Kevin Hoyt

Ryan Stewart and I are crazy about GPS and geospatial information. We both actually carry a Trackstick device wherever we travel which records our adventures. The data file can be accessed via USB as any number of formats, but it is usually XML-oriented. Of course we’re both building applications that use this data, which is when I ran into the problem of waiting for a server to process several megabytes of XML data. Using Flex I was able to monitor the long-running transaction without unnecessarily delaying the responsiveness of the user interface.
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It is pretty common these days that Flex developers come from traditional programming backgrounds. This means that more and more, many developers leveraging the Flash Player, have never worked with Flash CS3. It also then means that many Flex developers aren’t always familiar with common Flash authoring techniques. Here’s a quick introduction on masking for Flex developers, with some collaboration thrown in for good measure.
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There’s an old demonstration we used to show for Flex Data Services, now LiveCycle DS, that pushed data from the server to the client to be charted. More modern incarnations of this can still be found as samples included with LiveCycle DS and BlazeDS (Trader Desktop). The original incarnation was great fun to show, but I never really liked the workflow of getting the data feed started and stopped. Old habits die hard, and I used that dislike as an excuse to explore the new CFTHREAD feature of ColdFusion 8 in conjunction with the included LiveCycle DS instance for data push.
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