ColdFusion Sneak Peak at MAX - ColdFusion and AIR

Posted on Oct 02, 2007

In the sneak peak for ColdFusion, Hemant Khandewal shows how Coldfusion can create an offline/online AIR application using the next version of ColdFusion. Despite some initial technical difficulties, he shows an application built using the new Coldfusion 8 CFAjax tags.

Hemant wants to convert the application to an AIR application and make it available in an offline mode. Offline submission of data would synchronize when the person returns online. He does this by adding a cfairaccess tag to the page. ColdFusion then generates all the code for the AIR application to store all its data into the local database, and then the page is saved as HTML and compiled into an HTML/JavaScript AIR application with the full functionality retained.

Lastly, Hemant demonstrates how offline data is sent to the sever. This uses a coldfusion.air.submitForm function. Once this is done, when a person is in offline mode the data is put into an unsent items. Once the person gets back into online mode, the data is synchronized by being sent to the server.

This is great news in my opinion for the future of ColdFusion and deeper integration with AIR, which is an obvious priority for Adobe.

Comments

Sam Farmer Wow. This sounds very intriguing. Any word on when it would be released?

Posted By Sam Farmer / Posted on 10/02/2007 at 5:27 PM

Brian Rinaldi Nope, no word at all. However, considering 8 just came out, I put this at least a couple years down the road unfortunately unless there is some sort of major interim release.

Posted By Brian Rinaldi / Posted on 10/03/2007 at 5:14 AM

Rob Brooks-Bilson I'm going to guess that we'll see this in a point release later this year. Tying CF to AIR is an important step for Adobe, and I think we'll see the capability sooner, rather than later.

Posted By Rob Brooks-Bilson / Posted on 10/03/2007 at 10:45 AM

Rob Brooks-Bilson Err - or early next year. I forgot it's October already!

Posted By Rob Brooks-Bilson / Posted on 10/03/2007 at 10:50 AM

Sean Corfield I thought it was a fugly hack - he saved a generated page from the browser, for heaven's sake!!

Posted By Sean Corfield / Posted on 10/03/2007 at 9:16 PM

Brian Rinaldi @Sean, I agree somewhat but my thought on that was 1) we *just* got CF8 and I wouldn't expect more than a POC at this point; 2) I can't imagine this is the end-result workflow they will release. The important thing to me is that this is not only on their radar but actually in some form of active development.

Posted By Brian Rinaldi / Posted on 10/04/2007 at 5:48 AM

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About

My name is Brian Rinaldi and I am the Web Community Manager for Flash Platform at Adobe. I am a regular blogger, speaker and author. I also founded RIA Unleashed conference in Boston. The views expressed on this site are my own & not those of my employer.