Web application developers and designers often give up on building rich, interactive user interfaces because they lack the JavaScript skills to make it happen. AJAX development power tools - including Dreamweaver, Spry and off-the-shelf AJAX components - make it easy to build rich user interfaces in AJAX with no JavaScript coding. Andre Charland will demonstrate how to install, set up and configure extensions to Dreamweaver, and will use them to build simple, rich interface AJAX apps.

Adobe has named Kevin Lynch, a guy from the Macromedia side of the house, CTO, a chair last warmed by John Warnock. Lynch was previously chief software architect and senior VP of the company's platform business. His attention is now supposed to focus on AIR, Flex and Flash Player and his posting is supposed to mark the importance of rich Internet applications to Adobe, which acquired Macromedia in 2005. He holds three patents with others pending.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

The defining characteristic of any RIA is that it has a stateful client that is (or should be) platform and browser independent. Thin-client web applications grew from the need to provide applications with more reach, easy access to server side data, and to alleviate the pain of having to install and configure thick client software. Thin-client web applications remain a great way to accomplish these goals. However, with the advent of these new RIA platforms, developers now have all the reach of a traditional thin-client web application with many of the useful characteristics of thick-client applications, such as the ability to maintain state on the client.

Sun is offering ten grants of US $11,500 - equivalent to several months of pay for developers in some countries - for the best NetBeans projects submitted by open source developers. Conceived as a means of increasing general awareness around the NetBeans project as well as rewarding good work done by the NetBeans Community, the 'Dreams of Reality' contest is described in detail by worldwide NetBeans Community Manager Bruno Souza, the charismatic Brazilian developer, in a special audio webcast currently playing on SYS-CON.TV.

Google, which does not give guidance, missed both Wall Street's top and bottom expectations for its December quarter by a hair and the punters turned vicious pounding it down around 50 bucks after-hours. Consensus demanded non-GAAP earnings of $4.44 on revenues of $3.45 billion. Google came in with $4.43 on revenues $3.39 billion. Those revenues figures are net of what's called TAC, Google's traffic acquisition costs, the money it pays its partners, which it this case amounted $1.44 billion or 30% of its ad revenues.

Microsoft this morning made a $44.6 billion hostile bid for the floundering Yahoo, striking at a point when it has become evident to all and sundry that Yahoo doesn't have a pray of turning things around on its own let alone getting competitive. Yahoo's first official reaction was basically to say it'll think about it. It said it would evaluate the offer 'carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo's strategic plans.' It did not give a timeframe for a response. Although it looks pretty boxed in, it could of course try for more money.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) run inside web browsers and provide a much more dynamic user experience than conventional web pages. While traditional HTML-based pages require a full reload of the page when the user clicks on a link, many modern web pages only reload parts of the page and provide animations to dynamically navigate through an information space. There are several platforms to implement such dynamic web pages, for example AJAX, Flash, Java FX, Microsoft Silverlight, OpenLaszlo, XUL.

Creating reporting applications in AJAX is often more challenging than developing data entry CRUD applications. Reporters usually need to process lots of data, preferably on the client side to minimize the amount of information that goes through the wire. Reporters need to know how to apply formulas, group the data, and calculate totals and subtotals. Add to the mix a requirement to give the end user an ability to customize the look and feel of the report, and you're facing a serious project.

The main concern of any project manager is if there are enough people in the pool of Flex developers to staff the project. Yes, there is a pool of Flex developers, but let's look at the creature called 'Flex Developer' under the microscope. If you are considering adding Flex to your set of skills, it?s still early in the game and you can join the fast growing Flex community. Decide which group of the Flex developers looks most appealing to you. Set a goal and go for it. Be what you can be.

Microsoft disclosed late Thursday that Jeff Raikes, the head of its Office operation, second only to Windows in bringing in revenue, was retiring and will be replaced by Stephen Elop, 44, Jupiter Networks' short-term COO. Before Jupiter, Elop was president of worldwide field operations at Adobe by virtue of Adobe's 2005 acquisition of Macromedia, where he was president and CEO. Elop also has experience as a chief information officer. The plan is for Raikes, 49, to hang around until September as a backstop as a member of the senior leadership team for purposes of transition.

Redmond Developer News has published an interview with Dr. James Gosling, creator of the Java language, where among other things, he talks about JavaFX and competing technologies. And he made a comment I can't agree with. Here it is: 'If you look at something like Flash, when you get to the much more advanced stuff - richer interfaces, more complex network protocols, more complex APIs - it really falls short.'

PaperThin, Inc. announced that four customers have recently gone live on CommonSpot Version 5.0, including: LeSea Broadcasting, Ping Identity, Tulane University, and Tuthill Corporation. In addition, 30 customers are currently implementing the new solution which is being widely embraced for its inherent ease-of-use and improved flexibility.

This started as a Skype chat room conversation between my colleague Anatole Tartakovsky and myself, and I thought that it would be a good idea to invite more Flex developers to join this discussion. Having said this, I'd like to make it clear that over my career, I've been developing frameworks myself and truly respect people who are capable of creating frameworks, and Anatole has huge experience in this area as well. Here we're just questioning the need to create frameworks not for a general-purpose language like Java, but for a domain-specific framework like Flex.

Roughly two years ago, when I was writing an article on 'New Features for Device Developers in Visual Studio 2005' that was published in the August 2005 issues of this magazine, our program management team was already busy shaping the next release of the product, which is soon to be released as Visual Studio 2008. We spent a lot of time talking to our major customers and reviewing the feedback we got on blogs and questions on forums on newsgroups to identify what enhancements/features would be most useful to our device developers. One thing that surfaced was that device developers needed more help when it came to testing their applications efficiently. Whether that meant testing on multiple devices or under varying conditions or simply being able to write unit tests, they clearly needed help getting applications to market faster by reducing the testing time.

Adobe is open sourcing the remoting and messaging technologies in its commercial LiveCycle Data Services ES - Adobe's route to the Internet - as a new product called BlazeDS. The widgetry, along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification, is being sent into the wild under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL v3), making Adobe the first major company to use the little-used new license. Public betas are out at labs.adobe.com.

JavaFX is a scripting language that provides more powerful client applications in term of features for the user interface experience as well as being incorporated with server platform technology such as RMI, Web Services, and EJB. Its ability to reuse all Java libraries opens an opportunity for JavaFX to create flexibility and ease the integration and reuse of existing Java applications.

Adobe earned $222.2 million, or 38 cents a share, up 21%, on record fourth-quarter revenues of $911.2 million, up 34% year-over-year, exceeding the company's revenue target of $860 million-$890 million. It attributed the results to Acrobat, its Creative Suite 3 products and momentum in its enterprise business. Creative Suite 3, which started coming out in April, includes upgrades to Photoshop, Illustrator and software acquired with Macromedia like Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks. On a non-GAAP basis Adobe earned 49 cents in Q4, a penny more than Wall Street expected.

'AIR Beta 3 is an exciting release that takes us one step closer to AIR 1.0,' writes Platform Evangelist Kevin Hoyt in a recent commentary on eight changes from AIR Beta 2. 'Unlike the myriad of changes introduced in the move from AIR Beta 1 to AIR Beta 2,' Hoyt added, 'the changes in AIR Beta 3 are far more subtle.' This stability,e ne noted, indicates the growing maturity of the product.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

My seven-year-old daughter thinks that there is a knowledge genie that her teacher 'Googles' for answers. While cute, the anecdote also exemplifies how much Google's obsession with simplicity has helped build brand awareness, making their name literally synonymous with search. I can foresee generations X and Y being followed by generation S - one that will rely on search to accomplish almost any task.

Lyris, Inc. announced that its Hot Banana Web content management solution (CMS) was ranked highest in overall ease of use by The 2007 Gilbane Group Survey on the Web Content Management User Experience. The survey results ranked Hot Banana highest in overall ease of use, interaction with other systems, and application design. Hot Banana also ranked in the top three for its navigation and feature functions and for its incorporation of rich media.

Lyris announced the availability of Hot Banana Version 5.7, the latest update to its award-winning Web content management solution and core application within the company's Lyris HQ integrated marketing platform. Version 5.7 of the Hot Banana application provides seamless integration with other Lyris HQ applications, including the EmailLabs email marketing and ClickTracks Web analytics products.

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

My money is on targeting iPhones and WM devices until Android actually shows up live and in the wild on more than 500,000 devices. Also, don't be fooled about the Android developer challenge. That's not $10million in prize money, that's a $10 million bribe in order to obtain the critical mass of engaged developers they know will be required for anything useful to come out of the Android project. If they don't have truckloads of developers begging to get their apps onto the phone, their framework will fail and all the mobile partners will go back to business as usual.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Lynda.com, a self-paced digital media and design training, introduced ColdFusion 8 Beyond the Basics. ColdFusion 8 Beyond the Basics demonstrates how to utilize ColdFusion 8 to its full potential, from setting up a project to using ColdFusion Components and sessions in a shopping cart application.

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

Hot Banana, the Web Content Management Solution (CMS) from J.L. Halsey, is now available on salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace. The two-way integration between Hot Banana's Web content management solution and Salesforce means that both sales and marketing get what they need in the format they want. Marketing maintains full control over Web forms and landing pages, while sales teams obtain lead generation data quickly and in their preferred format.

ColdFusion 8 introduces the CFImage tag and dozens of image manipulation functions. We have already looked at reading and writing image files and we have covered the basic yet powerful image manipulation possible through CFImage tag actions alone. Now we know enough to be able to really start exploring the vast feature set of ColdFusion 8 image manipulation. When it comes to something like this your imagination is really the only limit, so it makes it a bit more difficult to come up with simple ways to learn this stuff. I find that task-based learning works well and will let us accomplish real-world goals while touching on many aspects of image manipulation.

Do you remember January of 2004? Macromedia had just released ColdFusion 6.1 a few months earlier. CFCs finally worked! Fancy JavaScript techniques were not pulled together under the moniker of AJAX. Rich Internet applications were just a casual mention in a Macromedia whitepaper. There was only one ColdFusion framework in common use and Flex was an unnamed beta behind the Macromedia cloak of secrecy. Macromedia Central was the way to deploy Flex apps to the desktop.

Early releases of ColdFusion (under Allaire) focused on the Windows market and it was common to include example Access databases. It was common for entry-level developers to take this example to heart and build systems on Access back-ends. One didn't have to install, set up, admin, or most importantly pay for anything. With the beta release of ColdFusion 8, Adobe is providing support for an array of open source databases. Now using PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Apache Derby (formerly IBM Cloudscape) has been made that simpler for CF developers since JDBC drivers for all of them are included. Any of these solutions can be used for the free distribution of databases on either Windows or *nix.

For security reasons (similar to the Java sandbox concept), Flash clients can only access the domains they come from, unless other servers declare, explicitly or implicitly, trust to SWF files downloaded from our domain by a corresponding record in a crossdomain.xml file. But our portfolio SWF wasn't loaded from finance.yahoo.com, and we aren't allowed to install crossdomain.xml on the Yahoo! servers. We'll use another technique called Flex proxy.

As I'm now officially on the Flex Builder team, I wanted to take a moment to make sure everybody knows where to go for ColdFusion help. Thanks to all of you who had kind words and good wishes for me at MAX last week. While I'm focused now on making Flex Builder even better, I'll still remain involved in the ColdFusion world. My last 'official' ColdFusion duties will be to present on our European ColdFusion 8 launch tour later this month. I'll post some additional information on those events shortly.

Hi, my name is Dave Livingston and I killed BlogFusion. Many of the folks in the ColdFusion community consider it dead and have moved off to other open source CF blogging applications. Well, it's not gone. BlogFusion is actually alive and well, we just haven't done a very good job of letting the rest of the world know that or how it's morphed.

Exciting news for organizations and developers using ColdFusion: Adobe released ColdFusion 8 on July 30. This release is a major milestone for the product: it is the first full-version ColdFusion release by Adobe since the acquisition of Macromedia. With the release of CF 8, Adobe has shown their commitment to the product and their commitment to enabling ColdFusion developers to build better Web-enabled applications faster than with any other technology.

'The biggest problem here is that it looks bad for ColdFusion. The first print magazine dedicated to it has left the building,' says Michael Dinowitz in his blog about the Adobe decision to kill CFDJ. 'The very fact that they're moving the magazine from ColdFusion, an Adobe product, to Silverlight, a Microsoft product, can and will be used against ColdFusion.' Other bloggers directed their disappointment toward SYS-CON, the publisher of the magazine, rather than Adobe, which made the decision to kill the title.

My editorial last month was a high-level overview of all the new features in ColdFusion 8. Many of these features were generally divided into one of two categories: features that address developer productivity and those that focus on integrating with other products and technologies.

ColdFusion 8 has a load of awesome image manipulation functionality. So much so, in fact, that it will take several articles to discuss it in any sort of decent way. In Part 1 of this article (CFDJ, Vol. 9, issue 5), we spent the entire post just exploring all the ways in which ColdFusion 8 can read in and write out/save images.