I know some people are unaware of the Adobe.tv site. There are many great videos across all product lines.

Here is a great video by Jason Delmore the Senior Product Manager for ColdFusion.

In this video he shows how in the next release of ColdFusion you will be able to leverage the baked in hibernate technology.

In short, see how you don't have to write any CFQUERY tags, or SQL. In addition he will show you a preview of how Bolt (new cf ide coming soon) allows you to auto generate the required CFC's and Hibernate files to get you up and running with the quickness!

Enjoy: Centaur ORM on Adobe TV

A developer new to ColdFusion made a post in the Adobe forums. After reading this though the developer made some really great points. When talking about researching CF, the reader had some of the following points.

"So I thought well I am using Adobe anyway let's see this ColdFusion rather than go back to MS or turn to PHP/ROR. You have to understand having been in front ends and graphics I have some basics of them all anyway.

I nearly did not as the web is not full of praise at all on the surface for CF. ROR is hyped but I did not like it's feel (framework is good bit CF does it too if you want to). The PHP community was too fragmented into a multitude of Open Source Projects - most of which I would never use. ASP had changed too much for me and I did not own a windows license anymore. I am using OSX and Linux distros of the day.

So I looked up the CF community. I noticed unlike the PHP/ASP/ROR etc you had kinda like father figures here (who help newbies!)." -Scot2009

And this quote as well:

"You can learn for free. What is all this CF costs money rubbish I was told before I started. I have found very good shared hosts with great prices and even some using open source CF really cheap. If you need a dedicated machine and can't afford CF then you can't afford a dedicated machine. So that is all rubbish that is spread by other web application server language users. Adobe needs to make new coders know this is rubbish." -Scot2009

So in short, this new developer found that most of the anti-CF stuff on the web is rubbish. For those of us who use the technology every day, we know most of this is rubbish and don't pay attention to unfounded rants by others.

From what this user said, he was almost turned away from CF by the fragmented rants of other communities. I hope Adobe pays attention to this users post, Adobe (IMHO) needs to make better efforts to kill these myths from a marketing prospective.

With Adobe at the wheel, ColdFusion demand is increasing as reported by Hostway. This is great news for Adobe and the ColdFusion product team.

Personally, I think that when CF9 comes out is when you will really see adoption jump. Adobe gets it with this product, and with Adobe DNA being integrated more and more into the product, is going to make for some amazing features in the products future.

Check it out here

Now on Adobe.com there is a great educational resource for learning Adobe ColdFusion 8. The curriculum is geared toward web developers with some experience how to create dynamic web applications using ColdFusion.

There are two courses available for download, "Introduction to ColdFusion 8" and "Advanced ColdFusion 8 Development".

Adobe.com ColdFusion 8 project-based curriculum

ColdFusion 8 has always been a great investment in productivity for your organization. A friend, colleague and fellow Adobe Developer Connection author Steve Rittler made a great blog post a while back about investing in ColdFusion.

I recently showed a new client some examples of how easy it was to create dynamic PDF's and charts in ColdFusion, they were amazed at how simple it was. This feature alone along with all the others, made ColdFusion 8 an obvious choice.

Steve's Blog Post: Investing in ColdFusion

Great presentation on creating dynamic presentations with ColdFusion.

Using simple tags you can create great looking presentations very quickly.

Watch it here

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.