A little bit of what interests me.

Description: Well I am back home and the excitement has begun to die down. I’ve begun running trough my notes on new idea’s and products to try out and my wife is probably sick of me talking about Adobe, Coldfusion and Flex for a while and I’m actually looking forward to heading back to work. Day 3 was still a fun day where I participated in the Coldfusion/Flex/Live cycle lab. Some of what we went over I was already currently using but I did pick up few tricks one of those was that while there is a connection limit to the included LCDS services in CF 8 standard the limit is around 1000 which is more then I need for the current app, but still good to know. I spent some more time at the CF Unconference where I sat in on the CF Uber panel which will be on the CF Conversations podcast. I also got to meet Joe Rinehart the creator of Model Glue. He talked about Broadchoice and the technologies used. He actually spoke a bit on Groovy which I already have been thinking or looking at but after some of the quick demos I intend to take a closer look. I also sat in on a session where I was introduced to the webserver stress tool. A mid priced web stress testing tool. http://www.paessler.com/webstress/download ( I’m sorry I forgot the name of the presenter ). I also went to the very last session on what’s new in Flex 4 and there are some nice new things, the integration of Flex Unit for one, 2 way data binding ie testInput.text =”{@myValue}”, the separation so a designer can do there thing and the dev there’s, the tighter CF intergration and more. I hope I get to attend next year and catch up with everyone I met but I definitely intend to keep in touch with you all.

Description: 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 Ill be sticking with CF8 but defiantly intend to set up a Railo box at home for prototyping.