Check out Adobe Alchemy on Labs. This was demoed in the general session today at MAX. They initially showed a few libraries (such as OpenSSL) compiled to run on the Flash Player, then they showed image manipulation and audio playback (Ogg Vorbis) running in the Flash Player. Finally they showed Quake(!) and a 6502 console emulator running Super Mario...

Whilst it elicited a bit of a "huh?" from many attendees, I think this is a very important piece of technology because it brings a large amount of pre-existing software to the Flash Platform. Oh, and the compiled code runs asynchronously** so that long-running C / C++ cross-compiled processes can run while the Flash Player contains to update the UI etc.

** OK, it runs across Flash frames so it doesn't block execution of other code (at least, that's my understanding).

At present, Adobe Groups does not support RSVP so we'll continue to use the old BACFUG website for that but we will transition fully onto Adobe Groups once RSVP capability has been added.

The demo didn't go into much depth but it's Eclipse-based (no surprise) and has some "intellisense" (but it's unclear how it will handle more dynamic code) with RDS-style file system and database browsing.

In some ways, it's really not news - most people expected Adobe to announce this based on the somewhat coy comments Adobe CF staff have been making over the last year at conferences - but at last it's real.

The Labs page has an FAQ and an outline of features. You can sign up for the Bolt pre-release program on Labs too.

MAX 2008 will be upon us soon and this year it coincides with our regular 3rd Wednesday for BACFUG. Accordingly, we have a special meeting with two presentations by speakers who are in town for MAX!

Bill Shelton and Marc Esher - creators of the awesome MXUnit testing framework - will be presenting "Unit Testing with MXUnit". Unit testing talks have proved very popular at BACFUG in the past and MXUnit has really raised the bar in terms of features and tools so it will be great to have the framework's creators speaking at MAX.

Our second presentation will be related to Model-Glue 3 "Gesture" and will again be the framework's creator, the amazing Joe Rinehart. Joe has hinted that he will be tailoring the talk toward integration with powerful Java technologies, along the lines of what we have achieved at Broadchoice.

BACFUG is free and open to everyone - both regular locals (who may or may not be attending MAX) and all those CFers who are in town for MAX! However, we need you to RSVP on the BACFUG website so that we can figure out numbers and book a large enough room!

You can order a print or PDF subscription and there are options to order a year's subscription with all back issues as well, in case you haven't gotten around to subscribing yet.

It's a very high quality journal and makes a great reference work for your bookshelf within reach of your computer.

FAQU 7 focuses on data with articles on (getting and exposing data via) web services, type validation, stored procedures and views, system tables, data mapping, data manipulation for Excel and Blaze Data Services. In addition, Doug Hughes provides an introduction to Model-Glue 3: Gesture and Mike Henke explains how to get the best performance out of Eclipse.

No, I will not be at MAX on Sunday - I'm busy doing other stuff.

I will be there for the Monday keynote and sessions and the BOFs in the evening. See you then.

I will be there on Tuesday during the day but I am not going to the special event - I'm not paying $100 for a guest pass (this has been a running complaint of mine about MAX - and CFUNITED) so I'm going home to my wife in the evening thank you very much.

Wednesday will be my busy day: Ray's Unconference Uber Panel, Dee Sadler's Manager-2-Manager UGM meeting, the Broadchoice demo at the Adobe Partner booth (noon to 1:30pm - come see the ArgumentCollection team and take a look at our Workspace application!) and then my Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion talk. And in the evening it's BACFUG - with Bill Shelton, Marc Esher and Joe Rinehart as speakers!

Commercial use will be just $99/user per year with educational licenses at $49/user per year. Registered non-profit organizations can get free licenses.

If you're also a Salesforce user, you'll love the integration between groups in Workspace and your company's Salesforce account, allowing you to see open opportunities directly in the Workspace and create collaborative spaces based on opportunities so that you can work with your non-Salesforce peers on closing deals!

Working with Brian Kotek, Joe Rinehart and Ray Camden on this application has been a wonderful experience. We've all learned a lot from each other as we've learned a lot about Flex, AIR, Groovy, BlazeDS, Spring, Hibernate and integration with CFML via Model-Glue 3 (Gesture) and ColdSpring!

Also, for Workspace users on-the-go, there is an iPhone-compatible web application (with plans for full Blackberry support by year end).

Although there's no list of speakers / sessions yet, the location has been announced (the fabulous Lansdowne Resort in Leesburg, VA). The room rate is way down from last year and the conference prices are also slightly lower ($699 for 3 days, $849 for 4 days - compared to $799 and $899 last year). Knock another $100 off with your alumni discount.

You can also suggest speakers and topics for CFUNITED 2009.

Wow! .00 is... like... FREE!

(The gas station is being renovated and they've put in a zero price for some reason... very eye-catching tho'!)

You can read the What's New in 1.6 wiki page to learn about the recent additions. I had already used the publish/subscribe listener invocation (more like Model-Glue), the improved Application.cfc integration and the ColdSpring Property (which replaces the old Plugin). The major new features in 1.6 are caching and logging which were not in the early build I was using, unfortunately (for me!).

Official support is provided for Adobe ColdFusion MX 7 / 8, Open BlueDragon 7+, New Atlanta BlueDragon 7+ (but not BlueDragon.NET - which I was a bit surprised by). They're hoping to add official support for Railo soon - but have heard that it runs just fine on that engine.

So I took a couple of screenshots and then inverted the color selection in Fireworks (because light grey text on dark grey / brown is hard to read).

Enjoy!

It runs 11am-6pm Monday, 9:30am-5pm Tuesday and 8:30am-5pm Wednesday. Three full days of ColdFusion sessions including an "Uber Panel" on Wednesday morning (10:30-11:30), hosted by Brian Meloche, which includes three of the Broadchoice team (Ray, Joe and myself) as well as Charlie Arehart and, from Adobe, Adam Lehman and Jason Delmore. Bring your hardest questions about ColdFusion!

The entire Broadchoice team will be at MAX and you'll be able to find us at the Adobe Booth on Wednesday, between noon and 1:30pm, as we will be demonstrating the Broadchoice Workspace at the Adobe Partner demo station.

The team has worked almost around the clock this week to add new features, redesign large parts of the user interface and track down and fix a number of bugs.

We're using the Scrum process with each week being a Sprint and it's been working fairly well for us. We each get to focus on a small set of tasks for the week, we finish the week with a new build and then we discuss what is going into next week's Sprint. Joe (Rinehart) has the most experience with Scrum so he's been leading the charge but it seems a very productive way to develop and evolve a complex feature-driven product.

I've learned a couple of (painful) lessons this week and I'll be blogging about those over on the ArgumentCollection soon.

By the way, the whole ArgumentCollection team is going to be at MAX - see you there!

You can either submit yourself as a speaker, with topics, or submit a suggestion for topics that others could speak on. Since Liz has said next year's CFUNITED will be community-driven, make your voice count by submitting suggestions!