ColdFusion rocks! Come see for yourself at SOTR.

ColdFusionYes… I know… It may be a little bit strange to read this on my PHP driven WordPress blog but hear me out for a second. I used to be like many of you. I used to think that ColdFusion could not even touch the capabilities of PHP and I’m sure many of you still think that. But have you really seen the power of ColdFusion up close and personal? Have you downloaded the developer version and played with it for a while? Well, I did and it blew me away. I always find it so amazing to see that CF can do the same task in only a fraction of the code needed in other languages.

You really have to see it and/or play with it before you can really appreciate the power of ColdFusion. Scotch On The Rocks, the ColdFusion conference, is giving you the opportunity to do just that. They’re going to try and reach out to the non-CFMLers and see if they can’t offer them a little incentive to give CFML a go. They’re offering 10 tickets for each location to JSP/PHP/.NET/Rails developers to come along and see what all the fuss is, for absolutely zero cost.

Come and see the power of ColdFusion yourself!

PS: I am now working on a super-secret project powered by ColdFusion. So yes… I do use ColdFusion these days!

Video tutorial: Use Flex for your ActionScript coding for Flash CS4

There are a couple of ways you can use Flex and Flash together. I’ve already showed you a couple of those in previous tutorials. In this video, I’ll show you how to use the SWC files created by a Flex library project in Flash CS4. That way, you can have an ActionScript developer work in Flex who can then hand off compiled SWC files to a Flash designer.

Weekly blend – March 7, 2009

No crisis on the web? How are you doing?

crisisAccording to the Union of Belgian Advertisers and researchers Profact [as published on Digimedia (dutch)], there is no crisis on the Internet. According to this report, 90% of all advertisers said the crisis does impact the way they work and over 80% reduced their budgets by 10 to 20%.

Where it gets interesting, is where they are spending their money. 55% of all advertisers said they will spend less money on tv, newspaper, magazine, movie theater, radio and street ads. However, 37% of them said they are investing more in Internet advertising.

On top of that, I also see a lot of interactive agencies looking to hire extra Flash designers and developers. This week alone, I saw at least 6 job openings across Europe on Twitter. I also received a couple of emails from agencies looking for people.

While talking to agencies at both FITC and FlashCamp UK last week, I found that this seems to be a common trend. Most of the people I talked to still had plenty of work but are expecting a cutback in marketing projects. Most of the people I talked to are planing on filling any gaps with research (looking into mobile development came up frequently) and diversifying their skill set.

Now, I may be completely wrong, but to me it sounds as if “the Internet” is doing ok at the moment. I’m sure there have been some cutbacks here and there already but the bigger agencies seem to be doing alright.

I’d love to hear your stories! How have you been doing? Has your company been hit by the crisis? If so, in what way?

Video tutorial: Use the Flex webservice component in Flash CS4 projects

In this video, I’ll show you how you can use the webservice component from the Flex framework in your Flash CS4 projects. If you’re missing the webservice component in Flash, just use the one in the Flex framework.

UPDATE: My sincere apologies. There is an error in my code which I did not explain in the video.
Line 10 should not read myWebService.load but myWebService.loadWSDL.

I do remember we recorded this one twice and I fear that that’s where the mixup happened. Please download the working FLA below.

Download the FLA file.