Flex 4 of course introduces the new line of Spark components that replace the Flex 3 based Halo ones - although you can use Halo and Spark containers/components together.

One interesting tidbit is that both Halo and Spark support the notion of constraints, which is an option you can use for visual layout, by being able to anchor visual components from the edges or center of containers. E.g.

That above example would anchor the button to the bottom right, regardless if the user resizes the browser.

However, as far as I know there's no Spark container that supports enhanced constraints. You would still use the mx:Canvas Halo container. E.g.:

I started working with Report Builder today and things were going along just fine. I was making some changes to the report, and adding in a bunch of styles, then ended up with some really wierd results once i shut the reports down and tried to open them back up again.

What appeared to be happening was that items that i had set up with a style were not staying set and that the report builder was forgetting the association with style. But that turned out not to be the case.

I decided to investigate a bit more and found out the following:

if you use a value outside of a normally used default value, in my case, we were using a font size of 7 (I know, really small right?) and it's not in a defined style, when you exit the file and load it back in, it will "forget" those values.

To replicate:

create a new file, and create a text label. enter some text in there. change the font size to 7. save the file. then close the file. Open the file up, and you'll see that the size has moved back up to the default font size.... How fun!!

The work around is to define a style with the minimum size/style that you want and assign it to the text area that you define.

Summary

This is my first time working with Report Builder in Coldfusion. I remember the hype about it a few years ago when they launched it, but it looks like it hasn't lived up to the hype... in some senses it seems like it would be easier/quicker/faster/more flexible/ to just create the report in CF and the pump it into pdf.

MicroStrategy has released a free version of Reporting Suite targeting the small and midsize enterprise (SME) market. Reporting Suite is an operational reporting tool: it doesn't offer scorecarding or dashboarding features, but it does include drilling, graphing, data slicing, formatting, and interactivity. The suite is free for use by up to 100 users, which should address the reporting needs of most small- and medium-sized customers.

Check out the article here

So how do you use it? MicroStrategy offers free 1 day seminars on its product. Just enough to make you dangerous.

Enjoy!

Some of you may have encountered this Windows gotcha.

When you remote desktop to your PC, you'll see the primary monitor. The problem arises when you have windows showing on the other screen that aren't visible to you, or you open up a program that was last used on the secondary monitor – by default it'll reopen on there.

A quick solution is to right click on the task bar and select maximize. But if you need to work with multiple windows:

1. Right click on the app and select Move
   

2. Press any arrow key
3. The window will now follow your mouse, allowing you to move it back onto the primary monitor.

We have a large body of users who remote desktop into a small terminal services farm to run a web based intranet app.

The application was originally aimed at Internet Explorer (because of its integrated window security for automatic login), and the servers are nearing the edge of comfortability.

So while we look at expanding on the hardware side of things, we also took at look on the software side - specifically the browser (currently supporting IE7).

After doing some tests, we found some surprisingly results. Keep in mind this was by no means an exhaustive analysis, but a quick evaluation to see if any browser has a clear advantage with our intranet apps.

The Results
To our surprise, IE8 actually runs the leanest overall:

Here are some other observations/notes:

• Chrome and IE8 by default run each frame, pop-up window, and tab as a separate process (you'll see multiple .exe's running in the task manager). Most people don't know this and so it appears that the one Chrome process they look at seems like it's using incredibly low amounts of memory (but if you add it up, it's not as mindblasting).
• We configured Chrome and IE8 to run as a single process.
• Any theme, extension, add-on, toolbar, etc... to FireFox significantly increases memory usage. In the tests above, this was a FireFox running barebones.
• Chrome seems to have a significant advantage on pages that have a lot of JavaScript involved (e.g. the my.yahoo.com portal when logged in) - and IE8 did the worst.
• On the flipside with regular HTML pages that used simple JavaScript (e.g. form validation), IE8 did the best. Though Chrome was close on some of those occasions.
• Was unable to test Safari 3 and 4, they flat out didn't work on the Intranet.

The next thing that would be interesting is to go through a series of planned steps for a period of an hour and see how well they do.

SAN RAMON, May 4th -- Amcom Technology is pleased to announce that Jon Hirschi will be joining the Product Development Team in our Amcom Computer Services division.

Jon brings a rich set of skills and experiences to the table, with skills ranging from software engineering (Adobe Flex, Adobe ColdFusion, Java, and AJAX), systems development life cycle (agile methodologies, and technical design), to business (process engineering, project management, and product management).

Jon is also an active member with the community with having authored technical articles, to co-authoring Flex 3 In Action, and participating in the Adobe Community Expert program.

Amcom Technology is a member of the Amcom companies located in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Ramon). The company provides premium end-to-end technology services from Web 2.0/RIA software development, to network infrastructure and business intelligence.

Some interesting news that has implications for BI: SAP and Sybase Put the Power of SAP Business Suite in the Hands of the Mobile Workforce

This new partnership between SAP and Sybase is a nice step forward for providing mobile based enterprise software. Considering that mobile devices now outnumber desktops, this partnership helps create an understanding of how to deliver BI and analytics to a mobile user. The ultimate goal is to allow that user to interact with their data, and to take action, wirelessly, in real time.

In my opinion, this is a good pairing. Business Objects (SAP) has a Mobile BI component as part of their Enterprise BI suite. This provides the software platform for delivering information to Web and mobile users. Sybase has the database tools in its ASE (Adaptive Server Enterprise) product that can provide warehousing and data integration. You can use Enterprise Connect to establish dynamic connections to data sources, and the Data Integrator for managing the ETL.

With a bit of creativity, we could probably find the same type of tool sets for Oracle and SQL Server solutions. For example, in SQL Server, using Linked Servers in place of Enterprise Connect, and SSIS packages in place of the Data Ingegrator. Regardless of the marketing spin, it's nice to see how you can mix and match existing products to create an architecture for Mobile BI.

When Google first announced it's app engine, I thought wow that sounds cool, but I wasn't really into learning python (nothing against it, just wan't interested). So I filed it for later investigation. Well after about a year or so, later has become now. And now we don't need to learn python. We can use Java or more interesting for me Groovy.

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AmcomTech is proud to be a sponsor for the East Bay ColdFusion Users Group (EBCFUG).

A few of the ColdFusion gurus from AmcomTech will be at the EBCFUG's inauguration (Apr 7, 2009) as the user group kicks off it's first meeting.

AmcomTech's staff has a long history of being involved in the technical community by participating and sponsoring user groups, authoring articles for technical magazines, supporting users in support forums, publishing books, and lending a hand to open source initiatives.

We look forward to seeing you.

Last time left us with a couple of very simple domain objects written in Groovy. No real behavior or anything like that, and at this point they aren't anything that we couldn't have done just as easily with Transfer or even just using queries and structs. It was kind of nice not having to create any database tables, but other than that no real world benefit so far.

Here are the updated files for this post if you would like to follow along.

Even ignoring that we have no behavior in our objects (not the point of this post), what we have is less than ideal, both from the point of view of the object model and for the relational model. Employer and Employee both have 4 properties representing an address instead of just one property that is an address. Wouldn't it be better if say, we could have the address be it's own class? That way we could implement some snazzy behavior in it and not have to repeat that logic in any object that will have an Address?

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