Flex and CFMX Integration

There has been some talk on the Blogs lately regarding integration of Flex with ColdFusion into the same server instance. If you're not aware of it, the new flash CFFORM is essentially a stripped down version of Flex. All that's needed is to merge the full flex server into the ColdFusion server. There is a great technote at Macromedia on this.

Integration of Flex with CFMX can give you the ability to run cfm and mxml files in the same root context. While you can do this with the CFMX standard edition, the real benefit occurs with the CFMX enterprise edition where you get the added functionality of JSP pages as well as the ability to import JSP tag libraries.

There is one particular advantage of integrating Flex with CFMX that I find extremely helpful and that is the built-in CFMX Flash Remoting. Flash Remoting, CFC's, along with the Application.cfm/Application.cfc makes it easy to use the already familiar application and session management features of ColdFusion within the Flex framework
Some suggestions

1. If you haven't made the jump to a CFMX/J2EE installation from the CFMX standalone, I suggest you do so. I feel that you have more control of your server environment and it is a great learning experience

2. The integration technote also discusses integration of the Flex Samples. If you are using the CFMX/J2EE installation, ignore that bit and just create a Flex samples server in the JRun servers directory using the JRun Admin Console, copy the Flex samples.war file to the newly created flex samples server folder and perform a hot deploy. You generally don't want the samples running in a production environment and you typically only need the samples on occasion. It's much easier to launch the samples server through JRun and access the samples through JRun's built-in web server i.e. http://localhost:8200/samples/