…well, the shirt anyway. If you’re eagerly anticipating ColdFusion 9 – codenamed Centaur – you can now get the unofficial tshirt. User groups can get bulk orders with their name on the back. Pity it’s white though! hat tip to Ben Forta.
The biggest news this week was that Adobe have finalized their educational licensing and ColdFusion 8 is now available to students and educators free of charge. Government agencies in the US can get a 20% discount on ColdFusion 8 at the moment as well.
Coding
A couple of security posts this week – hat tip to Steve Bryant’s CF_BlogPicks for these links:
- Joshua Cyr reminds us to make sure we’re not giving away too much information on our production servers
- Jason Dean continues his security series (9th installment) with Request Forgeries and ColdFusion
In more general code-related news, Stephen Withington has out together a big list of Java Servlet equivalents to CGI scoped variables – so instead of CGI.PATH_INFO for example, you can use getPageContext().getRequest().getPathInfo(). The comments on the post explain a little about why you might find the Java Servlet alternatives more useful.
Paul Marcotte explains his approach to test driven development in detail – part 1 (Application Structure and Apache) and part 2 (MXUnit, ColdSpring and ColdMock) are available.
Ben Nadel, always one to share his learning experiences, has posted about his first experiences using ColdFusion 8 secure CFFTP. Brad Wood explains what the de() function actually does. And Raymond Camden still hates CFFEED.
Frameworks
Mach-II news: Matt Woodward reports that the alpha of the Mach-II Dashboard has been released. According to Matt, the dashboard “gives you a ton of insight into and control over your Mach-II applications, letting you reload the application or individual modules, reload the base or child ColdSpring bean factories, manage logging, and manage caching.”
An on the Fusebox front: Sean Corfield reports that Jeff Peters’ book How to Drive Fusebox 5.5 is now available for purchase. Being a Fuseboxer myself, I’ve ordered my copy already – Jeff’s previous Fusebook books were great.
Community
Brian Rinaldi took a week off his Open Source Update last week – I don’t know if you missed him, but I certainly did. This week he’s back with four new projects, 12 updates, and a whole ton of announcements, tutorials, presentations and reviews.
After a bit of a hiatus, I’m getting back into the swing of my CF-TALK mailing list roundups. Last week’s summary included discussion threads on SQL Injection, Web Services, Academic Licensing and Career Advice.
A Wee Dram of Scotch – the mini Scotch On The Rocks conference being held in London on September 25 – now has a full program and is open for registration (hat tips to Andy Allan and Sean Corfield). With the stars in the lineup and at only £10, I dare say it’s going to sell out quickly.
Alternative CFML Engines
Gary Gilbert has posted his impressions of Railo 3, after meeting Gert Franz and Michi Streit at the Munich CFUG. Gary was impressed by the “strict” variable scoping setting in the Administrator, the Amazon S3 resource, and the extension framework.
Michael Sprague has released a beta of CFjqAjax, a library of custom tags to replicate ColdFusion 8’s Ajax UI controls CFGRID, CFWINDOW, and CFTOOLTIP with jQuery equivalents. This is great news, not only for people who prefer to work with the jQuery JavaScript than ExtJS or YUI… but also for those using alternative CFML engines like Railo and Open BlueDragon.
Okey dokes kids, that’s all for now. Got a tip? Email kay at smoljak dot com, leave a comment or tag at delicious.com with for:kay.smoljak. Til next time…
Kay Smoljak
