Of course, since this is ColdFusion I expected nothing less than this, i.e., powerful AJAX functionality combined with the simplicity of a tag-based language, and that's exactly what the Auto-Suggest AJAX component delivers. The code in Listing 1 is a simple example in which the auto-suggest attribute of the tag has been populated with hard-coded values. If you're running ColdFusion 8 yourself and want to get a firsthand look at this feature, you should be able to copy and paste the code from Listing 1 and save it as a new ColdFusion file. Figure 1 shows the suggested search terms displayed by the auto-suggest attribute as text is entered into the control.

In April 2007 Adobe and Salesforce.com announced the availability of the Flex toolkit for Apex, Salesforce.com's on-demand programming language and API for interaction with their hosted CRM solution. This toolkit makes it simple to build Flex applications that interact with your Salesforce.com database.

Several weeks ago in the #coldfusion channel on the Dalnet IRC network we had a rather spirited discussion about some of the new features in ColdFusion 8. The discussion focused on and its related tags, and whether ColdFusion developers actually needed such functionality as part of the product we have all come to know and love.

AJAX has forever altered user expectations regarding the experience delivered by the Web. In today's world, users sit at the edge of their seat waiting to see what scrumptious eye candy AJAX will serve them next. Some of the more notable visual effects and desktop-like interactions include Prototype-esque fades, Dojo style fisheyes, the near ubiquitous drag-and-drop, and, of course, who can live without the entertainment provided by the assortment of animated loading icons that now distract us while AJAX does its asynchronous 'thing.' Yes, it would appear that AJAX can do it all and that no desktop visual effect or gesture is safe from being outsourced to the Web.

I will be attending the Ajax World Conference next week in Santa Clara. I will also be at the opening reception on Monday and the conference party on Tuesday. Over the weekend Jesse Liberty blogged about this as well 'If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, look for me on Twitter, and let's see if we can set up a meeting or a lunch.' Other faculty members, according to the Ajax World website, who will be at these parties include...

FuseTalk, created in 1999 by developers Jason Clark and Dominic Plouffe, has released the latest version of its flagship Internet forum and weblogging software for corporate, government and educational organizations. Version 3.1 performs extremely well on ColdFusion 8, according to the company.

BEA will bundle Flex Builder 2 with BEA Workshop Studio. Adobe will distribute evaluation licenses of WebLogic Server, with Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite. LiveCycle can be deployed with WebLogic in a wide range of applications, from mission critical clustered environments to single server departmental deployments and developer desktops.

SYS-CON Media announced today its plans to relaunch CFDJ - ColdFusion Developer's Journal as Silverlight Developer's Journal. The premier issue of SLDJ will be debuted at the upcoming AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West, which will take place September 23-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara California.

CFDJ was launched 10 years ago as a custom developer magazine with the direct support of Allaire Corporation. This support continued after the acquisition of Allaire by Macromedia. After ColdFusion became part of the Adobe product line Adobe recently decided to discontinue its support of the magazine. SYS-CON will offer free one year digital subscription to all CFDJ readers to a magazine of their choice, either Flex Developer's Journal or Silverlight Developer's Journal.

SYS-CON Events announced today that 'AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West' main sponsorship opportunities are now sold-out! Limited number of expo and event sponsorship opportunities that are still available are expected to be completely sold before the end of the month. The new sponsors who joined the conference this week, and are not yet listed on the conference Website, will also be announced later in the week.

I will be teaching a one day Bootcamp course on Ajax at the AJAXWorld Conference in Santa Clara, California on September 23, 2007. Details are at http://aja xbootcamp.sys-con.com I will be expanding the Ajax construction tools section from the Ajax Bootcamp I taught in New York at the SOA World conference. I am very impressed with TIBCO GI and Sun jMaki

SYS-CON Events announced today that the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West, which will take place on September 23-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California will offer a new dedicated 'iPhone Track.' Another dedicated track will offer a comparative education opportunity for conference delegates on emerging RIA tools such as Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX. The world's leading Rich Internet Applications & Web 2.0 event is expected to attract more than 2,000 i-technology developers. AJAXWorld grew from a single track, one-day seminar, less than a year ago, into a four-day international conference & expo with more than 150 sessions delivered in ten simultaneous tracks, by more than 150 faculty members.

The inaugural iTVCon - Internet Video Conference & Expo (November 12-13, 2007) is building out its program and the Conference Advisory Board is busy sorting through the hundreds of proposals for technical and strategic sessions that have been coming in. Final deadline for proposals is September 10, 2007.

'This is great news as it means yet another excellent Flex resource,' blogged Rich Tretola on his 'Everything Flex' blog in response to the announcement by SYS-CON Media last week of the launch of Flex Developer's Journal as an online technical publication for developers that are using or considering Adobe Flex.

Recognizing that a Web site's content and core design play a critical role in search engine optimization, seven companies recently chose to power their Web sites with Hot Banana (www.hotbanana.com), the SEO-friendly Web content management solution (CMS) from J.L. Halsey.

We've created an editorial advisory board for Flex Developer's Journal that includes well known members of Flex community. Our goal was to bring together people who work with Adobe Flex in the trenches and are specializing in Flex best practices, enterprise development, mobile devices, Flash, and Flex communication protocols. Being a Flex coder was one of the main requirements to be included in the editorial advisory board of FDJ.

On August 16, 2007 SYS-CON Media has launched Flex Developers Journal, an online technical publication for developers that are using or considering Adobe Flex as a technology for creating rich front ends for Web applications. While in the past SYS-CON was publishing Flex-related articles here and there, now we've got the critical mass of interest required to have an independent publication covering this solid platform for creating Rich Internet Applications (a.k.a. RIA). You can have lots and lots of people screaming and shouting 'Flex is cool', but publishers of technical magazines are very pragmatic people, and they would not start a new publication unless the software has already some serious following and good growth potential from the business perspective. Today, Adobe Flex has both.

There's been a lot of talk in the ColdFusion community lately about the newly released Flex 2. If you're new to Flex or haven't tried it yet, this article provides an introduction, from a ColdFusion developer's perspective, to what Flex is and is not.

Some things that I learned early in my career that originally helped me succeed, I believe are now hurting me in job interviews. One of the pros to typing via dynamic languages and forgiving compilers such as ActionScript 1.0, Ruby, JavaScript, and others is that you can quickly code things that work. In a lot of the early agency, multimedia, and small software company work that I did, these technologies were great. They didn't get in your way, and they empowered you to quickly create programmatic solutions that were enhanced or even driven by good designers. You could hit insane deadlines, recompile changes quickly for a client, and react flexibly to ever-changing, almost fluid requirements...if any.

Whether it's in factories or workshops, in mines or forests, in offices or homes, or even in our sacred ColdFusion Administrator, anything that impairs the efficiency of workers is always worthy of improvements in the process or changing the way of doing things. Levering ColdFusion ServiceFactory to get work done is one example. Figure 1 is a screenshot of an example Flex-ColdFusion hybrid application that allows manipulation of ColdFusion mapping without having (or even needing) access to the ColdFusion Administrator.

This excerpt describes the process of creating a complete Flex-Java distributed application. Upgrading Flex applications to Java Enterprise Edition applications is done with Flex Data Services. FDS provides transparent access to POJO, EJBs, and JMS and comes with adapters for frameworks like Spring and Hibernate.

'The world is changing,' Flex Developer's Journal editor-in-chief Yakov Fain told the audience at SYS-CON Events' Real-World Java Seminar in New York City today. 'Financial institutions are starting to hire Web designers.' The world of rich Internet applications has made it to Wall Street...and Adobe Flex is well placed to allow Java developers to ride the RIA wave.

AJAX developers brought Web 2.0 to the browser. Now they can leverage their JavaScript and HTML skills - as well as the IDEs they are familiar with and already use - to build the next generation of desktop applications that span platforms. Kevin Hoyt of Adobe will demonstrate how to extend rich Internet application (RIA) development outside of the browser using AJAX with Adobe AIR Adobe's cross-operating system application runtime. The concepts that will be introduced include native windows, native drag-and-drop, native clipboard support, local file IO, and persistence to a local database.

Adobe's LifeCycle Data Services ES offers developers powerful capabilities. Some of this software's capabilities, specifically server push, can be developed with relative ease using a utility class that has been around in the Flash APIs for a great while, and without having to pay licensing fees for LifeCycle Data Services ES. The utility class spotlighted in this article is flash.net.XMLSocket, and it provides all the client-side plumbing required for implementing server push.

Several months ago I posted some articles on my blog about Flex 2 components and accessing/modifying their BitmapData. In one example, I sent the BitmapData to the server and saved it as a JPG file, and I've been asked numerous times since...

Some people take the dog for a walk, others go play a round of golf. Not Christophe Coenraets. His idea of a good time is to illustrate Flex 2 / JMS integration by extending a simple 'realtime feed' application that he built a while back! Web Developer's & Designer's Journal is proud to bring you each month two of the month's best tips from Adobe's intrepid Flex Hero.

Flex 2 and the Flash Media Server are a match made in heaven. By combining the two technologies, streaming Flash videos at my office has become a nice part of my daily routine and a good excuse to add another monitor to my desktop. Whether your musical genre taste is classical or rock 'n roll, it's relatively easy to quickly create a desktop library of Flash videos. In this article, I'll describe one approach that will have you streaming in no time.

AJAXWorld 2007 West will take place on September 23-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California, and will offer a new dedicated 'iPhone Track.' Another dedicated track will offer a comparative education opportunity for conference delegates on emerging RIA tools, including a Diamond track on OpenLaszlo and sessions on Microsoft's Silverlight, Adobe's AIR and Sun's JavaFX.

This release is the first one to include contributed content from Rob Gonda, Tom de Manincor, Brian LeGros, Sana Ullah and Aaron Roberson. The ColdBox Team and contributors are growing. So enjoy this release. The ColdBox website is also being renovated and will be launched soon. Development is now strong for version 2.1.0 and we have some extraordinary features coming your way. So please show your support and God Bless.

Hot Banana, the Web content management solution (CMS) from J.L. Halsey, has added five new channel partners to its reseller program. In signing with Hot Banana, all cited the need for a leading-edge Web content management system that is feature-rich, flexible and marketing-friendly.

As a ColdFusion developer, hopefully by now you have heard at least a little about XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Wikipedia defines XML as a 'general-purpose markup language' designed to 'facilitate the sharing of data' and also designed to be 'relatively human-legible.'

I'll be running a new special interests group on Rich Internet Applications for New York Software Industry Association. We are going to cover Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, AJAX, JavaFX, OpenLaszlo and more. I invite you to attend our first meeting on Oct 9,2007, where I'll give an overview of what's currently is out there on the market of RIA technologies for development of the entrerprise applications. I'll be inviting people representing various RIA technologies to help software engineers and development managers in making the right choices for their new projects.

Finally, ColdFusion 8 has incorporated image manipulation directly into the ColdFusion tag and scripting language. No more are we, as developers, chained to third-party products. These products, while excellent in quality, just mean adding one more level of complexity to any application that requires server-side image manipulation. Now, with CFImage and an abundance of image-related functions, ColdFusion has done to image manipulation what it has done to almost every other aspect of Web applications development - it has made it simple.

ColdFusion Developer Journal's Simon Horwith expressed intense enthusiasm for ColdFusion 8 in a recent interview, but this interview was hardly the only story published by SYS-CON Media recently in the runup to one of the major Adobe announcements in recent memory. Here's the recap...

ColdFusion 8 Server Monitor lets developers swiftly identify bottlenecks and tune the server for better performance. 'The server monitoring capabilities in ColdFusion 8 are outstanding, offering granular-level access to identify slow requests and terminate runaway processes,' said Nick Walters, programming manager, Lightyear Network Solutions. 'We can now receive actual detail as to which requests are taking the longest and which objects within a page are performing poorly. Server monitoring with ColdFusion 8 is leaps ahead of third-party applications on the market.'

'As someone who often has to troubleshoot, improve, and analyze client applications and server performance, I've also found the new debugging and server monitoring tools to be invaluable. I can't imagine going back to not having them available and making use of them daily.'

With the release of Adobe's ColdFusion 8 -and today's general availability release- SYS-CON.TV's Roger Strukhoff sat down with ColdFusion Developer's Journal Editor-in-Chief Simon Horwith for an exclusive interview from SYS-CON's TV studios overlooking Times Square in New York. Simon had had the opportunity to work with the CF8 public beta, and his enthusiasm could not have been more emphatic. 'It's fantastic,' he said in the interview, 'the number of features is ridiculous, crazy, great. And it's also very stable.'

Flex is a complete set of tools to develop rich Internet cross-platform applications based on the Flash platform. With Flex, you can create applications that not only have the 'wow factor' necessary to please clients and users alike, but the 'usability factor' necessary to make your application a real success.

I'm going to postpone the second part of my RSS aggregator article to tie this column into this Flex-themed issue. Have no fears, though, it will be back in full force in the next issue. Flex, as I'm sure most people know, is a way for programmers (you, me, and us) to create Flash movies.

'It takes a village,' said Cynergy vice president Dave Wolf (pictured) most recently at AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 East, 'to build an engineering team capable of writing world-class Rich Internet Applications.' You cannot create the right atmosphere in a 'cubicle farm,' he contends. And Cynergy walks the talk, and walks the walk, with no individual offices, large spacious office environments, and a commitment to keeping its staffers energized and creative, more like an ad agency than a development shop.