Seven new projects and nine updates in this week's update. This update covers the past two weeks as I was away at MAX last week. MAX was excellent as usual with some big announcements for those of us interested in ColdFusion or Flex, though my favorite part may have been hanging at the Cigar bar drinking, smoking a cigar and networking. I hope to have a wrap up post coming some time this week. However, we better get down to business as there is a lot to cover this week.

Recently I encountered a situation whereby my services API had a requirement for a single method that actually retrieved many types of items, all of which extended an object that, for example purposes, I will call just "item." The biggest obstacle was that for various reasons, nothing inside the item told you what subtype it was (which is arguably a better solution than the one provided here). Nonetheless, the object itself can tell me what type it is just by examining the metadata, and I was able to call the appropriate methods using that information. Below I have the code that allows you to do this in case you encounter a similar requirement. This example does a read based upon the CFC type, but the same can be done for create, update and delete (or whatever else really). (Code after break)

The Day two keynote starts out deafeningly loud. Tim Buntel, senior product manager for Flex Builder, is the first speaker to speak about the Flash Platform. He does a humorous secret agent theme to his presentation, where Ben Forta joins him onstage in a secret agent costume. They discuss almost the entire Adobe product line including Flex, Flash, AIR, ColdFusion, Dreamweaver, Flash Media Server, Flash Catalyst and more.

Flash Catalyst is what everyone formerly knew as Thermo and Flex Builder 4 is the "Gumbo" release. Traditionally, Adobe always invested in developer productivity tools for Flex but they are now spreading out to design-oriented tools with Flash Catalyst, Flash Pro CS4 ad FXG. They are also extending to data by adding tooling that is data aware. Underneath everything there is a whole new set of next generation components within the Flex framework.

Adobe MAX this year had over 5,000 attendees and I am one of them. I cover everything discussed within the Day One Keynote along with the product announcements and previews. Highlights include talk of the Flash Platform including Flex, AIR, Cocomo, and Flash Lite.