The week in ColdFusion: 16-22 Jan 08: exam time!

So what does the blogosphere have for hard-working ColdFusion developers this week?

Firstly, open source projects have been busy. More information about the upcoming version 5 of the FarCry CMS – “FarCry Fortress” – has been released, and it will now have a variety of deployment options which will mean that it can run more easily on shared hosting accounts, which has long been a bone of contention for many developers. Full details on the Daemonite blog: FarCry: Shared Hosting Made Easy.

On the frameworks front, Steve Nelson – one of the original developers of Fusebox – has written a “one year on” look at his simple CFC-based MVC framework. Apparently it hasn’t changed much, which makes perfect sense when you consider that it was meant to be super simple! Steve even goes so far as to explain how it works in one paragraph (and the final version is pretty short): Steve’s MVC Framework a year later.

Lots of developers are interested in the Ext JS Ajax framework, especially since Ext 1.0 is what does the heavy lifting behind the built in Ajax tags in CF8. Justin Carter has started on an Ext JS tag library for forms, and made some screenshots available. Although he hasn’t released any code yet, Justin is looking for suggestions as to how to proceed with the project so if you’re interested, pop over and see what’s he’s got so far.

Adobe Devnet has been updated with Part 4 of Charlie Arehart’s series of articles on CF8 monitoring: Multiserver Monitor, Admin API monitoring, and more. The first three installments of that series are linked from the article. While we’re in the server monitoring space, FusionReactor 3 has been released, with lots of interesting looking enhancements including a Flex-driven “Enterprise Dashboard”.

And last but not least, if you’re interested in certification, the word on the street is that the ColdFusion 8 exam will be released at the end of this month. Many people have strong opinions on the usefulness of the certification process, but if you’re looking to flesh out your resume it certainly can’t hurt. I’m thinking about swotting up for it – what about you?