A little bit of what interests me.

Well it’s the end of Day 2 at 2008 Adobe MAX and I have to say I was impressed.  I really like the look of the new ColdFusion IDE “Bolt” and it really looks like its gong to work well with CF9 and Flex, which to me is a huge plus.  Ive been using CF Eclipse for a while now but a true ColdFusion extension its going to be great.  The ability to type datasoure=” and have a lookup to available data sources is really nice.  The right click and generate a CRUD from the IDE looks like what we can do in Flxbuilder already but is still nice although with all the noise of Hibernate ORM integration it surprises me that we didn’t see right click of a table, from a datasource and a CRUD generation using hibernate and CF.  Although Ben did mention “Other frame works”  I can only assume this is still to come.
 I’m also really looking forward to Adobe Catalyst ( formerly Thermo ) as I’d really like to be able to produce some more applications that don’t look like  standard Flex apps.
I attended 2 labs High Powered ColdFusion by Dave Watts and Extending Flex components with Matt Boles.  Both were great sessions but it was the Flex session which in the first 10 mins I saw a solution that would help me cut down code by fixing some hacks I used to get around things I wasn’t sure you could do.
Lastly the sneak peaks did show a server side implementation of actionscript as a .sas file that is compiled on the fly and includes but the usual Flex code for displaying the data and the server side code for retrieving the data from the data base.  This is interesting but I don’t think we will see this available for some time as currently CF and AS are a really nice fit.
Bolt information/Beta signup: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Bolt
(shame about the .php ? )
Oh and I forgot to mention there are plugin’s for Flex support into Visual studio 2008: http://www.ensemble.com/

From the first moment I learnt of Adobe Max ( Vegas 2006 ) I wanted to go.  It wasn't until this year that I became as big a fan Adobe due to a position change and working with Flex and Coldfusion.  San Fran is a gret city its the second time I have been here and the weather is just great.  I'm really excited and can't wait to see/meet some of my internet idols and look forward to news regarding Coldfusion 9 and Flex 4.

See you there

I've recently spent some time looking at alternative CMFL engines Including Open Blue Dragon and Railo.  I've set up a spare server running VMware Server 2 which is just great and surprisingly, even on older hardware, performs quite well running multiple VM's simultaneously.

The Open Blue Dragon image worked perfectly and although I haven't used Linux as a server for some time it was easy enough to get Samba working so I could edit from a remote machine.  I endeavour to spend more time with BD in the coming months.

The real surprise was Railo.  It had a nice installer ( windows 2k3 server ).  Worked without issue and following Gert Franz's how to I was up and running in IIS without too much trouble (once I got the hang of resin.conf ).  The admin section was great and I had no trouble connecting to Mysql, MS SQL 2005 and 2008 without changing anything.  I really like how close it replicates CF8's special features and so far have had no issues with generating PDFs with cfdocument, reading/writing/manipulating images with cfimage and reading rss feeds with cffeed.

The one caveat with anything other than ColdFusion is the lack out an out of the box, working AMF solution.  So in the short term I’ll be sticking with CF8 but definitely intend to set up a Railo box at home for prototyping.