The other day someone asked me whether you could use ColdFusion Builder extensions and/or snippets in Flash Builder. The answer is yes. When you have ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder installed together in the same Eclipse environment, which you should, many features of the IDE can carry over including things like RDS dataview, RDS fileview, snippets and more. However, when it comes to things like extensions, there are some limitations based on my experience. Still, there's enough added value that even you straight Flash/Flex developers who got a copy of ColdFusion Builder with Flash Builder Premium may want to install it. Here's what I've found.

In part 1 of my Squiggly for Flex tutorial, we discussed how easy it is to use the check-as-you-type spell checking for any TextInput or TextArea. This works great for most scenarios. However, sometimes you're requirements may ask for more customized spell-checking behavior. For example, perhaps you need to persist user custom dictionary items to a database or you need to build a custom spelling suggestion UI - these were just a couple of the requirements I faced. Thankfully, Squiggly provides most of the tools you will need to get these tasks done...with some caveats.

Last year Adobe released their Squiggly spell checking engine for Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR and on December 18th, they updated that library to work with Flex 4 Spark components. (UPDATED: Shortly after this was posted, adobe released a third prerelease of Squiggly that contains support for additional languages and a number of significant code changes. The code samples in this post have been updated to work with the latest version. Most of the more significant code changes apply to the examples in the upcoming part 2.). Where I work, spell checking is a core requirement for our application, and as we are looking to rebuild the Flex portion of our application in Flex 4, I decided to put Squiggly through some some basic testing to see if it could meet our requirements. In the end it mostly met them with some key drawbacks that hopefully are addressed in future releases.

In this post I will discuss the previously available options for spellchecking, how to get started with Squiggly and how to implement it using the provided SquigglyUI class. Part 2, which will be posted next week, will delve into the SpellingDictionary and UserDictionary and how they can be used to create custom spellchecking functionality. Keep in mind, this is all based upon a proof-of-concept that is still to be considered a "work in progress" - so feel free to share your ideas, suggestions and experiences.

Ryan Stewart posted yesterday that Adobe is sponsoring an evening Flash Camp here in Boston (well, Cambridge to be exact) at the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square. on March 19 They are flying in several members of the Flash Builder and Flex teams including Deepa, the new Product Manager for Flex. In addition, for ColdFusion folks like myself, there will be a session on ColdFusion Builder. Something tells me we can expect some exciting announcements a this event! Plus, there will be beer...and, if that weren't enough, there will be beer too! Oh, and prizes, but did I mention free beer?

This sounds like its going to be a great event and given that its complete free (as in beer!), I expect it will sell out soon. So, grab your tickets ASAP. Here's some basic details from Ryan's site:

How Much: Free and open to the public (Limited space and Registration required)
When: Friday, March 19th, 2010. 5:00 p.m. EST – 10:30 p.m. EST
Where: The Charles Hotel, Harvard Square, 1 Bennett St. Cambridge, MA 02138
Why: Why not?
What to Bring: Yourself and your laptop. Adobe will be providing the beer, food, prizes, and access to parts of the engineering team so you can get all of your Flex questions answered.

I had the pleasure of contributing yet again to the Adobe Edge newsletter's latest issue. The article is titled "Data-centric development in Adobe Flash Builder 4" and ostensibly covers the new wizards built into Flash Builder 4 for integrating services in ColdFusion, PHP, Java and http/web services. However, the article also dives into the basics of ORM (Hibernate) integration in ColdFusion 9 as well as some of the default wizards that come with ColdFusion Builder for generating a server-side model using ORM. While the finished product of all of these wizards isn't necessarily a "ready-for-production" app, they do get you a long way towards a finished product with amazingly little work.

As both Flash Builder 4 and ColdFusion Builder near a final release, I expect the process only to become easier and smoother. This brings up an interesting aside about this article and the trouble writing about beta software. I originally wrote the first draft of this piece many months ago and for a variety of reasons it wasn't published until now. However, so much changed in the beta releases at MAX that I ended up having to revisit nearly every aspect of the article and revise it. The good thing was, though, that it was for the better in every sense.

So, go read the article, and please share what you think via comments.