This week saw the beginning of the Adobe Community Summit, a briefing event for Adobe Community Experts and user group managers. According to Aaron West’s Day 1 summary post, there are over 150 attendees this year, catching up on the latest in Adobe tech and giving feedback on the various community programs they are involved in. Aaron also revealed that Rachel Luxemburg was introduced as the new user group manager, replacing Ed Sullivan who many people involved in their local user groups would have had contact with over the past few years.

Adam Lehman, Platform Evangelist at Adobe, released his set of demo ColdFusion applications, covering the Ajax, Flex, PDF and presentation features of ColdFusion 8 (amongst others). The quick and dirty demos are designed to work with the standard cfartgallery sample database, an Apache Derby embedded database that gets installed with CF if you choose to include the samples, so if you’ve got a development server handy and you haven’t had a chance to try all the new features, check Adam’s demos out.

Also from the Adobe camp, briefly:

• Russell Brown has a controversial request for ColdFusion 9: drop the built-in Ajax and JavaScript libraries. Although it’s unlikely that Adobe would take action, his comments are an interesting read.
• Jim Priest is curious as to whether there are developers who are waiting for Adobe to release a ColdFusion IDE. Is that you? Leave a comment for Jim.
• Adobe have released a hotfix for the image tags and functions in ColdFusion 8.0.1, so if you were affected by any bugs in image manipulation, you’ll want to download this (hat tip to cfsearching).
• Stephen Moretti has posted his review of ColdFusion 8, nine months on… with a little help from some friends.

Open Source

OpenBlueDraon is still a hot topic. Neil Middleton thinks that Open BlueDragon makes CFML development easy again. Do you agree? While we’re talking about it, the official blog has been launched, and a VMWare “appliance” - built on CentOS with Tomcat, MySQL and Apache - has been released. Matt Woodward has posted about his new development setup running Open BlueDragon and ColdFusion 8 side-by-side and Per Kleven has written detailed instructions on how to get Open BlueDragon and Tomcat running in a manner which allows easy upgrades (hat tip to Mr Corfield). The MXUnit team has posted on how to setup and deploy OpenBD on JBoss and Tomcat for Windows.

SourceForge have opened nominations for their 2008 Community Choice Awards, and for the first time it is not limited to projects hosted on SourceForge. Got a favourite open source project? Go nominate it! I think it would be amazing to see a CFML-based project short-listed for this award.

The Daemon team have announced that they are considering changing the licence under which FarCry 5.0 is released. While nothing has been decided yet,  the debate rages on the FarCry Google Group. Jeff Coughlin has written an interesting article about the issue on Fusion Authority: What’s in a License Anyway? : FarCry Considers Moving to a Dual License Model.

Oscar Arevalo has announced the release of ColdBricks, a free and open source content management system written in CFML for portals and dashboards (hat tip to a very excited Serge Jaspers).

“ColdFusion Conference Season” has started

cf.Objective() is over - read my summary of what the blogosphere had to say about this event - next week is WebManiacs in Washington DC (May 19-23), Scotch on the Rocks in Edinborough, Scotland is on from June 4-6, then CFUnited is gearing up for their 10th anniversary event, June 18-21 in Washington DC. Sneaking in first however will be WebDU, held in Sydney, Australia on June 12-13, and I’m pleased to say I will be there covering all the happenings. Then, later this year, CFDevCon08 has been announced in Brighton, England in September, and Sean Corfield would like to know what you think he should present on.

Community

The ColdFusion book scene has been rather sparse of late - other than Ben Forta’s staple CFWACK volumes, as far as I can tell no new books have been released for ColdFusion 8. Niche publisher Pakt are looking to change all that, announcing that John Farrar’s ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial will be shipping in August this year. Described as an “intense guide”, the book covers the basics as well as some of the juicier CF8 features, so should be a useful addition to the CF developer’s bookshelf. Good on you Pakt and well done John!

• Ben Forta has a list of international web hosts that support ColdFusion, and he’s put out a call for people to update the list where it’s gotten out of date.
• Charlie Arehart has a long way to go to cover all the categories in his Tools and Resources directory, but this week he’s highlighted CFMAIL Repalcements/Enhancements, CFML Documentation and Help Tools and CFML Caching Tools.

Code cuts

• Jedi master Raymond Camden shows how to easily get the current directory from a CF script, and Dan Switzer has followed up with how to get the URL path, without using cgi-scoped variables.
• Chris Phillips was impressed at the cf.Objective conference by how Transfer ORM handles caching, using the Java SoftReference class, and has shared some information on how it works.
• Dan Vega runs through an example of how to use multiple filters in CFDIRECTORY as a follow up to Ben Nadel’s two posts on the same issue
• Doug Hughes explains how search engine friendly URLs work in Model-Glue 3
• Barney Boisvert has updated his Amazon S3 CFC
• Gary Gilbert talks about speed and multiple CFQUERY inserts with some interesting test results

So that’s all, folks. Got a tip for me? Email kay at smoljak dot com, tag a link for:kay.smoljak in del.icio.us, or leave a comment.

It seems most delegates have arrived back home and updated their blogs, so I figure it’s time to see what they all learnt over the three days…

Brian Rinaldi wrote a comprehensive wrap-up for Fusion Authority. He noted that as the CF community continues to mature, developers are looking to the more advanced tools available to them to solve problems, namely Java, and this was evident in a number of session topics. He also noted that Flex was a hot topic, with so many sessions that a developer could spend the entire conference focused solely on Flex. Brian also reviewed several sessions in detail: Selling Professional Development in a Hostile Shop by Terrence Ryan; Leveraging Code Generation by Brian Kotek; Mate Flex Framework by Laura Arguello; Transfer Caching Mechanisms by Mark Mandel; and Flex: No Frameworks Required by Maxim Porges.

Mark Mandel wrote up his highlights, which included workshops on Model-Glue, ColdSpring, and Terrence Ryan’s session on Selling Professional Development at a Hostile Shop. While he was there, Mark presented two sessions on Transfer ORM (now at version 1.0) which were well-received - watch out for an interview with Mark on SitePoint in the near future.  He noted that the ColdFusion 9 information that was revealed was nothing overly surprising, but welcome nonetheless. Oh, and Mark was the lucky winner of the Nintendo Wii!

Brian Meloche posted three daily summaries - Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 - as well as an overall review, giving the conference an ‘A’ grade. Brian goes into quite a bit of detail about each of the sessions he attended, and makes note in particular of the Open BlueDragon initiative (a beta version was released during the conference) and covers what was discussed at the BF9 “Birds of a Feather” session. He was disappointed that more emphasis was not placed on the need for a dedicated ColdFusion IDE from Adobe.

A lot of material was published post-conference! Some more highlights include:

• Brian Kotek took away from the conference an impression that ColdFusion is at a crossroads. His thoughts on the future direction of the language are an interesting read.
• Terrence Ryan posted his conference postscript in easy to read bullet points - and created a cf.Objective() 2009 to-do list.
• Peter Bell summed up a whole stack of the presentations, noting the cf.Objective() “rocked”.
• Adam Lehman posted about the suggestion that cf.Objective() might expand to Europe and/or Australia.
• Free copies of the latest issue of the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update were distributed to attendees.
• Andy Powell posted his cf.Objective() Flickr stream in a funky slideshow.

A number of presenters have provided session materials online - slides and code samples:

• Jason Delmore’s Developing ColdFusion Java Hybrid Applications
• Brian Meloche’s ColdFusion as a Different Type of “Glue”
• Phil Nacelli’s Leveraging Basic Design Patterns in ColdFusion
• Peter J Farrell’s What’s New in Mach-II 1.6 and Using ANT
• Raymond Camden’s Spry and Model-Glue sessions
• Peter Bell’s Software Product Line Presentation
• Brian Kotek’s Leveraging Code Generation
• John Mason’s Unit Testing and PCI-DSS
• Dan Wilson’s From Procedural to OO (slides linked from bottom of Chris Phillips’ session review)
• Terrence Ryan’s Selling Professional Development Techniques
• Andrew Powell’s Enterprise MVC with ColdFusion and Java

One factor that nearly every post mentioned was that it’s the people that make cf.Objective() so great. Steve Bryant resisted the urge to do some name-dropping, while Ben Nadel likened the experience to walking among giants. It’s certainly a recurring theme - as was the wish of many attendees to be back for cf.Objective() 2009!

TIOBE Malarkey

Controversy abounds: the TIOBE Programming Community Index decided to remove ColdFusion from it’s list of most popular programming languages, on the basis that it was not a programming language, but a framework like .NET and Ruby on Rails. Obviously, much outrage ensued on blogs and mailing lists - far too many outpourings of disgust to link to them all! After reconsidering, TIOBE updated their FAQ to note that CFML - the ColdFusion Markup Language, as distinct from Adobe ColdFusion the application server product - was in fact, a Turing complete programming language and would be included in future lists.

What is interesting about this incident is that it has got the community talking about the terminology that we use. CFML is the language itself, implemented not only by Adobe for their ColdFusion server product, but also by New Atlanta in BlueDragon and Railo and the Smith project in their respective products. Perhaps I need to change the title of my weekly round up to “The Week in CFML”!

Frameworks

Doug Boude has posted an interesting rant on why he doesn’t like ORM (object relational mapping) frameworks, based on his experiences with Reactor. A couple of other people have pointed out that it’s unfair to damn all ORMs based on one experience with one product. I guess, as with everything in web application development, your mileage may vary!

Earlier this week I posted a poll - do you use a framework? I’m going to leave it open for a few more days so if you haven’t already voted, go have your say.

Community

MXNA, Macromedia’s ancient blog aggregation service that had been showing it’s age recently, was put out to pasture and the new Adobe Feeds was launched. In actual fact, the code base is the same, but according to Ben Forta some optimizations were made and the the new servers are now running ColdFusion 8.0.1 for an extra speed injection.

Charlie Arehart continues his series of posts exposing his massive lists of resources with Blogging Tools, CFML Certification Preparation Resources, and Bug/Defect Tracking Tools.

Open Source

After much anticipation, Open BlueDragon has been released into the wild in time for the cf.Objective() conference - so if you want to see what all the fuss is about, download it and give it a go.

Brian Rinaldi’s open source update includes two new releases and four updates, including a new project which filters against SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks, and a number of updates to Raymond Camden’s many projects. Brian also links to lots of new articles and tutorials on frameworks.

If you weren’t able to catch it live, you can now watch a recording of Jedi Master Raymond Camden’s presentation on open source and ColdFusion.

Code

Some CFML quickies:

• Justin Mclean shows how to find out if a date is affected by daylight savings using a little snippet of Java
• Ben Nadel talks about how to delete CFMAIL attachments automatically with the “remove” attribute, new in CF8
• Raymond Camden demonstrates how a simple custom tag can be created to duplicate the functionality of the CFHTMLHEAD tag, but for page footers, using the onRequest function

That’s enough for one week, I think. As always, if you have any tips, email me (kay at smoljak dot com), leave a comment or tag something in delicious with for:kay.smoljak (no one ever does that!). ‘Til next time!

When I started using ColdFusion, frameworks were largely unknown to the developer community, with one or two fledgling offerings available for the really adventurous. As the web has grown, ColdFusion has become more sophisticated to meet its expanding needs, and the choice of frameworks available has absolutely exploded.

A few weeks ago, SitePoint ran an interview I did with Geoff Bowers, the “benevolent dictator” of the FarCry community. While FarCry is better known as a content management system, the FarCry building blocks act as a framework, allowing developers to build complex applications. Just last week, this was followed up with an interview with John Farrar on his COOP framework, which is designed for rapid prototyping and easy collaboration between front end developers and back end developers. I used the same questions for each interview, so that different aspects of them can be compared, based on the answers. They’ve been phrased to try and help developers decide if a particular framework could work for them.

At the moment, I have the brains behind Fusebox, Mach-ii, Transfer ORM and ColdBox also working away on their answers to the same set of questions, and once those are out, I have every other framework developer firmly in my sights, no matter how big or small (so if that’s you, get in contact with me - kay at smoljak dot com). Over the coming months, we can look forward to seeing how each framework is similar and different.

But first, let me know what you think: are you a framework aficionado too? Do you use your own system? Or do you think it’s all a load of bunk? Let me know what you think. I’ll leave the poll open for a week. I’m looking forward to seeing the results!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Because that’s just the kind of guy he is, Charlie Arehart keeps a massive list of tools and resource of interest to ColdFusion developers - over 700 resources in over 100 categories. This week Charlie highlights the categories in his mammoth link collection. Come back when you’re through all that!

Subscribers to MXNA, the RSS feed aggregator for Adobe-related technologies, may have noticed that the site has been down quite a bit lately. Mike Chambers, one of the originators of the project, has posted an update to his blog on what is happening with MXNA. Looks like it will be back sometime soon.

In the only BlueDragon news I saw this week, the final instalment of the BlueDragon Open Source interview series - with Andy Wu - was released. That wraps up the introductions to the steering committee - they’re a smart and well-qualified bunch of people for sure.

Ben Forta has blogged his response to an enquiry from a ColdFusion developer from the CF3-CF5 era, who was wondering what he needed to learn to get up to speed with the current state of ColdFusion. Ben’s advice is interesting and applies equally well to any developer looking to improve their skills.

Code

Simon Horwith clears up what is a thorny area for many developers with CFLOCK Explained. It’s a long article, with code samples, and Simon does a really good job in covering the intricacies of locking. One for the bookmarks! Also in the “more advanced” category, Charlie Arehart revisits the topic of CF/Java integration - a powerful but often overlooked aspect of ColdFusion.

The Transfer ORM project has reached the very exciting milestone of 1.0 Release Candidate. A recorded Adobe Connect session by author Mark Mandel on an Introduction to Transfer is now available - but Mark advises that it’s the same presentation he will be giving at the cf.Objective() conference, so if you’re planning to get along to that you might not want to watch. And Paul Marcotte has posted a Transfer ORM Quickstart article, for those who don’t have the patience to watch the presentation.

Short but handy:

• ColdFusion Jedi Raymond Camden has posted a quick but very helpful tip for anyone working with the SlideShare API: the hashed secret key must be lowercase
• Ben Nadel outlines how to create a “remember me” login system in ColdFusion
• A new beta version 0.7 of ColdFusion on Wheels has been released. Hat tip to Ben Forta, who describes the project as “a CF community response to Ruby on Rails”

Regular updates

Brian Rinaldi’s Open Source Update this week highlights two new releases - a library for the Google AdWords API and CFANT, a deployment tool from Doug Hughes - and seven project updates.

My ColdFusion-Talk Mailing List Roundup for this week covers search-engine friendly URLs, screen scraping, database indexes, application scoped variable overhead, database structure diagrams, and browser redirect and refresh methods.

So that’s all, folks. Leave a comment or send me an email - kay at smoljak dot com - with your tips or suggestions.

Best Practices

Onto the posts: Peter Bell has started a series of articles on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development (TDD). He’s kicked the set off with Why Test? and followed up with Books on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development and then an article on Getting Test Infected - pairing up with another developer to pick the unit testing habit up from them. Food for thought if you’re curious about Unit testing or TDD.

Speaking of deep thinking, Barney Boisvert has posted on how far the ColdFusion community has come in the past few years, with ColdSpring, ORM solutions like Reactor and Transfer, and frameworks like Fusebox, Mach-ii and Model-Glue now so widely adopted. If you’re using these tools, learning them or even just thinking about these topics, Barney would like you to congratulate yourself!

Community

The first round of results from Jim Priest’s CFML IDE survey are in. Check out what the ColdFusion community is looking for in an IDE. If you’re interested in what the wider web development community is favouring, the results of a survey done by O’Reilly’s Inside RIA is also available.

Charlie Arehart reminds us of the UGTV (User Group TV) section of his site: a listing of recorded ColdFusion presentations. There’s lots of gems in there! Charlie has also had some of his “Tipical Charlie” columns from the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update journal published online in PDF format.

It’s official: Raymond Camden is a code diva. He lists the tell-tale signs - are you one too?

My CF-Talk mailing list roundup for this week covers discussions on Flash CFFORM binding, error handlers in a clustered environment, refreshing cached web services, creating an Excel spreadsheet, the difference between CFSCRIPT “for” loops and CFLOOP, and preventing cross-site scripting.

Open Source

The Open BlueDragon Steering Committee interviews continue with Adam Haskell, Mark Drew, Alan Williamson and Matt Woodward.

Brain Rinaldi rounds up the open source releases for the week - only one new project but a few updates, including version 1.0 of Mango Blog (taking the project officially out of beta).

Code, code and more code

Lots of image manipulation this week!

• ImageUtils, the CF8 image manipulation library, has had some nice TIFF functionality added
• Brian Love has posted about how to get JPEG resolution from EXIF metadata
• Seth Duffey shares a technique for rotating digital photographs in CF8 using EXIF orientation information
• Raymond Camden’s updated YouTube CFC has been officially released and he helps out one of his readers needing to extend the autocomplete functionality in CF8
• Scott Bennett has made his Google Maps API custom tag available and shows how to position a CFWindow from the centre of the viewport

That’s all for this week! Email me tips (kay at smoljak dot com), leave a comment or tag links for:kay.smoljak in del.icio.us. Keep rocking the code!

The hype over the ColdFusion 8.0.1 release has died down a little, and there were a handful of items this week discussing what’s new. Raymond Camden discusses the changes to the CFEXECUTE tag in CF 8.0.1. With the changes to the CF licensing, John Beynon has put together a little ColdFusion license calculator in Flex to work out how many licenses are required (and their cost) based on the CF edition, number of CPUs and number of virtual machines.

Not to be outdone, the alternative CFML engine Railo also released an updater, to version 2.0.1. The new release contains an ton of bug fixes and new features.

In the Open BlueDragon camp, the members of the new steering committee have been announced. Alan Williamson has posted interviews with committee members Andy Allan, Mike Brunt, and Sean Corfield, with more sure to follow.

Speaking of open source, Greg Cerveny has posted an interview with Raymond Camden on developing open source ColdFusion applications. It’s interesting because it seems Greg has some strong opinions on what open source should and shouldn’t be. And from Brian Rinaldi’s open source round up, lots of new stuff has been released, including an OpenID integration component, a portal framework, a logging application, Robin Hilliard’s unit testing project, a file manager, and more. Whew!

Short and sweet code cuts:

• Raymond Camden has started working on a new version of his YouTubeCFC wrapper, which now uses the updated YouTube API.
• Brian Rinaldi has released a new build of the wickedly-named Illudium PU-36 Code Generator.
• Brian Love shares a user defined function to easily manage image uploads.

If you’re after something a little more heavy duty, here some’s topics to stretch the grey matter:

• Raymond Camden discusses best practises for handling session and cgi variables inside CFCs, from both a real world and theoretical perspective.
• Mike Brunt discusses Vertical and Horizontal Clustering in his continuing post series on the topic.
• Peter Bell discusses treating an object as a struct - both how you would do it and why you might want to.
• Nathan Strutz tells us that ColdFusion is a Domain Specific Language, designed to solve one problem really well: “ColdFusion is meant to be the dream language for web applications. Its original goals were to make your HTML web site database-enabled and dynamic. That goal was basically perfected with version 1.0 and the cfquery tag.”

One of the things that makes ColdFusion great is the community. Jim Priest has posted a community-driven CFML IDE survey… where he’s making the results publicly available. Already there are over 300 responses, so fill it out and have your say. Kristen Schofield, ColdFusion product manager, has posted some ColdFusion 8 customer case studies that have been posted to the Adobe web site. And over at Fusion Authority, I’ve picked out five interesting threads from discussions this week on the CF-Talk mailing list: Database schema comparison tools, ordering numeric query columns alphabetically, advanced pagination, open source shopping cart systems and Application.cfm versus Application.cfc.

ColdFusion conferences are spread nicely over the year, it seems. On the CFUnited conference blog, they’ve posted the top 10 reasons to attend the upcoming CFUnited. However, these same reasons could apply to almost any conference - it’s just great to get out and meet like-minded CF developers while learning new skills! I’m probably going to miss out on WebDU this year (Geoff has posted some OSX Dashboard widgets to countdown the days until the southern hemisphere’s CF conference), but I have high hopes for next year. Nick Tong has announced that there will be a new ColdFusion conference in the UK in September, under the old moniker CFDevCon. More details coming soon!

Finally, some framework-related announcements:

• Geoff Bowers presented an Adobe eSeminar on FarCry 5.0 several weeks ago, and has announced that the recording of the hour-long session is now available. If you miss a live sessions, recordings of previous eSeminars are available “on demand” from Adobe’s site. And Jeff Coughlin has released the jcFarcryFlvPlayer plugin for the FarCry CMS/framework, which embeds a Flash-based video player into a FarCry site.
• Nathan Strutz has updated his Fusebox XML cheat sheet for Fusebox 5.5.
• Matt Quackenbush talks about how to use mapped views - view files common to multiple applications - in ColdBox.
• Sean Corfield explains how to use Transfer ORM in a cluster. And speaking of Transfer, Dan Wilson has let on that Mark Mandel is hard at work finishing up documentation for the release of Transfer 1.0 at the CF.Objective conference.

That’s it for this week! As always, leave a comment, email me (kay AT smoljak DOT com) with any tips, or tag your links for:kay.smoljak in del.icio.us.

• Ray Camden shows how it’s now easier to add PDF watermarks
• Brian Rinaldi and Barney Boisvert debate the best way to create dummy recordsets
• John Beynon discusses EULA changes, which will be of particular interest to those interested in virtualisation, and Vince Bonfanti of New Atlanta responds with the differences between ColdFusion and BloueDragon’s licensing models
• Adobe’s Manjukiran Pacchhipulusu writes about taking advantage of the new 64-bit support

Fortunately, I also managed to find some more material NOT related to the update. There’s new features at Fusion Authority, home of the print journal FAQU. The first of a number of CFUnited video interviews has been posted, where Paul Vernon interviews New Atlanta’s Vince Bonfanti about - guess what! - BlueDragon open source. And I attempt to highlight some of the best CF-Talk mailing list threads from the previous week in my new ColdFusion-Talk Roundup #1.

Short and sweet code cuts:

• Seth Duffey shows how to work with multi-page TIFF images in ColdFusion 8
• Michael Sharman shows how to dynamically flush a cached web service in CF 7 (and Raymond Camden points out in the comments that there’s now a supported method for doing the same thing in CF8)
• Todd Sharp explores a new way to create screen captures in Converting HTML to an image with CF/Java - at the moment the method is dependent on CF 8 but Todd says he hopes to remove that requirement
• Charlie Arehart talks about potential solutions to prevent CFMAIL from being flagged as spam

Autosuggest is Ajax topic of the week: Based on a question asked on the CF-Talk mailing list about allowing multiple auto-suggest items per field, Dominic Watson posted a solution that solves the problem and more, and then turned it into a custom tag and released it on RIAForge: Better Autosuggest. Original poster Steve Good also posted an alternative solution using JQuery.

Advancing the CFGRID cause: Brian Love demonstrates how to dynamically set a CFWINDOW title from a CFGRID - a handy tip for those CFGRID-driven CRUD interfaces. Angela Buraglia reveals some CSS to enable word wrap in HTML/Ajax CFGRID - although this CF-Talk mailing list thread suggests that Angela’s code may need to be modified slightly to work with IE. And Todd Sharp has created a calendar date picker widget for editable CFGRIDs. Sweet!

SitePoint have published a beginner’s tutorial on BlueDragon, Enter the Dragon: Develop ColdFusion Apps for Free. If you’re interested in trying out alternative CFML engines, there’s also Railo - Gert Franz runs through how to configure Railo with IIS6. On the other hand, if you’re looking for heavy duty Adobe CF, Gary Gilbert let us know that web host Intermedia.net have announced they are offering ColdFusion 8 Enterprise hosting plans. He has a look at their plans compared to hostmysite. Or if you’re going large scale self-hosted, Mike Brunt has kicked off a series of articles on clustering ColdFusion with HA - Clustering ColdFusion Part 1 - Installing CF. Mike intends to follow up with posts on hardware and software setup.

Other randoms this time around include:

• Sean Corfield posted links to the ColdFusion Weekly podcast’s public calendar of upcoming interviews and topics, which you can subscribe to in a number of different formats
• Bobby Hartfield, developer of CF4em, a new forum package for ColdFusion, is looking for people to help test drive the features before he releases it for beta testing
• If you’re an Eclipse user, you might be interested in Mylyn, a “Task-Focused Interface for Eclipse” according to the official web site - Mike Henke raves about it, and links to some resources (and there’s lots more similar material on Mike’s blog, so check it out if you’re an Eclipse, Subversion or ANT user)

Finally, from the “I didn’t realise that was even there” files, Nick Tong pointed out to me this week that his site cfFrameWorks is not only where he keeps his blog, but also a compendium of ColdFusion frameworks with a description and links for each one and a separate framework news feed. Nice resource Nick! My interview with Geoff Bowers on the FarCry CMS/Framework went live last week, and I hope to have more framework developer interviews coming soon.

That’s it for this week. If you have a ColdFusion tip for me, email me (kay at smoljak dot com), leave a comment or tag your links with for:kay.smoljak in del.icio.us. Operators are standing by to receive your link!

The updater incorporates a heap of fixes and enhancements which you can read about in the release notes (PDF) and FAQ. Notably, 64-bit support has been added to almost every platform - a feature that many organisations were waiting for - and JDK support has been upgraded to Sun Java SE JDK 6 Update 3, version 1.6.0_03.

The third party libraries from Yahoo, ExtJS and FCKEditor have been updated, so the built in Ajax components now support the Webkit/Safari browser. In terms of the core language, the AttributeCollection attribute has been extended, as has structure and array creation syntax, and there are numerous updates to cfdocument, cfexchangecalendar, cfexecute, cfftp, cfimage, cfmail, and cfpdf as well as over 100 bug fixes, including quite a few to ColdFusion Report Builder.

So what are you waiting for - go get it already :)

From the Adobe camp:

• CF Product Manger Kristen Schofield wants your feedback on the idea of a ColdFusion evangelism kit for potential customers. Do you think this would be useful? Let Kristen know your thoughts!
• Last week the Adobe MAX locations were announced. Now, they’re looking for your thoughts on sessions and presenters

Brian Rinaldi talks to Peter Bell in his CFUnited interview series. Peter will be presenting three sessions at the CFUnited conference, on CFCs, code generation, and OO. Brian’s Open Source Update also had lots of interesting announcements  on the frameworks front (ColdBox, FarCry, Mach-ii and Transfer related).

Code and techniques, short and sweet:

• Brian Ghidinelli shares a technique to minimize memory usage by bots in applications using session management
• Justin Carter has started a documentation wiki for ColdExt, the ExtJS tag library for CF, with a Getting Started tutorial
• Ever wanted to use CFPOP over a secure connection? It’s not supported in CF, but Jake Munson shows how it can be done with a quick Java call
• Brian Love has worked out how to determine if a particular request is coming from an Ajax request or not

And finally, my new most favourite tag: CFGRID. Anuj Gakhar shows how to change the CFGRID pageSize attribute dynamically, and Dan Vega shares a nifty select element trick for editable grids.

Got a link for me? Think I should be covering other stuff? Leave a comment, drop me a line (kay AT smoljak DOT com) or tag your links in del.icio.us with for:kay.smoljak. Until next week…