The marathon blog round-up! 390 blog entries to have a read through!
A lesson in never leave a job you should be doing today/tonight until tomorrow!

I'm never going to be able to go through all those posts in one sitting so I'm going to start with the batch of software releases that have been going on the last few weeks.

So lets dive in!

Matt Woodward notes that Open Office 3.0, which I mentioned previously in my round posts, has been released.

Nathan Mische has updated ColdFire on RIAForge fixing a few bugs and an extension for a problem with json. I'd love to know how he comes up with his version numbers. :)

Ray Camden released version 1.5 of SpoolMail with a couple of feature enhancements. If you don't know what SpoolMail is - its handy for when you're developing email feature in application and need to see what is going into the mail queue without them actually have to be sent to real people.

Ted Patrick announced the release of Flash Player 10 and gives a quick overview of the new features. Matt Woodward notes that the Linux edition of FP10 was actually released at the same time, which is a rare event!

Transfer 1.1 Final was release by Mark Mandel.  If you're stuck with a pre v1 copy of Transfer you really must get updated to the 1.1 version.  The performance enhancements are superb, along with the addition of new features such as cache monitoring and object proxies and the stack of bug fixes makes this release a must. If you're on the transfer list you may have noticed me making a bit of a tit of myself, but finally something has clicked and I've spent the last few days having the most fun doing development than I have in a while. Don't get me wrong.  I enjoy writing CFML, but its always nice to do something that is different to your usual routine and makes you feel all warm inside. ;oD   I should probably note here that Mark Mandel has done a CFConversation with Brian Meloche.

Are you an open source developer?  Do you work with databases?  Then you might be interested in Aqua Data Studio 7.  Todd Sharp notes that they offer free licences to open source developers.

The chaps at Broadchoice have been busy releasing and updating their very cool looking AIR application "Workspace".  I really should sign up for a beta account.  I wonder if it comes with free "more hours in the day". ;)

Ray Camden must be making use of those "more hours in the day", because in his relentless application development he's released an update to Lighthouse Pro along with everything else he working on.

Adobe have released a hotfix for ColdFusion 7 and 8 that adds multipart support to cfhttp to support changes with the Google and YouTube APIs.

Well I think thats about all the software releases I can find.  My blog entry count is down to 318 and my head is swimming.  Time to get some sleep.  Please let my son sleep the night through so I get more than 4 hours sleep!

Tomorrow night - "Blog Round up 5 Nov 2008 - In other news". ;)

I've been a bad boy.  I was supposed to write a review of ColdFusion 8 back in October of last year, but an imminent change of job and my 10 month old boy (now sixteen months) conspired to eat up all my time to play with CF8, let alone write a review.  When ever I did try to write a review I always ended up with writers block.  All the blog entries, by developers far more knowledgeable and respected than I, seemed to already talk about all the great new features in this latest, and greatest, version of ColdFusion.

So, what am I supposed to write about?  I started asking around. Asking people on my IM list, friends and colleagues, what I could write about.  It was this process that made me realise that I should write a kind of "nine months on" round up of what people's thought were now that they've had a chance to actually use the new server, rather than just "play" with it.

I've asked a few people who's names you might recognise to spend just a few minutes to write a paragraph of their thoughts and what their top three most used new tags or features are. 

Everyone I've spoken to says, that ColdFusion 8 is probably the most significant upgrade for ColdFusion yet.  If you don't upgrade for anything else, then you must upgrade for the performance increase you will get for your cfcs and your application in general.  One thing that has to be noted, ColdFusion 8 ships with Java 1.6 as its underlying JRE. Java 1.6 has a bug in the class loader that causes a fairly substantial performance hit when first loading your application.  Recommendations that I've seen from all quarters and experienced myself recently is, downgrading to Java 1.5 will increase load time performance without detrimental overall performance. 

The JavaScript and image enhancements are also top of a lot of people's lists.  Many of us are jack of all trades, writing applications in ColdFusion one moment, JavaScript the next and then onto Actionscript. Operators in CF have always been just fractionally different to these other languages or missing common syntax, like i++ for increment.  The enhancements to operators in CF8 make the transition between languages that little bit easier. AJAX is the technology de jour (sorry I'm a bit of a ludite and cynic when it comes to AJAX).  The addition of the AJAX functionality, using the very excellent ExtJS library (ok so I can still appreciate the work being done even if I am a cynic), is appreciated by many and makes an excellent addition to cfforms. 

Two other major additions to CF 8 that have had everyone buzzing are debugging and server monitoring.

Many of the long serving developers who remember the debug tools in cfstudio and the newer converts from other languages have been asking for IDE based debugging have now got their wish in the form of a plug-in for eclipse. It's not just this group of developers that are benefiting. Many others are wondering how they ever managed without it! 

Server monitoring is a great new addition to ColdFusion server and compliment to the likes of FusionReactor and SeeFusion. The CF8 server monitor isn't just the realm of the server admin any more. It gives the developer the abililty to see what is going on under the hood of your application.  As well as providing some pretty sophisticated reporting on requests, variable scopes, memory usage and errors, to name a few, there's also an email alert system, the ability to make snapshots of the server and an api to allow you to build custom responses to various system states.

Because I've procrastinated so long over writing even this review (sorry everyone - I'm not the most confident writer, so it takes me a while to be happy with what I've written) updater 1 for CF8 has been released.  Updater 1 provides up dates to the FCKEditor, ExtJS libraries, improved AJAX, CFPDF and CFImage functionality, oh yeah and full 64 bit support on all OSs.

Again, apologies to everyone involved for how shockingly long its taken me to write this.  And now I shall hand over to my friends and colleagues to give you their thoughts on CF8.

Oh - and if you want to find out more about CF8, CFML, Flex, AIR, AJAX do I really have to tell you to get yourselves to Scotch on the Rocks at the beginning of June??  ;)

The contributed comments:

Jeff Coughlin - http://www.JeffCoughlin.com

Overall I think its an important upgrade, but unless you need 64bit or new features in CF8, I personally haven't seen the "need" to upgrade.

I've been liking the new speed enhancements, image manipulation, and Ajax features.

The fact that my JavaScript skills are poor at best and I can now build feature-rich UI experience using CF's new built-in Ajax features is mind-blowing.

top 3 most used tags/new features?

1. cfimage
2. cfajax (feature, not the tag)
3. cfeclipse debugger plugin
   

Niklas Richardson - http://www.prismix.com

Basically, we're using CF8 as our server layer for Flex applications.

So we're using all the features that CF8 gives us for Flex integration.

We are also using CF8 to generate documents for our Flex applications (PDFs, etc...) and sending out e-mails with attachments, etc...

Probably all I can say is the most used features are CFCs ;-)

1. Flash remoting
2. LCDS in CF8
3. And that it's faster

Neil Middleton - FeedSquirrel http://www.feedsquirrel.com/

Here's the headlines:

- Performance, particularly CFC instantiation and cfthread

- Eclipse add-ons, debugger, CFC generator etc

- JSON returntype - opens up CF to a whole load of AJAX (but interestingly I don't have much time for the built in AJAX - I'm a jQuery guy)

Andy Allan - Fuzzy Orange http://www.fuzzyorange.co.uk/ - Scotch on the Rocks http://www.scotch-on-the-rocks.co.uk/

PDF Forms

This has been a huge feature as it allows us to easily automate the processing of order forms and purchase orders, and the creation of invoices. Throw in the server side printing and it's job done in one easy step.

Presentations on Demand

Initially this feature was a curious one to us. We never saw the potential. All that changed when a client needed the ability to have dynamic content displayed on their in house company plasma screens that keep staff up to date with what is going on. Using <cfpresentation> we simply took the client driven content, put it together as a Connect presentation and slam, they had their dynamic, up to date company news on display, and fully under their control.

Server Monitoring

Fuzzy Orange do a lot of server consultancy and troubleshooting, and the Server Monitor has proved to be another invaluable tool for our resources. ColdFusion administrators and developers have been screaming for something like this built into the product since the release of MX 6.0 and now they finally have it.

Ray Camden - ColdFusion Jedi http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/

While I'm still very impressed by image and Ajax support, I find myself being very happy with the real small changes. For example, being able to

loop over an array using array= in a loop, or adding to a string using &=. It's the small language constructs I think that I'm really grooving too right now. Not to say I think those are the most important features - but I'm noticing that I'm real happy to have them in my toolbox so to speak.

Another one is onMissingMethod, which has made my beans much slimmer.

Also - I know I blogged quite a bit about my problems with CFFEED, but I do find myself using it quite a bit, and when it works

well, it sure is a nice feature to have.

Andy Jarrett - Andy Jarrett http://andyjarrett.co.uk/

ColdFusion 8 and what it means to me as a developer

ColdFusion 8 has changed quite a few of my apps since its been released and for several reasons. New tags and functions always change your next project but with CF8 came some great performance enhancement which made delivering applications even faster. Below 3 of the most used new functions in CF8 that I find hard to live without when going back to CF7.  It's not say these are the best new features, but they are the ones that have helped me out in my day-to-day developing the most:

1. Argument collections

CF8 makes working with tags that have multiple attributes with different variations like CFFile so easy to work with. It allows you to specify the tags attributes in a single structure and pass them them to the tag.

2. CFPDF

This really made working with PDF's so simple. This tag allows you to interact dynamically with PDF's, PDF forms, merge, generate files on the fly.

3. Array and structure creation improvements

Probably one of the least exciting changes (along with JavaScript operators in expression) to be added but I find it makes code neater and easier to go back over.

Noteworthy mention goes out to all Ajax and Layout tags/functions that were introduced.

Peter Bell - Application Generation http://www.pbell.com

By far my favorite feature in CF8 is OnMissingMethod(). It allows me to make my APIs much more readable while still being able to synthesize most of my code.

I think the AJAX feature (including cfajaxproxy) are a great way to improve the usability and responsiveness of your applications without having to learn too much about AJAX and I love the cfimage features for manipulating images easily.

I use a lot of CFC's and have also noticed a nice performance boost working with CF8 and overall have found it to be a painless and valuable upgrade.

Scott Stroz - Boyzoid http://www.boyzoid.com/ Alagad Inc. http://www.alagad.com/

When ColdFusion 8 was released and Adobe started its world tour touting all the new features, it was sometimes difficult to keep track of all the new functionality and how we, as developers, could leverage that functionality.  In my mind, I thought there were a few new features I would use often (step debugging, AJAX integration and CFImage), and others that I thought were cool, but really had no current need for (CFPresentation, CFExchange).  About 6 months later, I use step debugging just about every day and to be honest, I am not sure how I survived so long without it. Just about every new application I create, I am using some of the AJAX integration and I find myself using cfimage even more than I imagined I would have.  I think these 3 things are, by far, the most useful additions to ColdFusion we have had in quite sometime.

Toby Tremayne - http://www.tobytremayne.com

Interfaces is right up there.

I haven't done as much as I'd like but very useful for really big projects with distributed development

I also make major use of the fact that enterprise features are now all in standard - often I only want to use something like that reasonably lightly anyway so the threading limitation isn't a problem

I was excited about the app specific mappings till I realized that they're no good for me :) They happen at run time, but cfc mappings and extends for example are compile time. (Ed's note: application specific mappings also don't work with cfimport because of the runtime/compile time issues with

Happy to see the debugger in there, although haven't had much chance to use it - I think the thing I probably use most is the improved operators in cfscript that and cfthread.  I write a lot of actionscript these days so it's nice to have a bit more similarity with the operators :) ooh ooh and JSON! yay for JSON!

Adobe Developer Week 2008 was a few weeks ago now and I realised the other day that I hadn't written a quick post to point you to the recordings from the Connect sessions.

I was talking to Barry Beatie down in Australia at the time.  He kindly pointed me to this Adobe Australia and New Zealand site : http://www.joinadobe.com/eseminars/main/index.html

Its a really nice site where you can find all the recordings, but I thought I should find the UK/USA equivalent.  Thank to Ed Sullivan for pointing me to this page.  http://snipurl.com/adobeonlineevents Not nearly so attractive, but is the main Adobe Online Event page and also provides some additional online events recordings. You'll need to scroll down to the "Flex Architecture" presentation for the Developer Week Presentations. The Developer Week presentations all have the following description:

Adobe provides end-to-end web development tool suites and solutions. Join us to see what the buzz is all about in this one week long event with 20 sessions covering AIR, Flex, Flash, Mobile, ColdFusion and Dreamweaver technologies. Click here to listen.

Enjoy!

Between 24th and 28th of March Adobe are running a series of online seminars via the power of Adobe Connect. 

You need to register for the seminars, but if they are full already there will be recordings available later.

For more information take a look at the information below.

Adobe provides end-to-end web development tool suites and solutions.
Join us to see what the buzz is all about in this one week long event
with 20 sessions covering AIR, Flex, Flash, Mobile, ColdFusion and
Dreamweaver technologies.

http://adobe.com/go/2008_developer_week

Just a quick post to point out the two upcoming Scottish ColdFusion User Group events.The two events are on Thursday 25th October and Wednesday 31st October.The first of these on Thursday this week is Andy Allan giving a presentation on ColdFusion 8 at Tidalfire in Edinburgh - for more information and how to register to attend, please see the Scottish CFUG site meeting entry here : http://snipurl.com/scfugcf8tidalfire.

The second is a combined online and live event with the UKCFUG. This will be a MAX Debrief session, as well as UKCFUG Halloween party. For those of you that can attend the meeting in London there will be a copy of CF8 Standard to win. So if you weren't able to attend MAX Europe come along to the meeting either in London or via Adobe Connect and ask your questions! For more information times, the Connect URL and details of how to register for the London meeting take a look at the Scottish CFUG Events page : http://snipurl.com/scfugmaxdebrief. As ever - everyone is welcome to attend the Connect meeting where ever you may be. ;)

MAX Europe that is!

I notice from from Ted on Flex's Blog that MAX is now sold out! And I know why!
Its not cos Ted blogged about the rapidly decreasing numbers of tickets left. Its not because its going to be an awesome conference (which unfortunately I can't attend). Its because Andy Allan has been asked to speak at Max!

Andy has been asked to speak about ColdFusion Server Monitor and Troubleshooting and will be talking at the same time as Ben Forta, Sean Corfield, Ted Patrick and Dirk Eismann. If you're at MAX you should go and show Andy your love by attending his superb and highly informative presentation.

I'm now going to run and hide before the Scotsman comes looking for me to cause me bodily pain for broadcasting this to the entire world. ;oD

If you haven't already heard about the Creative Licence Tour, you really should have a look in.

I'll be attending the afternoon session in Newcastle upon Tyne, which is the "Web and Rich Internet Application Development using Flash, Flex, AIR and ColdFusion 8".

There are also sessions through the day on web design with CS Web Premium, photoshop for photographers and cross media design with CS Design Premium.

For more information and to register (I'm not sure what places are still available) take a look here : http://www.adobe.co.uk/cs3tour31

If you fancy trying to catch up with me I'll try to be carrying/wearing something suitably User Group ish - otherwise I'll most likely be lugging my laptop around in a Macromedia bag (There will be only one!) ;) Or you can look up my ugly mug on my flickr account (look in the bottom right of this page)

I hope I'll get to meet some of you there.