Doug Arthur's Flex, AIR, and ColdFusion Blog

I've been horrible at keeping my blog up to date. I recently filled out my google profile, and one of the questions on it is "Something I still can't find on google", and my answer to that is "Time"...

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One great thing about Flex is the ability to create your own custom components of whatever the framework left out. One simple component that would have served the framework nicely was a LinkLabel of some sorts. Something that creates a standard link that everyone is use to rather than that ugly LinkButton. Users are familiar with traditional links, and they expect to see those for links. For that, I have created a custom LinkLabel component, which acts like a typical href. It doesn't have all the functionality of href, but I may include that later.

An example (with source) can be viewed here.

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It's been a few days since I've posted anything. I've been working with ColdFusion SAML implementation on one of my side projects, which I have found a usefull post on over at www.philduba.com. For those that aren't familiar with SAML, it is Security Assertion Markup Language and has to do with Single-Sign-On (SSO). That's been interesting to say the least. I also have another project I'm working on over at www.hervoicecampaign.com working to improve the Flex applications performance, and appearently Jeremy Allaire's Brightcove video player is resource intensive. I need to investigate the Brightcove API a little further before making any conclusions there. And finaly, I've been working on a Event Calendar application at my day job. I'm really excited about this Event Calender app, as I'm doing some fairly neat custom components, and feel like this application is going to turn out very useful. I plan on posting more about my progress on that soon, and plan on going into detail of how I'm building it and the functionality it will have. Stay tuned for that.

In order for ColdFusion to handle database failures that failover to another database, ColdFusion must be aware of the alternate database servers. This can be configured using a JDBC connection to the database and specifying the AlternateServers in the JDBC URL. Below outlines how to configure the Data Source connection in ColdFusion...

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I've been working on server configurations for getting my blog up and running, and thought maybe I could share my setup. I think someone out there may actually find it useful. So here goes...

I'm the type of person that likes to use vmware, and sometimes over use vm's. For each client project I take on, I create a clone from a base image so I have...

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