Quick Update

Just incase anyone misses it (I read it on Ben Forta’s Blog), Total training is offering a free 30 day training for Flex. Have not seen any other Adobe Flex bloggers announce it yet thought people should know.

Also, a little update, event gateway is available in CF8 standard (and of course enterprise), in CF7 it was only available in enterprise edition. However it is also ‘limited’ to a single thread.

I am also in the planning stages of starting my own site, hopefully it will be built on CF8… will announce it when I am ready.

Take care all!

The week ending 26 August…

It has been an unusually busy week, both at work and things to do outside of work.

I attended an InDesign Melbourne Usergroup meeting on Tuesday (21 Aug), probably the biggest and most well run usergroup meeting I have been too all year. More than a 100 people attended (by my estimates), too many came so there was about a 40 min delay as everyone was registered. Many thanks to Noha Edell, Business Product Manager for InDesign, for coming and sharing the little quarks quirks of InDesign CS3 and what you have to do to get around them.

Also middle of the week saw the news of Flash having official support for the open source H.264 codec, and one would assume future H.26* revision which is good news for Flash/Flex community. I personally have not investigated enough into the support, but I hope this means Flash engineering team is trying to integrate native H.264 abilities into Flash which would accomplish what Silverlight has natively with VC-1.

Also somewhere along the week I realised that I may not have realised mentioned earlier that CF8 standard now comes with event/messaging gateway as well, albeit limited via the EFR, which was only available via CF7 Enterprise.

I also decided to get serious about picking up Flex, so I am going to start reading my two Flex books while waiting for, or travelling on, the train. Also decided it was time to have a CF site where I can pursue my projects (or extend others CF projects), and am shopping around for a CF web host based in Australia, but the usual problem of bandwidth pricing in Australia is frustrating to say the least.

I also started experimenting with the new feature set which interested me the most, which is the Exchange integration, which I must say is beautifully done, i.e. it works flawlessly… Though there is a little concern on security and the easy of use balance. To communicate with the exchange server, each thread/request needs to be opened with the user’s username and password, i.e. their Active Directory username and password, hence I need to find out what is the most practical way on storing this information and ensuring the security of the username and password, while not making it tedious to prompt for the password each time, for opening threads/request. If anyone wants to point me in the right direction it will be greatly appreciated! I will blog about possible solutions/considerations if and as they come to light.

Have a great week ahead!

SumUp: ANZ CF8 Launch Event…

It was a good event (run over Connect/Breeze)! All involved in planning it deserve a pat on the back! It was also good to see other CFUG groups around Australia and New Zealand.

Interesting snippets of info from the Q&A with Tim Buntel during the event:

• AJAX library can be extended, replace/updated. (though its at your own risk) This leave the door open for AJAX to be updated via a CF 8 updater if needed.

The question original asked was along the lines of ‘does adobe think it was risky adding AJAX functions/libraries built in considering they do not have control over browsers’

• There was no announcement to a future version of Homesite, for now it seems eclipse is the IDE for the moment.
• You can add any features to the wishlist here, the future direction of CF will be influenced by the feedback from CF users, just like CF 8.
• Good chance that there maybe a roadshow/event for CF8 in Australia!

Many Thanks to the effort of the people running the CFUG, especially the boys running the Melbourne CFUG, and Tim Buntel for lending his support!

Understanding what ‘Limited’ meant for CF8 standard version

Just a quick note to all about the difference of the two versions of CF8. I ask(emailed) Raymond Camden, your friendly neighourbourhood CF jedi, about it which he kindly pointed out it has been addressed in the comments of one of his post.

In brief, Jason Delmore (I assume he is one of Adobes CF engineers, or the very least one of the persons in the know Product Manager) commented on that post that Limited meant only one thread (think queue/pipe) for all features, Enterprise comes with Enterprise Feature Router (I assume this gives each feature its own thread at the very least), so unless you use the more advanced features extensively you would not see much benefit getting enterprise version, and if you do the company/business should be able to afford enterprise version of CF8, hence all CF 8 applications should and will work on any version, its just a matter of scalability of performance.

You can read more about it here on the post of Raymond’s Blog in the comments.

I had to ask this because i wanted to do a proof of concept project, and am hoping work gives me some time to work on it, if not i have to make time in my own time.

Have a good weekend

The right CF8 livedocs link

Click here for it! This is the easily navigable. (i hit a brick wall when i tried to search it and came to a Adobe page does not exist/Error 404 page)

Remember to check out the ‘Coldfusion Developer’s Guide’ in it, I believe most of the features are split into bite sized goodness, including new features like Interacting with Microsoft Exchange Servers, Creating and Manipulating Coldfusion images and Creating Slide Presentation among others.

Why use Coldfusion?

A brief summary (in my experiences so far) between Coldfusion, PHP and ASP.Net

	Coldfusion	PHP	ASP.Net
Upfront Costs	High, comes with a lot standard	Free to High, Free version is well Free, but there are numerous commercial packages/add-ons like file compression, dynamic caching, advanced server monitoring/management	Included if you have a Windows Server License.
Development time (comparatively)	Faster comparatively	Fairly Fast but falls somewhere between CF and .Net most of the time, catches up with commercial packages/addons	Longer than the other two
Processing Speed	Fast, with proper setup of JVM, even faster. Scales well with size and load	Fast though may have problem scaling without addons	Decent, sometimes rather slow.
Integration with other languages	JAVA, Flex/Flash	non-native(non that i know of)	.Net, Silverlight, C#
Developer Community	Not as big as PHP or ASP.Net, but still a decent presence is expected in most major cities.	Big, anyone can pickup PHP, tend to have a large spectrum of skill level	Big pool from Higher Education Institutes. Well supported and backed by MS

The license of Coldfusion is, and should be, a very small part of any business budget, especially if you happen to be in a country where bandwidth is more expensive than average, like Australia. Also, Coldfusion 8 has Developer(from memory, limited to 1 IP) and Trial editions(from memory, 30-day trial unlimited IP), which are free. So you can start learning or developing immediately.

A big advantage of coldfusion has is its development time, it was first developed as Rapid Application Development Platform/Framework, and still is very quick to develop and deploy in.The time spent on development is considerably less, even if it saves 1 developer 1 min a day, and who worked about 230 days a year, divide the number of your developers by the licensing fee per year. Same reason why software developers and/or software development companies don’t mind paying for good development tools.

Another is its tie in to Flex, and it will be the de facto choice due to integration with Flash. Thought that may change in the future, since Flex is going opensource and PHP will probably have extensions written for Flex integration. I can’t imagine the .Net platform supporting Flex too much, as it may undermine MS own Silverlight product.

One additional point is that Coldfusion is largely backwards compatible, the last rewrite was CF 6 when CF went to a JRun/JVM backend, after which very few functions/tags have been dropped. Which is something Adobe had the sense to maintain so far in both CF and Flash environment.

Over the next few days, you will see a fair number of people grumbling about the pricing of CF 8, which has not increased dramatically (besides R&D isn’t free, and the software engineers need their paycheck!). But no other web application platform today can offer what Coldfusion out of the box, from image manipulation, PDF integration, Flex integration, Exchange Server integration, dynamic presentaions on the fly, etc., click here to find out more

Coldfusion has loads of features but there is a business case for each,

e.g. PHP will do the job for most companies public facing websites why pay more than you need to ? PHP also has numerous framework and CMS, many of which are opensource. ASP.Net has loads of exposure in Higher Education Institutions, so it should be easier to find suitable staff, and tie-ins to Microsoft’s CRM and Sharepoint products.

Coldfusion will still be around for another iteration from the looks of what they have done with CF8, but don’t take my word for it, go read about it and try it out for yourselves! (Its only about 300+ mb download!)

 Edited: Added in .Net Developer Community

Coldfusion 8 posts at Ben Forta’s Blog

On Ben Forta’s Blog today:

• ColdFusion 8 Is Here!
• ColdFusion 8 Performance Brief - his performance brief posted online
• ColdFusion 8 IDE Extensions
• ColdFusion 8 Articles On Dev Center - A few interesting articles on some of the new features
• ColdFusion 8 Developer Video Posted

These links all link to Ben’s Blog personally I think the dev articles are a good read if you are interested in CF8.

*I will post about the pros and cons about CF 8 vs PHP vs .Net later today but I have trouble finding the pricing of Zend PHP.

Coldfusion 8 launch event Melbourne – 8th August

Just a quick note, you can find details about the coldfusion 8 launch party in the Melbourne CFUG. So if you are in the area and want to see what this CF8 is about or just to network come along to the next Melbourne CFUG. Details here

ColdFusion 8 is HERE! . . .

Coldfusion 8, the next iteration of the underperforming (in terms of market share) web application server platform/framework, is now live! Many hints have been thrown about but this post by Ray Camden in his blog on over the weekend, I personally expected it to be on 30th July or 1st August or 8th August (Scorpio/ 8 August(8)).When Tim Buntel was at WebDU (Sydney) in March, he did say expect it in the middle of the year, which technically was 21/22 July. Although a few days off, it is understandable considering the extra bug fixes and goodies that were thrown in.

Regardless, I am just glad it is finally out of the door and looking good.
Some of the additional features CF 8 has over 7 which i feel are worth mentioning over the others are:

• Server Monitor
• Doing dynamic realtime presentations(real plus for doing fancy presentations, web based presentation from anywhere using up to the minute data, better have a good internet connection and server though)
• Improvements in both CFC and CFML including: CF tags which does the AJAX for you (i believe most of the AJAX should be based on Adobe’s own AJAX Framework Spry)
• RSS and Atom feeds out of the box
• Improved performance from new JVM and engine (suppose to be at least 30% faster and in ‘certain’ scenario up to 300%, personally 30% for 1 generation is enough, i think 300% performance increase is few and far between personally.)
• Exchange Server Integration (this is the only one that I have not seen or read about so far but this will help doing CRM type applications and tracking email via exchange for one, or at least thats what i hope it means!)

There are many other features which can be viewed at the product page here.

Disclaimer – Adobe have not paid me to write that CF 8 is available, I have not seen any news so far on many of the CF blogs i keep up with so I thought I blog a little about it first.

I will post about why Coldfusion 8 has its own place and its actually not that expensive to run shortly.

The Wii-volution continues…

Nintendo continues to ride the wave of new innovation aka Wii-volution, (the Wii was originally codenamed Revolution, talk about naming it right). At the recent revamped E3, Nintendo announced the Balance Board, to be bundled with WiiFit.

Picture from joystiq.com

I am somewhat disappointed, I expected it to be bigger, hold on to your proverbial horses for a second and hear me out. Nintendo has the opportunity to create the most popular peripheral ever for a console (outside the regular controller lineup). In most type of combat games, I always thought immersion could be enhanced by carrying out the motion, your stance, movement of the feet. (I do concede on the movement being mapped to a controller is beyond anything affordable for consumer market in the near future).

Anyone remembers ‘Die Another Day’ when James played/took the Virtual Reality training scenario, I have been imagining something like since I was about 14. (I just realise thats 11 years ago, starting to feel old at 25)

Imagine playing games whereby your body motion is a major part of the controller in a combat game, be it ducking bullets or ducking swords. Anyway if it was bigger, it would enable developers to at least explore and try to implement gameplay involving changing stances, body postures and using the Wii Remote/Wiimote as your weapon. It could still do that in its current size, but in this case slightly bigger means a bigger range of motion, something that Nintendo would not be able to rectify once they decided on its final specifications. When the balance board takes off, it would be the final nail of the coffin of this round of the console wars, hopefully it would make the games industry as a whole more innovative.

And for the record, I will still buy it in its current form.