Howdy folks!  I recently came across this handy dandy ColdFusion CFSCRIPT cheatsheet from Pete Freitag's web site at http://www.petefreitag.com/cheatsheets/coldfusion/cfscript/

So I was channel surfing the other day and came across a blip about this incredible looking car, Tesla!  Tesla Motors has designed a 100% electrical vehicle that runs on batteries.  It looks nice too!  It is in production right now and you can get your own.  If you got one, you would be basically paying $100,000 for the base model that gives you 2 cents per mile.  WOW!  Not really bad when you consider your ROI.  So here's the rest of the scoop...  The 2008 Tesla Roadster is in production now, it's 100% electric, it goes 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds (better than a $500,000 Ferrari), it has an incredible 13,000 RPM redline (try that with a fuel vehicle), it gets a staggering 256 MPG equivalent, and about 220 miles per charge (which most fuel highend sports cars get anyway).  It takes about 2 to 3 hours to charge. 

Bottom line, I'm impressed.  Finally a 100% electrical vehicle that looks nice.  It blows the pants off any over priced "green vehicle" out there that uses gasoline still.  Dollar for dollar, I think this is actually a sweet investment for anyone looking for a great designed 2-seater sports car that can beat a Ferrari at a fraction of the cost.  No carbon footprint too!  Check out their web site at http://www.teslamotors.com/.

This is my analysis to consider to use Flex technology over Cognos for dashboard purposes when using Aqualogic (by BEA):

• Did you know that Oracle has chosen Flex technology to revamp their user interface (UI)?  Last year, Oracle OpenWorld announced they will use Adobe Flex Technology at: http://www.jamesward.com/wordpress/category/oracle/
• At the BEA main Developers web site, their first article discusses Building Enterprise RIA Using Flex and WebLogic Server at: http://dev2dev.bea.com/
• BEA embraces Flex and now bundles Flex Builder (the software used to create Flex solutions) into BEA Workshop Studio for FREE at: http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/wgroth2/archive/2007/10/_bea_workshop_s.html
• The external BEA Website has a community for Flex at: http://www.bea.com/flex/
• The Flex Framework is Open Source.  Meaning we will have plenty of developers to chose from when needing to hire for Flex resources.  Open Source is embraced by the development community inside and outside of many large companies and therefore larger numbers to chose from.
• Cost Savings! Flex offers ubiquity to the web browser which guarantees the same look and feel cross platform and cross browsers. Important: This equals HUGE costs savings during the development phase and allows developers to not have to program conditional statements to handle browser specific functionality, styles (CSS), etc…  Overall, it reduces the development lifecycle and ends up becoming a huge value proposition for all envolved.
• Cognos has very expensive licensing attached to it. Use of the Adobe Flex framework and the Flash Player as the platform is comepletly free.
• Faster development with Flex! I created a Yahoo mapping application in Flex that took 4 hours on one weekend.  Most of my time spent on doing this was learning the Yahoo API.  If a “real” developer did it, it would have been much less time spent.
• Great Performance! The Flex framework gets cached at the client and allows users to have a faster experience next time any Flex solution is used.
• Flex does not discriminate and works in any middle-tier (Java, .NET, PHP, ColdFusion, etc…)
• Other frameworks (like many in Ajax) have to use 3rd party libraries to duplicate Flex’s capabilities.  Flex comes baked with 70 componenets that add value to any business looking for amazing capabilties.  The list of components are growing and allow for a continued bright future for Flex.
• If needed, Flex Portlet on any portal solution can live “as is” outside a portal environment with no additional coding requirements because they don’t need to rely on the proprietary Aqualogic framework.

Bottom line, I know this summary is biased.  But it’s biased because of the obvious impact that Flex has (or can have) for any portal environment.  Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. Flex is based on several versions of the Flash platform and a mature product.  Flex is an easy programming model for all web developers and contains 70 very rich business-focused user interface (UI) components.  Flex can be used as the solution for small or large scale applications including Boeing portal solutions.  Flex technology allows for easy implementation to the desktop for off-line use (the next generation of Web solutions).

Here are a couple of great dashboard examples built using Flex technology:

• http://www.adobe.com/go/flex_dashboard_app
• http://examples.adobe.com/flex3/devnet/dashboard/main.html
• NOTE: Check back for more, this list will grow!

I went to a technical briefing by Adobe and was surprised to see that they quoted me after talking with them for a while about how Flex is an amazing product where I work.  Here's my quote,

See it on Adobe.com HERE.

I recently came across this very handy tip from a Flex Examples Blog.  This code sample allows any Flex developer to determine the server / domain name at runtime.  This is a handy tip which can help you when deploying Flex applications on mulitple servers (such as a staging/production server). Basically you can listen for the Application tag to dispatch the applicationComplete event, grab the URL of the SWF using the loaderInfo.url property, and then use the URLUtil.getServerName() method to parse out the server name. 

I ended up using this excellent solution for a Flex project I'm working on as a consultant.  Check it out: