By barneyb on November 26, 2007
I just updated FlexChart with a 'click' callback. You can now specify the name of a JavaScript function to be invoked when a data point on the chart is clicked. The function is passed the ID of the chart, the series label, and the x and y values for the point, in that order. Check [...]
Posted in coldfusion, flex, tools
By barneyb on November 22, 2007
This evening, I extended my Flex charting widget further. The demo is still available, and I've posted a new ZIP archive of the source.  Here's a quick rundown of what's changed:
The custom tag is now called xmlchart.cfm, instead of just chart.cfm. That's to make way for a different chart.cfm that provides an XML-less interface (like [...]
Posted in coldfusion, flex, tools
By barneyb on November 21, 2007
I've been looking for a good charting mechanism for a few personal apps.  CFCHART works in some cases, but I usually opt for SVG, either rendered inline (i.e. SVG and XHTML interleaved in an XML doc) or rasterized into a PNG server-side via Batik. Both solutions have their merits, but both also have a lot [...]
Posted in coldfusion, flex, tools
By barneyb on November 2, 2007
I discovered today, while trying to synthesize an Enum type, that AS3 has the concept of a static initializer, which is awesome. In a nutshell, a static initializer is kind of like a constructor, but it's for the class object itself, not instances of the class. It gets invoked during classloading, after all [...]
Posted in development, flex
By barneyb on October 26, 2007
I've been working on a Flex app for visualizing market research data for the past week or two, and ran into an interesting behaviour of ChangeWatcher, quite at odds with how I'd have expected it to work. As everyone knows, the Flash player is single threaded (and frame based), which makes for some interesting edge [...]
Posted in flex
By barneyb on September 1, 2007
I just deployed a Flex app to an SSL secured host, and ran into some issues getting AMF over SSL working. Googling turned up the answers, but in rather fragmented form. So I'm coalescing them here. In a nutshell, you have to create a new channel (my-secure-amf) that uses the secured versions of the AMF [...]
Posted in coldfusion, flex
By barneyb on August 31, 2007
I went to install the Flex3 Apache compiler module on my server today, and it supports glibc 2.4 and higher only, which means no RedHat 4 (or derivatives). So no Flex server compilation for me, since there doesn't seem to be source anywhere to compile against glibc 2.3.
Posted in aside, flex, tools
By barneyb on July 17, 2007
I've been working with a custom Slider extension (which selects a range of elements from a dataProvider, rather than numerics, plus a couple other little things), and got to skinning it this afternoon. One of the design specs required different images for the two sliders, both pointing towards each other (i.e. mirror images of each [...]
Posted in flex
By barneyb on July 17, 2007
Another relatively minor change: the charts now use a DateTimeAxis instead of a category axis. This way temporal spacing is preserved, rather than just ordering, and the axis isn't as cluttered, because it can drop labels without affecting the display semantics.
Posted in biking, flex
By barneyb on July 13, 2007
I just pushed a couple usability tweaks to the bicycle dashboard app. First, the profile you're viewing is now persisted in a cookie, as well as session, when you return to the app, you'll still be viewing the same thing, even if your session expired. Before you'd always revert back to me, and while I'm [...]
Posted in biking, flex