The first Culmulative Hot Fix has been released for ColdFusion 9 bringing a number of useful bug fixes for cfscript as well as a couple of other important fixes. The Tech Note doesn't list 80717 as fixed - you can't declare a function called default in cfscript - although that is marked closed in the bug database. That one is of special interest to me because FW/1's out-of-the-box convention is to use 'default' for the default item in a section and it meant you couldn't write FW/1 controllers in cfscript on CF9, unless you changed the default item.

Since I haven't yet installed CF9 on my new desktop, I can't test the CHF out yet. I'll probably get to it this week but if anyone can confirm either way before then, please add a comment here!

Adobe will showcase ColdFusion 9 at cf.Objective() 2010 with six topics. The schedule has been updated with two Adobe topics each day and they are listed on the session page as well. We believe Terry Ryan will be handling most of the Adobe talks but we'll be confirming that as soon as we know for sure!

Now that Adobe's talks are finalized, we'll be picking two more community submissions from our list and adding those. If you submitted a talk and wondered why you haven't received either an acceptance letter or a rejection, now you know. We hope to let everyone know within the next week!

We're also ready to accept BOF suggestions - I'll make a separate blog post about that in the next few days.

One of the new features in Adobe's ColdFusion 9 release that has excited a lot of developers is the broad range of enhancements to CFML's "other" language: CFSCRIPT.

In the past, I've been very disparaging about CFSCRIPT and I've gone so far as to say in several public - and private - forums that I felt CFSCRIPT should be deprecated and no further effort spent on it. It was always a bit half-baked with weird restrictions and lots of important features missing. It was annoying to use, because you often had to switch back to CFML's tags to get things done. With increased use of CFCs, the restrictions in CFSCRIPT made it even more painful to use because you could not specify function arguments easily in CFSCRIPT - no types, no defaults - and you couldn't express a function's access or return type.

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This Friday, at noon Eastern, I'll be on the CFPanel show, created by Dan Vega and Todd Sharp. Myself, Ray Camden and Adam Lehman will be talking about how ColdFusion as a language is moving forward. All three of us are members of the CFML Advisory Committee. Two of us are on the board of 4CFF, the new non-profit corporation formed to promote the CF community and Open Source projects. Two of us represent CFML engine vendors. It should be an interesting and lively debate!

Ben Forta explains why ColdFusion Builder is based on Eclipse in a great blog post that examines the alternatives and the history of CFML editors.

I'm afraid I never liked HomeSite / ColdFusion Studio.

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Adobe's sessions at CFUnited have been announced. In addition to the keynote, there are a dozen sessions on ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder!

Adam Lehman kicks off with a general "What's New" talk on Wednesday after lunch and Ryan Stewart will showcase what you can do with CF9/FX4 together. Thursday and Friday are the main events with five sessions on each day! Half a dozen of the ColdFusion engineering team will be over from Bangalore to speak about features they helped develop so you can get the information right from the horse's mouth! In addition, Terry Ryan and Adam will also be giving sessions on some of the new features. I think the highlights for me will be Manju Kiran's "Advanced ORM" on Thursday afternoon and Hemant's "Insider's Guide" on Friday afternoon but Adam's "Building Extensions with CFML" (for CFBuilder) and Hareni and Terry covering "Working w/MS Office, Sharepoint and Exchange", both on Friday morning, also look very interesting.

If you're new to Eclipse, Bhakti and Dipanwita's "Getting Start (Bring Your Laptop)" session on CFBuilder should be gold.

See the CFUnited blog post for more details.

Charlie Griefer, manager of the East Bay CFUG, kicked off the July meeting with his vision of what he hopes the EBCFUG will develop into to: an interactive group with a good social network. He hopes to see more meetings based on hands-on labs and a regular post-meeting social event that allows members to talk about issues and get feedback from the group.

For the July meeting, Charlie presented Balsamiq Mockups, a fascinating tool to enable collaboration with clients on user interface / user experience aspects of a project. After a brief slideshow and demo, Charlie turned it over to the members to explore the AIR desktop app and the online demo.

This was very valuable experience and much better than a regular "lecture".

If you want to get "hands-on" with ColdFusion and related technologies, this could be the user group for you!

I've talked about the CFML Advisory Committee before and explained that we're working on a specification for the ColdFusion Markup Language that we hope to release this year as CFML2009 and then review every two years.

CFML2009 is intended to be a specification of what the language should be by the end of this year. Ben Forta just posted about some CFML enhancements coming soon in ColdFusion 9 but he didn't mention that many of these will be embodied in the CFML2009 spec.

I figured it was worth looking at some of the items in his blog post through the lens of the Advisory Committee. Where these features are deemed "core" by the Advisory Committee, expect all CFML engines to provide them fairly quickly. Some features are supported already by one or more vendor, some are new to all three vendors.

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Don't miss the ColdFusion 9 / Flash Builder 4 tour when it hits the Bay Area: Ben Forta, Adobe's Senior Technical Evangelist, will be the speaker at this cross-user group event!

Learn about Flex 4, Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builer), Flash Catalyst, ColdFusion 9 and Bolt!

Make sure you RSVP via the BACFUG website!

In the absence of a printable schedule - sorry, Joe Rinehart says it's a problem with the Media3 hosting and he's been trying to get them to fix it for months! - here is my schedule for cf.Objective() 2009:

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Now that Adobe has provided most of their session titles, we had to move Jason Delmore's Object Relational Mapping session to earlier in the schedule (so Terry Ryan's Advanced ORM session could follow).

That means that if you signed up for Jason's talk, you're now signed up for Terry's advanced talk and if you signed up for Adobe's "super secret" Friday talk at 1:45pm, you're now signed up for Jason's basic ORM talk!

Feel free to visit the online scheduler to update your selections if necessary!

Adobe has provided four of their five topic descriptions. You can see them on the cf.Objective() sessions page. They're covering Advanced ColdFusion 9 Server Administration, Advanced ORM in ColdFusion 9, Extending Adobe Bolt with CFML and ColdFusion 9 as a Service.

These topics have been added to the schedule - and the online scheduler (yes, we know the Printable Summary doesn't work - Joe is having an issue with his hosting company and hopes to get this fixed soon).

Another Adobe topic - covering Flex - is on the schedule but we do not yet have the title or description.

cf.Objective() 2009 is offering last year's price of just $629 for three days of all-new material - no repeats this year! - so it represents incredible value. Also, don't forget that there is a one-day ColdBox training course on the Wednesday before the conference!

The Adobe Developer Center has a great article on Test Driven Development in ColdFusion by Bill Shelton and Marc Esher of MXUnit fame.

If this is a new concept for you, read this article!

If this is a familiar concept for you but you want to feel better about what you already do, read this article!

Seeing this sort of stuff on the Adobe Developer Center is very encouraging because it says a lot about what is considered current best practice!

It's been a while since I posted anything formally about the committee and I've started to see it mentioned in comments on blogs and on mailing lists lately so I feel now is a good time to update everyone on where we are, what we're currently working on and what we're trying to achieve.

First off, you can always check out the CFML Advisory Committee website. We're updating it as we finalize our decisions but it can be a slow process since this is the first time any group has tried to agree on a specification for the ColdFusion Markup Language.

Over the last few weeks, the committee has been pretty active...

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It's been a couple of weeks since I blogged about cf.Objective() 2009 so I figured it was a good time to remind people again. This year's conference is just five weeks away!

The early bird rate is over but the full price has been held at last year's $629 so it's excellent value!

If you've ever wanted to learn ColdBox, this is also a good opportunity with a full one-day pre-conference training class by Luis Majano himself for just $449.

This year's schedule features three full days of new sessions - last year, day three was mostly repeats of popular sessions but we had so many great submissions this year that we wanted to showcase as many as possible. We will repeat two of the most popular sessions in the last slot of day three, however, if people fill out the online Session Scheduler (linked from the schedule page) so we know what's popular!

The Adobe sessions covering Centaur / Bolt promise to be smokin' hot - Adobe are keeping them secret right now but we hope to be able to post details next week!

Finally, the hotel rate is guaranteed thru Monday. It may go up after that (we don't know - that's up to the hotel) so hurry up and book your rooms!

The last week has seen some big announcements in the CF world! On March 31st, Gert announced the open source release of Railo, the next day Mark Drew announced he has joined Railo as CEO of the new Railo UK and then this week Peter Bell announced that he has also joined Railo and will be heading up the new Railo US operation.

I've been using ColdFusion since 2001, back when I worked at Macromedia and my team of Java and C++ developers first encountered CFML in the form of very early builds of what went on to become CFMX (6.0). We were pretty skeptical at first.

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An interesting blog post from TechRepublic was doing the rounds on Twitter this morning so I thought I'd comment on it in terms of revelance to the CF community. The blog post was 10 skills developers will need in the next five years. Let's go through each of the ten items in turn...

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Ted Patrick has posted an update on MAX 2009 where he confirms that MAX North America will be Los Angeles, October 4-7, but there will be no separate European event this year (no word on a Japanese event yet).

However, in addition to the live, in-person event, he hints that "MAX will take place ... online" and says Adobe "will be taking the online experience to the next level."

Given the huge audience for MAX 2008 sessions on AdobeTV, this is an interesting development.

I've only been to one MAX Europe (Barcelona in 2007) and, for me, it was a better experience than MAX North America because it was a smaller, more intimate affair and I actually went to sessions nearly all the time (it's where I learned most of my Flex / AIR theoretical skills). But it wasn't a great networking opportunity in the same way the North American version has always been.

For me, the biggest benefit of attending MAX has always been the networking and I often do not attend many sessions. Being able to watch them after the fact was great. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out for 2009.

I was at MAX and I saw the Meer Meer cross-browser preview technology that Adobe is developing. Given the current buzz about Microsoft's forthcoming SuperPreview technology (announced at their MIX conference), I was pleased to see this response from Scott Fegette, Dreamweaver Product Manager, about Meer Meer and how it stacks up against Microsoft's future offering.

It's particularly interesting to note that whilst Microsoft is initially focused on Windows-only, Internet Explorer previews, Adobe's service will be cross-platform, cross-browser from the get-go - and what was shown at MAX five months ago was a real demo of a real service, based on early working builds. In other words, Adobe is a long way ahead of Microsoft on this and is very committed to the workflows and technologies needed to address this complex problem.

It'll be very interesting to see how this pans out and whether Microsoft will ever address this in a cross-browser, cross-platform manner.

As noted in several places (and all over Twitter!), Adobe has published its curriculum for both introductory and advanced ColdFusion courses.

The ColdFusion 8 project-based curriculum is designed to teach experienced web developers how to create dynamic, database-driven web applications using ColdFusion 8.

Introduction to ColdFusion 8

This course covers the basics of ColdFusion and focuses on best practices and design, while stressing the importance of usability, optimization, and performance.

Advanced ColdFusion 8 Development

This course is designed to teach you how to take full advantage of ColdFusion 8 while building web applications. The course focuses on best practices and design, stressing the importance of usability, code reuse, performance, and scalability.

Read more about the curriculum, free licensing for education and download the PDFs of each course on the Adobe education website.

I'm very pleased to report that the Bay Area has not just one ColdFusion User Group but two!

In addition to BACFUG, which has been around longer than the user group program itself, we now have the East Bay CFUG courtesy of Charlie Griefer (Amcom) and James Morrow (Planitax).

The inaugural meeting of the East Bay CFUG will be Tuesday, April 7th, hosted by Planitax in Alameda. It's a great facility - Planitax hosted BACFUG's meeting last night - so you can expect meetings to be broadcast and recorded if you're remote and a chance at foosball and darts if you turn up in person!

We just heard back from Adobe that Broadchoice Workspace has been approved and is listed on the Adobe AIR Marketplace. Download the app! Spread the word!

Got an idea for a session at MAX 2009? (in Los Angeles, October 4-7)

Submit it through this page on Adobe Groups.

All of the session descriptions have been posted on the cf.Objective() 2009 website. The sessions page describes the four tracks at this year's conference with session titles and speakers. Click on each title to jump to the description on the full track listing page. Don't forget to check out the schedule - it has had a couple of small tweaks as well. Adobe sessions will be listed nearer the time (since much will depend on where Centaur and Bolt development is at the time of the conference!).

I just received the latest SourceForge.net newsletter and was pleased to see the following promotion from Adobe:

This mailing has been brought to you by: Adobe(R) AIR(TM)
----------
Create and Deploy Rich Internet Apps outside the browser with Adobe(R) AIR(TM) software. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web. Download the Adobe AIR SDK and Ajax docs to start building applications today.

(followed by a sf.net jump link - via DoubleClick - to the AIR SDK download page)

Nice to see Adobe reaching out to the open source community to promote development for the AIR platform!

As Adam just announced, he is the the new ColdFusion Product Manager as well as the product manager for Bolt. Adam's very passionate about ColdFusion so it's great news to hear that he's stepped up to take this on. I can also announce that Adam has joined the CFML Advisory Committee, replacing Sanjeev Kumar who is stepping down to focus on Centaur engineering issues.

A lot of people have asked about OpenBD being represented on the CFML Advisory Committee since the original announcement at CFUNITED 2008. I'm pleased to announce that today Matt Woodward joined the committee, representing the OpenBD CFML engine. We now have the three major CFML engines represented on the committee: Adobe ColdFusion, Railo and Open BlueDragon.

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About a month ago, I talked about my experience of setting up clustered ColdFusion instances on EC2. Since then we have migrated the Broadchoice Web Platform completely from a regular data center, where it had lived since launch, to the Amazon cloud and now all of the *.broadchoice.com sites and all of our client sites based on the Web Platform are happily running in the cloud.

We've been very pleased with the performance and stability of EC2 so far and we're comfortable about scaling out as demand increases. We took advantage of Amazon's EBS (Elastic Block Storage) that allows you to mount S3 storage directly as part of the file system on EC2. This essentially replaces the NAS we were using in the data center where all uploaded files were placed. We run two ColdFusion instances on a medium EC2 instance and run MySQL on a separate EC2 instance (actually on the instance that is currently running our AIR application, the Broadchoice Workspace for Salesforce, along with its MySQL database). We replicate the MySQL databases to another server (in a data center) so that we can restore / recover in the event of a problem with EC2. We also run scheduled backups of the EC2 instances to S3.

As I noted in my earlier entry, we're using Apache and the JRun Connector to manage the two instance cluster and failover. I'm still suspicious of the connector due to past experience but so far it has been behaving well and when we restart instances for maintenance, we're generally seeing uninterrupted service, from a user's point of view, as requests silently failover to the other instance.

If you're interested in running ColdFusion in the cloud, you'll need to talk to Adobe about licensing (either Adam Lehman or Kristen Schofield) but they are being very encouraging because they want this to happen. The more of us who do this, the better the argument they can present internally to get the EULA changed to support ColdFusion running in the cloud!

If you want to learn more about how we handled the migration and/or what to watch out for when designing applications that run well on the cloud, feel free to contact me via this blog or directly (c'mon, you know my email address!).

Adobe is continuing to put all of the MAX 2008 presentations up on Adobe TV (under the MAX channel). The audio was recorded directly from the in-room mic and the "video" is a screen capture of what was being presented and whatever technology they used to do it has produced a very nice way to watch every single MAX session for free (so I can now go back and watch the sessions I missed which I'd really wanted to attend!).

It seems that only two ColdFusion sessions are listed, one of which is my Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion session. The other is Rob Brooks-Bilson's Advanced ColdFusion Caching Strategies. Searching Adobe TV for ColdFusion turns up nine videos, six of which are part of the Adobe Developer Connection series from Adam Lehman and Ben Forta.

If you haven't checked out Adobe TV as a learning resource, there's definitely some good stuff up there.

I just received my final evaluation forms from MAX 2008. With the exception of one person who "Fell asleep during presentation. It was offensive.", the comments were mostly positive. There was, however, an interesting undercurrent...

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This week has seen my focus shift back from ActionScript / Groovy to ColdFusion, although not specifically programming in CFML. A couple of blogs have been buzzing about the pros and cons (and plain ol' whys) of running ColdFusion in the cloud, such as on Amazon's EC2 service. Obviously you can run Open BlueDragon or Railo without worrying about cost but for many people, only Adobe ColdFusion will really do what they need and the current EULA does not really accommodate that (partly because the "per 2 CPU" aspect doesn't cover the Amazon situation where you simply don't know how many physical CPUs you actually have!).

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A dramatic title I guess but this really highlights Adobe's commitment to open source and expanding the reach of Flex: Adobe Collaborates with SpringSource for Enhanced Flex / Spring Integration.

I've been working with Spring quite a lot over the last few months - we use it to wire things together behind the Broadchoice Workspace - and it constantly amazes me how comprehensive the Spring project is - see below for an example.

By integrating the open source BlazeDS project directly into Spring, Adobe brings Flex integration to a vast community of Java Spring developers who can now expose their Java services to Flex UIs in a very simple way. It should really help the uptake of Flex in the Java community!

An example of Spring's comprehensive nature: Ray blogged about sending email using Spring's mail support via Groovy. I recently built a new Model-Glue 3 app on top of our Groovy services and needed to send email. I could have used CFMAIL but Railo has a bug that does not allow + in email addresses and I didn't want that restriction (since we send email elsewhere directly from Groovy). It was very simple to use the same Spring mail package directly from CFML by declaring the Spring-managed beans in the CFCOMPONENT tag of my controller so that Model-Glue would autowire it!

There's a lot of C / C++ code out there that does a lot of useful stuff - masses of tried and true, well-tested and often well-supported open source software. Now you can take any of that code and automatically convert it to compiled ActionScript code that will run on Flash Player 10.

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).

Now that Adobe Groups has been announced - in today's general session at MAX - I can encourage everyone to visit BACFUG on Adobe Groups and join the group - and any other groups you might want to be part of (e.g., San Flashcisco, Fire On The Bay, Silvafug...).

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.

Some information is posted on Adobe Labs and it was demoed in the general session at MAX today, along with some cool CS4 stuff, Flash Catalyst (formerly known as Thermo) and Flex Builder 4 (aka Gumbo).

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.

As I've mentioned a couple of times, we're using Cocomo for some aspects of the Broadchoice Workspace. Now you can try Adobe's collaboration component model (and service) for yourself. All the information about Cocomo is on Adobe Labs for download!

Since I just mentioned BACFUG's free event on the Wednesday of MAX, I figured I should also highlight Ray Camden's ColdFusion Unconference that takes at MAX in parallel with the main MAX sessions.

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.

Adam Lehman kicked off the day with some upbeat news about ColdFusion 8 (about 75,000 new developers since 2007!) and then covered potential features for Centaur. I'll blog more about this later.

Next up was Mark Drew, covering ColdSpring. A great introduction to basic ColdSpring then on to AOP and remote proxies. I acted as a "bean factory" that helped Mark get ready for work: he asked me for his jacket and I ensured that it contained his iPod and his cigarettes, which in turn meant adding his headphones and his lighter. His examples were amongst the best I've seen for introducing ColdSpring concepts.

Peter Bell is up now, giving his Rapid OO talk - similar to what he did at Scotch. Some good, pragmatic advice about when to bend (or even break) the "rules" of OO that can make you more productive.

After lunch, it's Mike Brunt (Clustering), me (Subversion branches), Kurt Wiersma (development environment) and Gert Franz (Railo 3.1). More on that later.

This has been mentioned in a few places but I figured it was worth spreading the news as much as possible. Adobe has a series of ColdFusion eSeminars:

• ColdFusion-powered Rich Internet Applications - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 11:00 A.M. PDT
• Beyond HTML: Using Ajax, PDF, and More to Create Engaging Applications with ColdFusion 8 - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 11:00 A.M. PDT
• ColdFusion and AIR supply calendaring system for San Diego Department of Child Support Services (SDDCSS) - Wednesday, October 15, 2008 11:00 A.M. PDT

Get the ColdFusion evangelist's kit from Kristen Schofield! It's about time Adobe provided us with this sort of ammunition.

I just made another pass over my MAX schedule to finalize my choices and thought I'd post my planned list of sessions so folks will know where to find me:

• Monday
  • Opening General Session
  • Adobe Roadmap: Enterprise
  • Flex Architecture Face-Off - panel
  • Real-Time Collaboration Apps with Flex and Cocomo - Nigel Pegg
• Tuesday
  • Mixing Open Source and Commercial Software
  • General Session
  • Adobe@Adobe: IT Innovation
  • Developing Rich Applications with jQuery and Adobe AIR - John Resig
  • The REST of SOA
• Wednesday
  • Advanced Patterns for ColdFusion Test Automation - Bill Shelton / Marc Esher (MXUnit)
  • Building Real-Time and Collaborative Applications with Flex and BlazeDS
  • Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion - an updated version of my session from Scotch on the Rocks and CFUNITED
  • Cocomo Deep Dive: Building Social RIAs with Flex + Adobe Hosted Services - Nigel Pegg
  • Developing Enterprise ColdFusion Applications - Joe Rinehart

As I was updating my schedule, I noticed that several of the ColdFusion and Flex workshops are already sold out - good to see so much interest in those! I was originally going to Dave Watts' "High Performance ColdFusion" but decided to give up my seat when I saw it was sold out (hopefully someone else will get in now!). There's a lot of excellent ColdFusion sessions at MAX this year but my focus right now is on Flex, AIR and real-time collaboration so that has driven most of my session choices.

Also a reminder that BACFUG meets on the Wednesday evening immediately after MAX ends and I am pleased to announce that we are having a double session with some MAX speakers:

• Bill Shelton and Marc Esher will present on Unit Testing in ColdFusion with MXUnit
• Joe Rinehart will present on Model-Glue 3: Gesture

We hope to have a good turn out with MAX attendees taking advantage of this (free) user group meeting in the evening! Since the meeting is inside the Adobe building, you will need to RSVP for security purposes. See you there!

Teratech and Adobe have worked together to create these impressive posters for ColdFusion 8. User groups will be raffling off some of these shortly (BACFUG will raffle three off each month while supplies last) but you can also fill out a Teratech survey to get your own copy (U.S. only due to shipping costs). See the CFUNITED Blog for more details.

With all the fuss about Google Chrome scoring 75/100 and a fresh round of comparisons of compliance (Safari on Mac gets 72, FF3 on Win gets 69 I believe?), it's interesting to read that an internal Alpha of AIR scores 100 according to Ted Patrick. Very impressive!

{posted via Google Chrome - on a Windows XP VM on my MacBook Pro}

A Wee Dram of Scotch has a location - The Square Pig in Holborn - and has posted the full schedule for the day:

• Adobe Keynote - Adam Lehman and Claude Englebert
• ColdSpring - Mark Drew
• RAD Object-Oriented CFML Development - Peter Bell
• High Availability: Clustering ColdFusion Applications - Mike Brunt
• Subversion: Better Living Through Branches - Sean Corfield
• Setting up a Solid Local Development Environment - Kurt Wiersma
• Railo 3.1: The Open Source Story - Gert Franz

Gert is a new addition to the schedule - it'll be great to hear an update on Railo going open source! Mark's talk went over extremely well at cf.Objective() this year - if you're curious about ColdSpring or just starting down that path, this will be an excellent talk for you! Kurt's talk was also very well received at cf.Objective(), as was Mike's. Both talks have a lot of solid, "from the trenches" experience in them. Peter's talk was very well received at both Scotch on the Rocks and CFUNITED - I really enjoyed this talk at Scotch and learned a lot from it! Mine is a new talk I was planning for CFDevCon, that looks at how Broadchoice is using Subversion for more than just simple version control.

As announced at CFUNITED this year, ColdFusion 8 is now available for free for learning purposes to all students and educational staff worldwide. This is something that many people in the community have been requesting for years so it's great to see Adobe pull this off!

For more information, check out these links and blog posts:

• Adobe ColdFusion 8 for Education on freeriatools.adobe.com
• FAQ for Free ColdFusion Enterprise for Education in the main ColdFusion product FAQ
• Ben Forta's brief announcement on his blog
• Kristen Schofield's more detailed announcement on her blog

A one-day CFML event in London to fill the gap left by CFDevCon. Thursday 25th, September 2008. Adobe keynote, talks by Mark Drew, Peter Bell, Mike Brunt, myself and Andrew Shorten. And raffles (of course - since this event is organized by the makers of Scotch on the Rocks!).

Price? A ten quid cash donation on the door which will get you two free drinks and a discount on Scotch on the Rocks 2009.

If you were going to CFDevCon - or wanted to go but couldn't afford it - come along to A Wee Dram of Scotch and catch some of CFDevCon's speakers for the cost of a few drinks!

More details will be posted on the Wee Dram website shortly!

If you were at MAX last year, you saw a video collage in each keynote of people saying why they loved the web and technology and good user experiences. This year, they're planning something similar and Adobe want you to contribute by making a short YouTube video tagged with 30onMAX (click that link to see what others have already posted on YouTube). See Ted Patrick's blog (first link) for more details.

Adobe has just published an article by Mike Brunt on High Availability that introduces you to the concepts involved in clustering and shows you how to set up ColdFusion Enterprise with two instances in a cluster using the Enterprise Manager in the ColdFusion Administrator.

In an effort to get some adoption of its Silverlight player, Microsoft signed a deal with NBC to make Silverlight the exclusive delivery channel for online video of the Olympics.

I'm not much of a sports fan so it doesn't give me any incentive to download Silverlight but my wife wrestled with the installer yesterday and spent fifteen minutes cussing Microsoft over the installation process (she's no fan of Microsoft these days after several years on a Mac where the only software that crashes regularly is MS Office).

Has the MSNBC Olympics coverage caused you to install Silverlight? What did you think?

Go on over to Mashable where they are running a poll about Silverlight and the Olympics to see whether people like the Silverlight experience or whether they prefer the Adobe Flash Player experience!

Learning Flex means tackling a number of other technologies - server-side scripting / programming, some OO, CSS, XML etc.

Matt Chotin is asking what non-Flex resources helped you learn this in order to grasp Flex's programming nuances.

If you are a Flex developer these days but had to go through that broader learning curve, comment on his blog post with specific recommendations for books, blogs, websites etc that helped you.

Ben Forta announced in this morning's CFUNITED keynote that Adobe has formed a CFML Advisory Committee that will be responsible for guiding and reviewing changes to CFML going forward. The committee is made up of:

• Sean Corfield, lead
• Ben Forta, Adobe
• Adam Lehman, Adobe
• Gert Franz, Railo
• Matthew Woodward, Open BlueDragon
• Ray Camden
• Rob Brooks-Bilson

This is brand new information and details are still being worked out. I was not actually expecting it to be announced yet but I'll post more information as and when I can.

As you can see, Adobe has just two positions on the committee, so this is intended to be community-driven, not Adobe-driven.

When someone asked why no one from other CFML engine vendors was listed, Ben explained (as carefully as he could) that the committee was made up of people who have shown an interest in working together on CFML for the benefit of the community. This issue is going to continue to be hotly debated, I'm sure, which is why I mention it up front instead of waiting for someone to ask in a comment!

---

Updated to show latest committee line up February 2009.

Scotch has a nice, relaxed feel to it (some people might call it disorganized but I rather like it). The keynote was Ben Forta and Adam Lehman tag-teaming the state of the ColdFusion world (CF8 doing very well, working hard on Centaur).

Big news for European CFers - there is now a dedicated EMEA ColdFusion specialist, Claude Englebert, so that there is a direct contact for all sales-related issues. This was the hottest issue brought up at MAX Barcelona so it's good to see the U.S. model being rolled out in Europe.

Ben emphasized that CFers should be using CFCs to write better structured code and separating presentation code (CFM pages) from business logic (CFCs). He then went on to talk about LiveCycle Data Services and Adam ran thru some simple demos of what is possible with very little MXML code and almost no CFML code.

Ben closed by talking a little (very little!) about possible Centaur plans around AIR.

It seems all the big information about Centaur is being held back for MAX 2008 (in San Francisco, Milan and Tokyo).

Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4 and Soundbooth CS4 public beta builds are available for download from Adobe Labs. I think you'll be in for a (pleasant) surprise!

CFUNITED just announced two new topics from Adobe ColdFusion team members Chandan Kumar (PDF documents and forms) and Manju Kiran (64-bit ColdFusion). They join Rupesh Kumar, who will be talking about cfthread. It's great to see more of the Bangalore-based ColdFusion team attending conferences! It's good for us to put faces to the ultra-smart guys who build the product we love. It's good for those engineers to meet and talk with the customers who use what they build.

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Adobe just announced it is opening up the SWF and FLV/F4V formats amongst other initiatives for the Open Screen Project. This aims to bring Flash Player ubiquity to all devices, large and small - and, in due course, AIR as well. The list of partners is very impressive and includes chip and phone manufacturers, network companies, content providers...

You may not realize it but your public CFC methods are available via Flex Remoting. Adobe have just released a hot fix for ColdFusion 8.0.0 and a hot fix for ColdFusion 8.0.1 to address this problem. Read the Tech Note about the hot fix for more details.

Adam Lehman just posted a summary of the fixes and change in the brand new ColdFusion updater.

Foremost for many is official Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard support!

Also general 64-bit support (Vista, Win2k3, XP, Leopard, RH 5, Suse 10, Solaris 9 / 10).

Minor enhancements (depending on your position):

• Allows attributeCollection to be mixed with regular tags and allows additional attributes - useful working across multiple tags
• AJAX upgrades to FCKEditor 2.5, YUI 2.3, ExtJS 1.1.1, Spry 1.6
• Implicit arrays / structs can be nested
• A bunch of other minor stuff

Some of the "minor stuff" is actually very exciting to me, including slight changes to argument passing that make onMissingMethod() much more powerful and much easier to use!

Bug fixes include the notorious resetting of the Global Script Protection flag in the CF Admin, non-XHTML generated by AJAX components, Break On Exception issues in the debugger, false server monitor memory reporting for complex CFCs in application scope (affecting most of the frameworks) [not fixed: it appears incorrectly in the Issues Fixed section - but it is one of the Known Issues which is accurate].

Download and enjoy!

Note for Leopard users: you need to download the 64-bit OS X version and do a clean install so if you have a hacked-up CF8 running somehow on Leopard, make a CAR of your CF Admin, shutdown and move your old CFIDE and JRun4 directories, do a clean install and then load the CAR back in!

True cross-platform desktop applications built with familiar web technologies just became a reality with the availability of an alpha release of Adobe AIR for Linux.

I might as well mention it because everyone else has... Adobe released a beta version of Adobe Photoshop Express last night. It's a slick Flex-based consumer-targeted photo-editing / -sharing service.

Free, lots of storage, lots of cool Photoshop-inspired effects and tools, share your photos with your friends. It's what Flickr would be if it was created by a multimedia company instead of your regular Web 2.0 crowd.

Kudos to Adobe for getting out there in the Software-as-a-Service market with another cool Flex-based offering, showing what the technology can really do.

My only grumble was the length of time it took for my verification email to arrive (which may not have been Adobe's fault). Once I was in, uploading, touching up and sharing photos was a breeze. A great experience!

Ted Patrick has just announced that the call for topics for Adobe MAX 2008 is open. San Francisco, Milan, Tokyo. Submit yourself or suggest a speaker or topic you would like to hear!

Adobe's five sessions are (finally) on the website and on the schedule. Adobe is providing five deep dive sessions by five speakers (as well as their opening keynote):

• Deploying into Large Scale ColdFusion Environments - Michael Collins
• Integrating ColdFusion with .NET - Josh Adams
• Building Hybrid Applications with ColdFusion and Java - Jason Delmore
• Adding Live Chat with ColdFusion and BlazeDS - Adam Lehman
• Document Driven Applications with PDF - Sanjeev Kumar

Read the session descriptions for more details (all linked above - updated descriptions will be available for Jason's and Sanjeev's talks within the next day or two).

I'm particularly excited to have Michael's talk on the schedule since this covers a number of very important topics for enterprise ColdFusion shops - including a lot of new material, not seen anywhere before!

Josh's talk is an excellent complement to John Bland's session on .NET integration. John will cover the mechanics of the architecture and how to build .NET assemblies you can call from ColdFusion. Josh will cover specific uses of the feature to leverage Microsoft's Sharepoint and Office technology.

Likewise, Jason's talk is an excellent complement to Andrew Powell's session on ColdFusion and Java. Jason will cover ColdFusion and Java integration with pros and cons and Andrew will dive into building your entire business model in Java and using that with ColdFusion for presentation.

Adam's talk brings coverage of Adobe's newly released open source remoting system, BlazeDS, showing how it can be used to create interactive applications with ColdFusion and Sanjeev's talk goes deep into the Adobe PDF integration that ColdFusion 8 brought to the table, including architecture level information.

Congratulations to Phill Nacelli and Dan Wilson whose sessions are proving so popular we are repeating them on Sunday morning:

• Leveraging Basic Design Pattern in ColdFusion - Phill Nacelli
• Refactoring in ColdFusion: from Procedural to OO - Dan Wilson

As cf.Objective() attendees continue to sign up for the scheduler and select which sessions they want to attend, we'll be picking more sessions to repeat on Sunday until the Sunday schedule is full.

Adobe should be providing session titles and abstracts soon (I hope) so that we can populate their five sessions on the schedule.

I'll be blogging about schedule additions / updates as they happen - stay tuned!

Cities and dates have been announced for Adobe MAX 2008. San Francisco, November 16-19, we already knew (it will be at the Moscone Center). Europe's MAX will be in Milan, Italy at the beginning of December (1-4) and Japan's MAX will be in Tokyo in "2009".

The page has a link to sign up for information about MAX to be emailed to you as it becomes available.

If you missed Ray's presentation tonight, you can view the recording which is also available in Charlie Arehart's UGTV (User Group Television).

Connect crashed a few times on Ray after about an hour in but he logs back in pretty quickly (Adobe really need to fix the Leopard compatibility problems with the Connect Add-In!).

It was a great talk - well attended - and I learned a lot about how powerful Spry really is (I hadn't looked at it before because I thought it was "too simple" - my mistake).

Big thanx also to Kit Kurktchi and Neetek for sponsoring Pizza!

---

Ray just posted the example files used during his preso.

I haven't seen as much buzz about this as I would have expected. A few years ago, the company ran a week-long series of free eSeminars about products and technology. It was a great series!

Adobe Developer Week is back, next week, March 24th thru 28th. Topics cover AIR, ColdFusion 8, Blaze DS with twenty sessions spread throughout the week.

Lots of AIR / Flex 3 stuff as well as three ColdFusion sessions!

ColdFusion Weekly has started the first in a series of roundtable discussion format podcasts. Edition 3.03 features Brian Meloche, Brian Swartfager, Dan Wilson, Terrence Ryan and me, as well as regular hosts Matt Woodward and Peter Farrell. The focus of this edition was the release of Flex 3, AIR 1 and Blaze DS as well as a look at Adobe's approach to open source.

It was an enjoyable discussion with some differing opinions and looks like being the first of an ongoing series of roundtable format shows. Next week's edition will cover's New Atlanta's announcement of BlueDragon J2EE going open source, among other things.

You can download episodes (sorry, "editions") from the site or subscribe via iTunes.

Just noticed a great article by Roman Villareal on the Adobe Developer Connection about customizing Eclipse for ColdFusion development.

It walks you through installing CFEclipse and the ColdFusion Extensions from Adobe, using snippets (and the SnipEx server), tasks / todo lists, code / application wizards and so on.

If you're new to Eclipse or still on the fence about it, it'll be good reading.

Since I like to learn something new every day, I tuned in to Trevor McCauley's presentation to Fire On The Bay's meeting tonight and learned about ten cool things that Fireworks can do. Even tho' I'm a huge fan of Fireworks, I learned a bunch of new stuff! Thank you Trevor!

You can watch the recording if you missed it live.

Not being there in person I missed out on beer and pizza, courtesy of meeting sponsor Broadchoice.

BACFUG, BAADAUG and Fire on the Bay are proud to be hosting the kick off of the Flex 3 / AIR Pre-Release tour in San Francisco this Monday (January 21st).

It'll be a big event - we have around 150 RSVPs so far across the three groups!

• 6:30pm for food / drink / networking
• 7:00pm for the main presentation from Ted Patrick, Adobe's Technical Evangelist for Flex

Location: Adobe, 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA 94546

The raffle will include:

• iPod Nano
• Flex Builder 3 Professional ($699 value - when released)
• CS3 Web Premium Suite ($1,599 value!!)

as well as Flex backpacks and some Flex/Air T shirts

Due to the popularity of this event, we will be in the "Town Hall" open space inside the security area so you must RSVP using the BACFUG web site - http://bacfug.org/ (scroll down - the RSVP link is below the meeting information)

Direct RSVP link.

About this presentation:

Flex 3 and AIR are getting close to launch and in preparation, Ted Patrick from the Adobe Flex/AIR product team is traveling to select cities to show off the great new features and help prepare us for this exciting launch.

Flex 3 is a feature-packed release, adding new UI components like the advanced datagrid and improved CSS capabilities; powerful tooling additions like refactoring; and extensive testing tools including memory and performance profiling, plus the addition of the automated testing framework to Flex Builder.

Adobe AIR is game-changing in so many ways, extending rich applications to the desktop, enabling access to the local file system, system tray, notifications and much more. Now you can write desktop applications using the same skills that you've been already using to create great web apps including both Flex and AJAX.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to see and hear about this highly anticipated release of Flex 3 and AIR during this special pre-release tour. Plus, in addition to giving away some one of a kind Flex/AIR branded schwag, we will also be raffling off a copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional (pending availability), a full commercial copy of CS3 Web Premium and an iPod Nano at this event!

About Ted Patrick:

Ted Patrick is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe Systems. He worked with Flash since FutureSplash Animator and watched its evolution from animation to application.

Ted helped Macromedia/Adobe with the development of ActionScript 3, AVM2, ASC compiler, and Flash Player 9 for some 18 months prior to Flex 2's release.

Prior to joining Adobe in May 2006, he provided consulting services at PowerSDK Software and Cynergy Systems.

Ted is a serial entrepreneur having successfully started-up 4 times and raised over 7 Million in VC funding for companies he founded.

3 companies have been successfully sold to other businesses and one was sold to a publicly traded company in 2001. Ted is actively involved in the Flex development community and works at Adobe to define the future of rich media.

A regular topic of discussion in the ColdFusion community is "What should Adobe do to make ColdFusion more popular?". There are always some common themes in this discussion. I'd like to examine some of the arguments made and play devil's advocate in an attempt to get a bit more thought behind the discussions and, hopefully, bring out some useful insights (for both sides).

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On Monday, January 21st, Adobe's Ted Patrick will present Flex 3 and AIR to a joint meeting of BACFUG, BAADAUG and Fire on the Bay. This is part of Adobe's pre-release tour to promote Flex 3 and AIR.

We will be raffling off some incredible prizes:

• Flex Builder 3 Professional (shipped after launch)
• CS3 Web Premium
• Apple iPod Nano

We will also be giving away a lot of Adobe / Flex branded swag as part of this meeting so you'll want to attend.

Read the BACFUG website for more details and make sure you RSVP (on the BACFUG website) since the meeting will take place inside the security perimeter at Adobe's San Francisco building!

In light of the class loader performance issues with Java 6, you may be interested in "downgrading" to Java 5 but you may not know how (based on the comments on my blog post discussing the Java 6 issue). If so, you'll want to read this Adobe Tech Note explaining how to change the JVM that JRun/ColdFusion use.

I've had my head down working hard on client projects lately and finally got some time this evening to catch up on blogs. Wow! Adobe sure has been busy!

AIR Beta 3, AIR extensions/updates for Flash CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3, Flex 3 Beta 3, BlazeDS, Brio Beta, Flash Player 9 Update...

Good grief!

I just installed the new Flex Builder plugin but won't get a chance to put it through its paces for a few days. The AIR installer is sitting on my desktop and I'm just about to install the updated Flash Player. Oh, and I have my Brio account but haven't had time to play with that either. Maybe Adobe think we need something to keep us busy over the holidays?

Check out Adobe Labs to see what you might be missing!

The Collaborative Methods blog just posted a link to the CoCoMo Private Beta survey. CoCoMo is a Flex component set that brings the functionality of Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional to you Flex applications, leveraging Adobe's hosted services. There's some great examples and lots of information about CoCoMo on that blog.

Kristen Schofield says "We're in beta now with a release of CF that will support 64 bit and Leopard". If you want to play, hurry on over to her blog and sign up.

A new beta of ColdFusion? Hmm, I wonder what that will be?

Adobe updated its Active Content Developer Center a week or so back to reflect Microsoft's recent announcement that it "plans to remove the activation behavior from Internet Explorer in April 2008". April 2008 will be the second anniversary of the introduction of the behavior - two years that should live in infamy as far as stupid software patents are concerned!

Fusion Authority have published a great piece by Jared Rypka-Hauer which looks at the results of the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia with the hindsight of two years. Jared interviews Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, as part of the article. If you didn't get to MAX, to experience the levels to which Adobe have taken the community experience, you should read the article!

I know a lot of people rushed to installed Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) last night and my friends found it very odd that I was not one of those early adopters. I've owned and used Macs day-in, day-out for almost two decades, since the early System 6 days. I've been through two changes of hardware (68000 to PPC, PPC to Intel) and several of the "major" O/S upgrades (I skipped System 8 and System 9, for reasons that anyone who actually used them will happily expound upon for hours!). I'm on my sixth or seventh Apple laptop and my fourth Apple desktop. I'm a huge fan boy.

So why did I not pre-order Leopard and rush to install it?

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Ben Forta is off to Australia in a few weeks for ColdFusion 8 events in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth. The CF community downunder has some very vocal critics of Adobe's lack of attention to their region so hopefully this will go some way to reassure them. Certainly the message I got at MAX Europe was that Adobe is definitely looking at non-US regions and trying to address the problems that are being reported by the community in terms of presence and support.

See this news story. Now if they'd just offer ColdFusion 8 free to faculties... :)

Summary: MAX Europe was great, except for the food.

I've already posted the raw notes I took in the sessions which were pretty much just a brain dump of what the presenters were saying without much of my own commentary. In general, the sessions were extremely good. My goal was to learn a lot about AIR and some useful stuff about Flex and the conference met that goal perfectly. The AIR sessions were great and covered a lot of ground, with plenty of information about the file APIs and using SQLite, the embedded database. There was also a fairly good balance between Flex and AJAX in the AIR sessions (some presenters actually showed the same functionality in both Flex and AJAX side-by-side). The two Flex sessions that I attended - both led by Joe Berkovitz - were really good with a lot of practical information about designing and building large Flex applications.

What about the other aspects of the conference? The size of the conference (around 1,000 people I think) meant that all the sessions were together on one floor and all the food / community / vendors were together on another floor. That meant you didn't have to rush between sessions and you had a chance to network in the hallways between sessions. The session rooms were rarely completely packed so you always got a seat. It was nice and relaxed. It was much better than Chicago in that respect.

The food, however, was a serious disappointment. Tapas-style food was fun and interesting on Monday lunchtime but it was the same sort of thing at the reception on Monday night, at lunchtime on Tuesday, at the special event Tuesday evening and at lunch on Wednesday. Nothing was labeled so if you had allergies or just plain ol' don't like certain things, well, you were pretty screwed. And if you didn't like / don't eat fish, you went pretty hungry. I eat pretty much anything but I lost a few pounds this week because not much appealed to me on Tuesday (either at lunch or at the special event) and on Wednesday I completely skipped lunch. The most charitable thing I can say about the special event was that the jazz band was pretty good. Like Chicago, the event was in the conference center and was just food and drink (and they ran out of beer apparently - I stuck to wine). The Chicago event was $100 for guests and since I couldn't imagine what would be so special it could be worth that much money, my wife & I skipped the guest pass. From what I heard, we made the right choice. The Barcelona event was $75 for the guest pass and, with hindsight, we probably wouldn't bothered with that either. Come on Adobe, do something special next year in San Francisco - or at least don't charge guests such outrageous amounts.

Apart from the food - and Tuesday evening's event - everything else about the conference was really enjoyable. It was great to finally meet so many European community members - there was a large British contingent, as well as folks from every part of mainland Europe. Barcelona itself is a beautiful city with great public transport and is also an interesting city to walk around. The beach was really nice (so I'm told) and the hotel restaurant was really good (at the Vincci Maritimo), although the relaxed European approach to schedule meant that they opened when they were ready, not when the posted hours said they would open.

Of the two MAX events, Barcelona was by far the better experience in many ways. It'll be interesting to see what Adobe do next year since both events will likely be even bigger...

One other thought (added later): whilst it was great for speakers that they were in one of the nearest hotels to the event (as was the case in Chicago), there seemed to be no networking in the speaker hotel: folks did not congregate in the bar in the evening. The hotel was amazing quiet in the evenings. That was also true to some extent in Chicago. The bar was more of a networking location in Chicago but still you only got to network with other speakers instead of a broader range of attendees. I suspect this will be less of an issue in San Francisco since everyone should be staying within walking distance of the Moscone Center but it's something to think about.

Here are my notes from MAX Europe. This covers all of the sessions I went to. I'll probably flesh out some of the notes over the next few weeks and - if I do - I'll republish the doc and bump this blog entry

I'm in the Flex Best Practices panel right now (Joe Berkowitz, Steven Webster, Sascha Wolter, Dirk Eismann). MAX Europe has a much more intimate and relaxed feel than MAX North America. The CCIB conference center is right on the beach. This part of Barcelona seems very new and constantly expanding with lots of construction - and lots of parks in amongst the new buildings.

Yesterday, my wife & I went to see La Sagrada Familia temple. It's a big tourist attraction these days (it wasn't when my wife last visited Barcelona) and you can't really explore the building now. There are long waits for the elevators, there is a lot of scaffolding inside, you get to go through the building in one direction and that's all. The old side of the temple is beautiful (the nativity facade) but the new side is ugly with cubist sculpture. I'm glad I've seen it but I was a bit disappointed to be honest.

Today and tomorrow, I'm mostly focused on AIR sessions. There's a ColdFusion BOF tonight that should be very interesting. I'm wondering whether the general sessions and/or sneak peeks will bring something new that we didn't see in Chicago.

Wifi access seems good so I may well be blogging live from sessions.

Remember when Adobe gave away trial copies of Flex Builder on a CD with magazines? Several people in the ColdFusion community bemoaned the fact that Adobe wasn't doing this for ColdFusion (and the usual complaints about Adobe not doing its bit to promote ColdFusion blah blah blah)...

Cop a load of this cover shot of MacWorld magazine with ColdFusion 8 on the free CD accompanying the magazine!! (via Andy Jarrett)

Fire On The Bay is a brand new Fireworks User Group, based in San Francisco, and run by Luke Kilpatrick, BACFUG's co-manager. Their inaugural meeting will be October 23rd at the Adobe building in San Francisco. The speaker will be Alan Musselman of the Fireworks product team. RSVP via the link on the website.

You've probably read it elsewhere but I ran through the experience myself and wanted to try to save some folks some pain...

If you try to install CS3 for OS X when you have Safari 3 Beta installed, you'll hit an annoying problem.

Here's what happens. The install seems to go really well until you get to the end of disc one and then you get a blank alert box that you cannot interact with and you cannot quit the installer. You have to force quit the installer to get out of this situation.

Here's how to do it the right way. If you still have the Safari 3 Beta .dmg, mount it and run the uninstaller (if you don't have it, download the beta again from Apple's site). The uninstaller will remove Safari 3 Beta and restore your Safari 2 install. Now you can install CS3 without a problem. It takes up to two and a half hours depending on whether you install the entire suite or just select parts. It's huge.

Once you have successfully installed CS3, fire up the Safari 3 Beta installer again and you're back to where you started. No mess, no fuss.

Remember to run the updater - Help > Updates... from any program in the suite!

Adobe and BEA have formed an "Enterprise Partnership" to co-market products. Under the deal, announced on BEA's website yesterday, BEA will bundle Adobe Flex Builder with BEA Workshop Studio and Adobe will distribute evaluation licenses of WebLogic Server with LiveCycle. It's an interesting development that should drive further adoption of Flex within the enterprise.

Finally, the piece of **** that was CFDJ is dead! I've had a running battle with Sys-Con for years as they spammed me repeatedly, despite my requests to get off their mailing lists. I nearly got into it with Jeremy Geelan, Sys-Con's then editor, at MAX in Anaheim a few years back because of his attitude and his reaction to my complaints about his magazine. They sent me two(!) copies of JDJ that I did not ask for but would never send me CFDJ. The magazines were jammed full of advertising - and the website has been absolutely abysmal for ages with auto-play pop-up videos and what little content there was stuffed tightly into the middle column. The Sys-Con site was what finally persuaded me to install ad-blockers!

According to the Sys-Con press release "After ColdFusion became part of the Adobe product line Adobe recently decided to discontinue its support of the magazine." Well, I'm just glad that Adobe had the sense to pull the plug on this feeble excuse for a magazine.

Read Michael Dinowitz's take on this news which worries that this looks bad for ColdFusion. I disagree. CFDJ - and Sys-Con's two dozen(!) other magazines - just reflect badly on Sys-Con.

If you're one of those lucky iPhone owners, you might find this hint about PDF optimization very useful (from my former colleague Shahram Javey's blog).

If you're thinking about attending Adobe MAX 2007, don't forget that the early bird price ends on August 10th. After that, the price goes up $200.

You can register for MAX 2007 here.

With Ted Patrick driving the focus to be more developer-centric, MAX should be a great conference this year!

Lots of ColdFusion 8 goodness in the developer center:

• Introducing ColdFusion 8 - Ben Forta
• ColdFusion 8 server monitoring - Part 1: Using the Server Monitor in development - Charlie Arehart
• Using the ColdFusion 8 step-through debugger for Eclipse - Brian Szoszorek
• Image manipulation capabilities in ColdFusion 8 - Ryan Favro
• Flash Media Server event gateway example application - Ramchandra Kulkarni

These can be downloaded ColdFusion Support Center, along with the report builder, the .NET integration service and the Flex/Flex Remoting components (making it easy to connect to CF apps).

ColdFusion 8 available for trial and purchase. Standard Edition price is unchanged, Enterprise Edition moves up to $7,500. All language features are available in Standard Edition but some features, such as event gateways and cfthread are "limited" (in terms of performance). Enterprise Edition adds additional DB drivers, multi-server install and J2EE deployment and sandboxing (as usual) but also the server monitor and user/role management for the administrator.

Adogo - Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando - is a new user group focused on ColdFusion, ActionScript, AIR and Flex. Maxim Porges, Adam Fortuna, Brian LeGros are all involved. The group meets on the first Tuesday of every month at 7:00pm at the Devry University at Milenia and the group is kicking off on August 7th with Adam Fortuna on Flex/ColdFusion Applications with ColdSpring and an RIA BOF which should be a good evening.

Rupesh Kumar, one of the ColdFusion engineers, writes about his experience of CFUNITED 2007 and posts his slides.

For those of you who missed his talk, his slides are full of details about the many, many language enhancements in ColdFusion 8, including several in-depth slides on <cfthread>.

&"The GR8 CF8!" - I'll keep updating this as Tim Buntel and Ben Forta continue to talk...

Top 8 reasons to buy ColdFusion 8:

• Making apps is really easy, including Eclipse Plug-ins (including debugging) and Wizards, Server Monitor
• Have confidence in production applications - Server Monitor & API, Multiple Instances, Stable & Backward Compatible
• Your users will be happier - Flex and AJAX, Reporting, PDF Applications, On-demand presentations, Images
• It's nice and secure - Multiple Admin accounts, Multiple configurable RDS accounts, Strong encryption
• CFML Evolution - JavaScript operators, Argument collections, CFC interfaces, File handling functions, Array and Structure creation, CFC serialization
• Plays well with others - .NET, Exchange Server, RSS & Atom, LiveCycle Data Services, Flash Media Serve (gateway etc)
• It's fast! Really, really fast! - Overall server performance, CFCs, List functions, Logic functions, more...!

Tested 2.4m lines of customer application code. Identified bottlenecks and made hundreds of tweaks. Struct manipulation is twice as fast; List manipulation is three times faster; switch/case is three times faster; cfparam is FORTY times faster; date functions is five times faster; regex is 2.5-3 times faster; isDefined() is twice as fast (as in CFMX 7); CFC creation is THIRTY times faster.

BlogCFC and the adobe.com store run 30-40% faster with no other changes.

Looks like there are nearly 30 ColdFusion sessions at MAX 2007. There are also lots of Flex and AIR sessions as well. Should be a really good conference for developers this year, based on Ted Patrick's comments about the direction of the conference.

Adobe has released Digital Editions which is a free, Flex-based eBook reader for your PC. When it was out as a beta, it was Windows-only so I'm very pleased to see the final release supports Mac OS X as well (although some of the book install pages in their sample library appear to require Windows... unless you spoof your user agent!).

What do you get? A slick, clean monochrome interface with simple, intuitive controls. A library mode and a reading mode. Bookshelves to organize your books. Bookmarks. Text search. All in a 3Mb download.

Adobe has quite a few free sample books in its library to get you started.

Bill McCoy has plenty more details in his blog, in particular details of support for EPUB (aka OPS), an open standard, reflowable XHTML-based format.

Jennifer Larkin will be presenting the recently released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), showing examples and talking about what it means for you.

Remember to RSVP on the BACFUG website so that Adobe security have your badges ready when you turn up.

7pm, 601 Townsend St, San Francisco (as usual).

This week I had the good fortune to attend the annual Adobe Community Summit - a San Jose-based event for User Group Managers and Community Experts to learn about the "state of the union" in Adobe-land. Last year I popped into a couple of sessions as an employee and saw some sneak peaks of what ultimately became the CS3 product line. This year I attended as a Community Expert, to learn about the many recent releases.

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