Tag: sotr09

Flash Builder – Webservices – SoTR

Flash Builder – Webservices – SoTR

Question:

What has a hidden entrance, is dark, damp and a just bit fousty (for any non Scottish readers – definition ) and takes quite a while to warm up?

Answer:

SoTR09 🙂
Yes, the Scotch on the Rocks 09 event held in Edinburgh was in a building called ‘The Caves’.  Oddly enough for a venue there was no sign outside to say that you were in the right place and on Friday there was a reasonable amount of rain.  So inside the main venue area you could see the water slowly runnning down the walls and the occasional drip noise coming from the corridor. The heaters didn’t come on till half way through the day but the tea & beers made up for that.

So what about the day, well I’m not a coldfusion guy, actually I’ve never touched a line of coldfusion.  But I didn’t go to learn or find out about coldfusion, I went to see if there was any tip bits about flex.  Serge was doing a talk on the new Flash builder and Flash catalyst, plus there was the another talk that involved both flex (lifecycle) and coldfusion.

It was nice to see Flash catalyst in action and during some of the talks they did this cool thing with webservices as if it was just something that was just known.  What was done was to import a WSDL (webservice) then once you see the list of methods available and while in design view, drag a method onto a datagrid and flash builder automaticly populated the datagrid with the returned result fields.

Something cool, other than Catalyst

Maybe this isn’t a cool thing to most people, nobody in the room seemed to notice, maybe because they were pretty much all coldfusion devs!?  But I thought that it was pretty neat. Should save a heap of time typing, plus just like you can with AMF you can now specify a return type for the WSDL.  Great new additions to Flash Builder. (In order to set up the datagrid automatically you need to specify the return type before dragging it onto the datagrid)

Best thing you could do would be to try yourself, download Flash Builder here, then create a new project, then find a WSDL that you wish to test something like this weather WSDL, choose the menu in Flashbuilder ‘Data’ -> ‘Connect to Webservice’. Follow the wizard then play around with the services.  Try things like setting the return type (create your own object), or right click one of the methods and ‘generate form’.  Very good additions.

If you’re into coldfusion then I’d definitely recommend SoTR. Last year (08) had more flex than this year (09), so if you’re also into flex then keep an eye on it. Scotch on the Rocks

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