Waldo Smeets .com

Ben Forta has two articles on his weblog in which he posts some code examples of how Flex and ColdFusion can work together. The first one shows how a Flex application can consume a ColdFusion generated webservice in runtime, the second one shows how ColdFusion can be used to dynamically generate MXML which on it’s part is passed on to the Flex presentation server to generate the UI out of it.

This is great prove of the flexibility that you’ll get in a combined CF / Flex application, but also shows that you have to consider your application design very carefully (isn’t that with every application?). Below I’ll try to describe two use cases in which each of the solutions seem to be the best.

If you develop a dynamic rich interface in which the data does not change frequently and will be the same for the majority of your site visitors (or major groups), then you might want to go for option 2. This dynamically generates the MXML and thus hard codes the data into the SWF and avoids that your interface has to consume a webservice for each pageview. This could be very efficient in for example multi langual applications.

However,  if your rich interface has to display data that change very frequently (read: several times a day) or need to be customized for each and every visitor, you’ll most likely be better off to just consume the webservice on runtime and thus go for option 1.

I’m wondering whether Ben can come up with more ways in wich Flex and ColdFusion can work together 🙂