Proving Adobe ColdFusion 8 is as strong as ever, the 2008 Codie Awards name Adobe ColdFusion 8 "Best Web Services Solution"!

Pretty good for a "dying technology" don't ya think, Computer World!

Flex 3 is now out and it's an exciting time to be a ColdFusion developer. In this article I walk you step by step to using Flex 3 with ColdFusion and the integrated LiveCycle Data Services. There is also a section about using the ColdFusion wizard to quickly build the backend ColdFusion CFC's to get you up and running.

LiveCycle Data Services gives you the ability to create robust applications with very little work, I encourage all ColdFusion developers to get familiar with this technology as it's a great tool on your development belt.
Hope you enjoy the article, and if you have any questions or problems feel free to drop a comment here.

View the Article Here!

Not to take anything away from the ColdFusion 8 launch just recently. But Adobe is starting on the next version of ColdFusion codenamed "Centaur"!
I'm sure as the months roll on we will hear more about the next release.

I have been getting many errors from the blog so you may have been getting errors when clicking links when DB requests are made.

I have talked with Host My Site (my hosting provider) and apparently ColdFusion 8 and MySQL 5 do not always play nice together. The connection gets randomly dropped between ColdFusion and MySQL 5. Host My Site development teams are looking into this issue, but no ETA was given on when this will be resolved.

So what is the solution for now? If you are a HMS customer and you are having this issue here is how I resolved it. Call Host My Site and have them login to the ColdFusion 8 Admin and open your DSN connection info up. There is an option called "Maintain connections across client requests". Make sure this is unchecked.

What is this setting: "ColdFusion establishes a connection to a data source for every operation that requires one. Select this option to improve performance by caching the data source connection."

What I think was happening from the error messages I was getting, was that the connection is getting dropped, I assume from the MySQL side. Because ColdFusion had this connection cached, it does not know the connection has dropped, tried to run a query, and you get this error.

"No operations allowed after connection closed. Connection was implicitly closed due to underlying exception/error"

This is only a workaround!!
Doing the above will give you a performance hit, but I choose performance hit over errors for the moment. As soon as the original issue is resolved, you should turn this setting back on to take advantage of the performance you get.

As the Adobe MAX conference has now kicked off, Adobe has released a whole bunch of new beta's on labs.

• Adobe AIR Beta 2
  
• Adobe Flex Builder 3 Beta 2
  
• Adobe Media Player

What are you waiting for! Go to labs and check out the new Adobe technology releases!

ColdFusion 8 has another feature that allows a ColdFusion developer to leverage .NET inside their CF applications.

It allows you to call .NET classes in your ColdFusion code. ColdFusion 8 allows you to access and use these classes as CFML objects in the following ways.

- Direct access and control of the Microsoft products like Word, Excel PowerPoint and so on.
- Use existing .NET components
- You can use .NET assemblies to leverage features that may not be available in ColdFusion or Java. Note that because ColdFusion is a J2EE application, its more efficient to create what you need in Java then .NET

Also, your .NET classes you want to use do not have to be local. Your ColdFusion application can access .NET components that are on remote systems.

You may be asking, but we run Linux or OSX and do not have the .NET runtime installed. Not to worry, you don’t have to have the .NET runtime installed on the same machine as ColdFusion, you can still access .NET assemblies on remote systems even though your local system does not have the .NET runtime installed.

Here is a simple example from the docs of how to use .NET classes.

Also note that if you make a change in the .NET assembly, ColdFusion will recognize the change and use the new version. You can also secure communication to .NET from ColdFusion using SSL.

I am on the lookout for a ColdFusion developer for a position here in San Jose CA. Please email me your contact information with resume ASAP!

A security evaluation report was just released from Information Risk Managment, Plc. This report in short said that "ColdFusion 8 exhibits a high degree of resilience to application layer attacks with no compromise on functionality provisioned by the new features"

Read the full report for more details

Here is the conclusion they came to:

"IRM’s security evaluation of ColdFusion 8 revealed that the product has been well designed with security as a major consideration during development. The ColdFusion 8 model requires certain administrative tasks to be performed as a part of deployment in order to enforce a stringent security regime. Security management of these servers is essential in ensuring security of the overall deployment. It is important to follow Adobe’s best practice guides for securing these servers and applying appropriate security patches. Adobe also maintains resources on secure development of ColdFusion applications which can be found at the following URL:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/security.html.

ColdFusion developers should strive to incorporate secure coding principles into their development methodologies as highlighted by Adobe. Overall IRM was impressed with Adobe’s integration of security processes in the development lifecycle, the result of which can be seen in ColdFusion 8, a product that withstands stringent security testing with relative ease. All of the new features incorporated in this release adhere to highest levels of application security enforcement without any compromise on functionality."

Very cool!

While CF 8 is packing allot of features, it has gotten a big boost in the speed department as well! Buckle your seat belts!

Check out some stats:

1. Working with structs is 2x faster
2. List manipulation is 3x faster
3. Switch/Case statements are 3x faster
4. CFPARAM is 40x faster
5. Date functions 5x faster
6. Regex 3x faster
7. isDefined() 2x faster
8. CFC creation is 30x faster

When tested on Blog CFC and the Adobe.com store, there was a 30-40% speed increase!!!

It just keeps getting better and better for ColdFusion. Sean Corfield posts about using PHP in your ColdFusion pages. Check it out!

So why would you use this? ColdFusion gives you everything you need and more then PHP and is much more productive, we all know that. But, one thing that CF always got criticized for was the lack of open source applications. With this ability you the CF developer can now grab free PHP apps and integrate them with CF very easily. In fact, PHP can now see CF variables, and CF can see PHP variables. Both the CFML and PHP code are compiled down to java byte code.