Ben Forta presented Flex 2/CF Integration tonight...

Even with a busy travel schedule, Ben managed to stop by Philly and give his Flex2/Cf Integration presentation. Before I comment on that, recap the meeting.

The development team from the Wharton Business School at Penn gave an excellent presentation on some of the applications that they have developed. They had a super personalized intranet portal for the students. There was a very nice home-grown CMS system for managing the intranet. The application that impressed me the most was the ability to search for conference rooms via a cell phone text message and then actually book the room, all via text messaging. The student then received a confirmation email of the booked resource, a nice touch. Wharton has a large team of developers, somewhere between 12-15 in all. It's quite an impressive facility overall.

Now, for Ben's preso. As usual, Ben didn't fail to deliver a very inspiring presentation. Realizing the extremely tight integration between Flex and CF quickly started to get the wheels turning. Once the endpoints of your path are setup in the xml configuration file and then completing the path information in the project file properties, the cfc's can easily be referenced in the remote object calls. There is absolutely no reason that any CF developer shouldn't consider using FLEX, especially since the pricing structure has been reworked. Now, FLEX can be used with Coldfusion for the price of $0....yes - FREE! And that includes the ability to retrieve data from CFC's via remoting (using the CF adapter) or web services. How could you not use FLEX to deliver a sexy UI! It just makes sense now. It sounds like the Enterprise Services will be available via a tiered pricing structure, so I'll be anxious to see those price points, though I'm sure they won't be out for a while.

I've been tied up at my workplace with some serious deadlines recently, but once things lighten up I'll certainly be jumping on the FLEX bandwagon and digging in!