MAX Lab: Making Real-Time Data Come Alive with Flex Data Visualization
If you are attending Adobe MAX, I’d like to invite you to come to what I think will be a fun BYOL (bring your own laptop) lab that I am co-presenting with Holly Schinsky.
I’ve always been fascinated with data visualization, especially data that needs analysis as it is generated. For example, financial transaction data can contain immediately useful trending information that is invisible without some visualization. Credit card transaction data can contain data indicating fraudulent use. I once worked on a project where we analyzed cellular call data in real-time looking for indications that a phone had been cloned (old-school cellular phones could easily be “cloned” before things went digital).
I thought that this type of data visualization would make for an interesting lab at MAX and invited Holly (Flex and Data Services guru) to help me put it together. Holly and I have been working hard to make sure that this is both an informative and fun 90 minute session.
Here’s the description from the MAX site: Discover how the real-time messaging capabilities of BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services ES can be combined with the data visualization capabilities of Flex to result in some very interesting applications. In this lab, you will learn how to produce and consume a real-time data feed and how to pass that data to various data visualization components to create an interactive dashboard.
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We’ll explore the basics of publish/subscribe messaging with BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services as it applies to real-time data feeds and learn how to take that feed and turn it into something very visual and compelling. We will first employ some of the Flex charting capabilities and then look at how to plot data on interactive maps.
The session times are Monday, Oct 5th at 2:30pm and Wednesday, Oct 7th at 1:30pm. Both sessions are filling quickly. The Oct 7th session is already 70% full – maybe I need to show you with a bar chart? 
Click here and sign up!
See ya at MAX!
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This is going to be a bomber session. Hopefully I’ll be free to see it. It combines enterprise level data with stuff Flash is good at: kick ass design.
=Ryan
ryan@adobe.com
Ryan Stewart said this on September 24, 2009 at 7:26 am |
Is there a video of the session available?
Antonin said this on October 11, 2009 at 5:33 pm |
Hi Greg. I attended your Max session. Outstanding! You and Holly inspired me. So, I tried to take Lesson2 and covert it so that it works with ColdFusion 8 and the flex2gateway and BlazeDS. I followed the BlazeDS integration with CF instructions and just cannot get beyond this 500 error issue on my Mac’s local CF server. When I try to send a message to the eventgateway using CF, I get “Unable to access the Flex Message Broker.” Would you happen to have an example of the chat lesson that is specific to deploying it on a CF8 and BlazeDS configuration? It is driving me crazy trying to get the server configured properly. Any general pointers would be helpful. Too much code to post here with all the xml config files,etc.
Thanks for the great session at MAX!
Don Kerr
Manager, Space City Adobe User Group
Houston, TX
Don Kerr said this on October 18, 2009 at 8:44 pm |
Greg, like I told Holly in her blog … got it working by upgrading to CF9! Very nice. Must have been something I missed in the manual config of CF8. Glad CF9 comes fully integrated with BlazeDS!
Thanks again.
Don
Don Kerr said this on October 20, 2009 at 12:10 am |
That’s good to hear! You should be able to get LiveCycle Data Services 2.6 working with it as well if needed. LiveCycle DS 3.x won’t work with CF9 yet…but will soon.
Greg
gregorywilson said this on October 20, 2009 at 9:45 am |
Hi Greg,
Still have one remaining issue with CF9/longpolling with Flex client as producer. Works great when cfm page is the producer, but not with flex.
would you view the source of this app. it included my CF9 messaging/services config files too.
http://www.fusionpage.com/flex/Messaging/bin/cfchat.html
this is the basic chat example, but using cf-longpolling-amf default in CF9.
I can’t get the producer messages to appear in the chat window.
I know the CF9 gateway works because, in another app, it receives the messages just fine
http://www.fusionpage.com/flex/Messaging/bin/screen.html
via
http://www.fusionpage.com/flex/Messaging/sendData.cfm
So, I’m trying to use the simple chat example to troubleshoot why CF9 doesn’t work with the config files I have defined. If I can figure out why the flex producer doesn’t work with CF9, using the basic chat example, then I can fix my Screen.html example too.
Would you mind looking at:
cfchat.mxml, messaging-config.xml, and services-config.xml and see if you see any issues with them?
Thanks,
Don Kerr
Don Kerr said this on November 20, 2009 at 10:15 pm |
Figured it out after posting this last comment! It was something I didn’t find in any of the CF9 docs/blogs/etc. It was a problem with my gateway cfc . Had to add this function to the gateway cfc .
So, in short, the same function that was working in my cfm page … needed to be included in the gateway cfc in order for the flex client to become the producer.
I also had to change the dot syntax
log.text += message.body.DATA.body.chatMessage + “\n”;
message was coming back inside .DATA.
Feels good to finally get the server-side configured properly! Now, I can proceed with building some production CF9/BlazeDS Real-Time data projects!
I really appreciate your MAX session for inspiring me to learn more about Real-Time data viz!
Thanks Greg and Holly!
Don
Don Kerr said this on November 21, 2009 at 12:09 am |