using , server monitoring, PDF form integration, and … some very cool Ajax controls which really got the crowd buzzing. Some of the demos included:

  • An HTML (non-Flash) version of
  • HTML grids created using that loaded data via asynchronous calls back to ColdFusion Components.
  • Auto-suggest implemented using just , with both hardcoded lists as well as dynamic lists returned from asynchronous CFC method calls.
  • A rich tech editor embedded by simply adding richtext=”true” to .

We’ll be posting more details in the coming weeks and months, stay tuned!

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18 responses to “Spring <br /> Keynote”

  1. Dan Avatar
    Dan

    I can’t wait for those 4 updated form items. 🙂 I run into those issues constantly. Just having those 4 features would make the upgrade worth the cost to me!

    Reply
  2. Sid Wing Avatar
    Sid Wing

    Ben,
    I have read several blog reviews of your keynote. Kudos! for once again evangelizing the populous on the powers of CF. Now we just have to get all the kinks worked out of Scorpio and get it on the block so we can make use of these new features.

    Reply
  3. Dan Wilson Avatar
    Dan Wilson

    Ben,
    I am grateful for the rich text control. This is a welcome addition to CF.
    My understanding is the control is based on the popular FCKeditor. If so, why wasn’t KTML chosen?
    KTML is a product by InterAkt, an Adobe company now. It is in my opinion, a better product. Would you please shed some light on this?
    Dan Wilson

    Reply
  4. Dan Avatar
    Dan

    Just my .02, but I’m excited to hear that the rich text editor may be using FCKEditor as it is a recognized, customizable editor with a good feature set that already has Coldfusion versions of their file browser and image browser! However, I’m sure I’ll figure out whichever editor comes with Scorpio and be happy it’s included. 🙂

    Reply
  5. Andre Charland Avatar
    Andre Charland

    Is there a video or somewhere we can see those demos online? We want move all our Ajax components over to CF and would love to get some ideas:) Nice work Ben!

    Reply
  6. Scott Stroz Avatar
    Scott Stroz

    Ben – It seems odd that even though Adobe acquired (or bought, or whatever) Interakt, and one of Interakt’s products was a rich text editor named KTML (which I think is far and away better than FCK Editor and TinyMCE), FCK Editor is the rich text editor used in CF 8.
    What are the chances you;d be able to configure which RTE you could use?

    Reply
  7. Ben Forta Avatar
    Ben Forta

    Andre, not that I know of, but I will try to post examples.
    Scott, I was not involved in that decision, so can’t comment on what was picked and why. We plan to make it possible to configure the editor functionality, but I highly doubt we’d let you switch which editor is used. But, ya never know.
    — Ben

    Reply
  8. Andre Charland Avatar
    Andre Charland

    Thanks Ben! Whenever you get a moment:)

    Reply
  9. Jason Delmore Avatar
    Jason Delmore

    Hi all… I was the primary driving force behind choosing the FCKEditor. Here’s a couple reasons why.
    – When we made the decision Interakt had not been acquired by Adobe (we’ve been working on Scorpio for 2 years… we’re not just whipping this stuff up last week!)
    – FCKEditor was and is ubiqutous and known to work well with CF
    – Frederico Caldeira Knabben, the copyright owner of FCKEditor was and continues to be incredible to work with and dedicated to the success of the FCKEditor and our use of it
    That was enough for me. I hope you all like that feature, but I have news for you, its just a very small piece of a very very large puzzle!
    Cheers,
    Jason
    (The still relatively unknown and extraordinarily busy Product Manager for ColdFusion)

    Reply
  10. Lance Avatar
    Lance

    Hi, Ben.
    Great presentation yesterday. I am very excited about Scorpio.
    Quick question–are Flash forms going to continue to be supported in CF8? Is there any chance there might be a Flash form RTE? That is something we would love to have.

    Reply
  11. John Farrar Avatar
    John Farrar

    Any word on if they will trim the fat out of the editor? (Other platforms) And… will they make the file browser work via CFC’s or some remote device that makes it "TRUE AJAX"? It looks like the grid component you showed is calling CFCs in a true AJAX fashion. Does it provide for making sure the calls are "secure"? The components are cool… just considering that historically the real focus of CF has been on the enterprise we need to make sure the solution is not a partial solution. (I know you can’t give us a bunch more details… but sure wish you could.) … I also personally wish they would treat CF like Mozilla and add actionscript as an alternate scripting language in CF!

    Reply
  12. John Farrar Avatar
    John Farrar

    Great! The file manager has been one of the hardest things to configure, next to the spell checker, in FCKEditor! Now we can hope that the common developer will be able to enjoy the same things guys like me had to hack to get working.

    Reply
  13. Don Kerr Avatar
    Don Kerr

    I’m sorry I missed your presentation in Houston! Two questions I was going to ask you:
    1) How will RichText in CF8 and RichText in Flex be the same/different? I’m in need of a WYSIWYG solution in CFFORM flash forms and/or Flex.
    2) Will CF8 flash forms support File Upload? Multi-File Upload?
    I have an immediate need for:
    1) A Flex form that has WYSIWYG editor (not just RichText basic like it is now) and file attachment fields.
    Or
    2) A CFFORM flash format form that does both.
    I’ve been holding off going back to HTML solutions I’ve used for both of these in the past.
    Don

    Reply
  14. Ben Forta Avatar
    Ben Forta

    Don,
    Flash Forms are not changing in Scorpio, other than removing any AS language restrictions.
    — Ben

    Reply
  15. david Avatar
    david

    hi ben, I test the code below on cf8 beta, but all the slides displasy the last item of the data from the database, why so?
    <cfquery name="slide" datasource="slidedb">
    select * from slide_tbl
    </cfquery>
    <cfpresentation title="Presentation" >
    <cfpresenter name="David" email="info@xxx.com" >
    <cfoutput query="slide">
    <cfpresentationslide title="#title#" duration="20">
    <h3>#slide_title#</h3>
    <p>#slide_content#</p>
    </cfpresentationslide>
    </cfoutput>
    </cfpresentation>

    Reply
  16. Kevin Avatar
    Kevin

    FckEditor, eh… that’s too bad.
    Can we make custom toolbars on the fly? Docs & reference would suggest NO – which is very, very bad.
    TinyMCE set up and configuration works so much better, especially controlling the toolbar dynamically.
    I need to layout toolbars on the fly, and would like to use cftextarea – but if I can’t I guess I’m sticking with TinyMCE

    Reply
  17. Brent Avatar
    Brent

    I am disappointed that more integration was not done with the rich text editor and flash forms.
    Also, I have a problem with some of my clients on a shared host environment. Since the FCKEditor config files are in the shared CFIDE folder which is not accessible on a shared host environment, I am at a loss as to how to provide a custom configurations across multiple hosts.
    I appreciate the simplicity of the additional attribute for cftextarea for rapid development, however any toolbar customization that is needed based on user access levels, or administrative experience, (custom skins to fit site design, styles, templates, etc.) illustrates this is not a robust solution as needed for most designers/developers.
    I was referred to a previous posting on per application settings [ http://www.forta.com/blog/index.cfm/2007/4/24/Scorpio-Per-Application-Settings ] for mapping from within the application, but am unclear as how this might work for the rich text editor.
    I would appreciate any ideas, suggestions, and hope of future development to address these concerns.
    Thanks!

    Reply
  18. Aleii Avatar
    Aleii

    We created a funky workaround using the flash layer technique to overlay the flash form with a HTML object that is the editor. z-index:2 is the key here.
    This comes after the </CFFORM> of the flash form.
    <object height="350" width="580" id="xeditor" style="left:40;top:85; width:555; height:290;position:absolute;z-index:2">
    <!— A form on top of the Xeequa standard flash form to blend in the rich text editor. —>
    <cfform name="myform" format="HTML" action="#CGI.Script_Name#">
    <cftextarea richtext=true name="postcontent" width="554" height="290" value="#getDB.postcontent#"/><BR>
    <center><cfinput type="submit" value="#_trx.page.current_post_button_value#" name="UpdatePost" size="30"/><cfinput type="submit" value="Submit" name="newpost" size="30"/></center>
    </cfform>
    </object>
    You can see it at http://www.xeequa.com, just register an account
    Maybe it helps.
    Aleii

    Reply

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