Adobe Systems introduced a beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS3 software, the next release of the world standard in digital imaging. Also introduced is a beta release of Adobe Spry framework for AJAX, a designer-focused solution for adding the interactive power of Ajax when developing rich, dynamic web-sites.

In today's global economy, service providers are under increasing pressure to maximize margins and streamline operational efficiency to remain competitive.

Check out my 2h 17mins AJAX presentation recording. I presented AJAX in various flavors to the Scottish CFUG last week and I promised to post the slides and files. You may check out the Adobe Connect Presentation, download the slides, and download the source code. Code includes examples for ajaxcfc, dojo, jquery, prototype, spry, and well as hand-coded XmlHttpRequest objects. AjaxCFC examples also include some using the Model-Glue and MachII frameworks, not included with this download.

One thing that constantly bugs me on projects is when I am asked to work on the user interface. I can do CSS, but it is, admittedly, not my strongest suit. I can do some graphics work, but not my strongest suit.

Often the hardest part of developing an application is getting agreement on what exactly it should do. Intent Driven Design (IDD) is an approach that simplifies and standardizes the process of getting detailed technical requirements from non-technical business users so you can develop more complete and consistent requirements in less time.

SYS-CON Events announced today that the first'iTVcon Internet TV Conference & Expo 2007' (www.itvcon.com) will takeplace in New York City. Calls for papers for the conference, sponsorshipand exhibit opportunities were made available today at the conferencewebsite. Delegate registration information can also be obtained at the conference website, www.itvcon.com.

With the introduction of MX, ColdFusion programmers started to move away from the world of hard-to-maintain reams of scripts with includes, and into the world of clearly defined libraries with specific responsibilities. CustomTags were a good stab at re-usable code, but focused on the level of the function as opposed to grouping functions, which meant the method lacked a good way to define the return value and had scoping issues.

ColdFusion developers today are presented with more options than ever before - more developer tools, more conferences and learning resources, and more development choices in the form of frameworks and language features.

Hot Banana Software Inc., a provider of Web content management software for marketing and a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey, has entered into a channel partner agreement with the Bokka Group of Denver, Colorado.

Hot Banana Software, a provider of Web content management software for marketing and a wholly owned subsidiary of J.L. Halsey, introduced a multilingual content management plug-in that automates the process of translating and publishing Web site content into multiple languages.

Do you know what's the main goal of any gas station owner? To get lots of trucking accounts. Business from small car drivers is worth pennies, and it gets on my nerves to hear them ask again and again, 'Five dollars of regular, please.' Trucks are different. They usually pump in a couple of hundreds of gallons at a time. For instance, here comes a flashy 18-wheeler with a sign 'Software Delivered.' These guys ship reusable open source components around the globe. As a former programmer, I was trying to play it smart by asking why they don't just let people download these components from the Internet? But the smiley truckers (many of whom used to be software developers too) just shrug and tell me that nothing beats personal delivery, plus the tips.

This command will build the swf file with the frame rate of fifty frames per second. Display list rendering and the ActionScript execution take turns, hence the frame rate can affect your application performance. Setting the frame rate to fifty does not mean that each frame will be displayed in exactly 20 milliseconds, as there is some OS/browser overhead. Besides, some browsers may impose restrictions on plugins to lower CPU utilization on the user?s machine.

In Part 1 (CFDJ, Vol. 8, issue 10) we introduced the destination-aware grid, formatters, and renderers. In this article we are continuing our discussion about datagrid renderers and...

I'm a Webmaster for the Air Protection Division (APD), EPA Region 3 in Philadelphia and in April 2006, I wrote an article for CFDJ entitled 'How ColdFusion MX 7 Made Me a Hero at the Office' (Volume 8, Issue 4). That article described how I harnessed the power of ColdFusion to improve access to our most vital business information.

Want to make your Flash forms more FLEXible? Well, now you can! But, is there any point, you say, now that Flex 2 is out and effectively free (if you can make do without FlexBuilder)? Well, if you can go with Flex 2 then do so, but maybe like me, it's currently off limits to you...

There are many resources we should analyze to ensure optimal ColdFusion operation or to help diagnose problems. Fortunately, there's an awesome free tool that comes to our aid to turn voluminous data into useful information.

One of the first things that you encounter when moving to object-oriented (OO) programming are beans. Beans are simple representations of a business object (like a user or a product) that hide all of the information stored in the bean behind methods (functions) for getting and setting the information (called, unsurprisingly, getters and setters).

Storage and bandwidth - these have traditionally been the two hardest things to scale up as an application grows. Many a dot-com million has been spent building out rock solid storage infrastructures, sometimes for applications which never saw the light of day. Fast forward to 2006. These are good times for developers, with open source technologies, open APIs, and low-cost, commoditized services to help the little guys play along with the big boys.

I'm at my best when I'm challenged. In my consulting business I tend to gravitate towards small businesses with delusions of grandeur. I want to be the one to help them realize their vision and turn their delusion into reality. Looking back, this has been an interesting week. I thought I'd share some of the interesting things I've done and how ColdFusion helped make them possible.

Spending as much time as I have speaking before audiences, I try very hard to keep an eye on trends and attitudes within demographic groups, including university students. I have also had the opportunity in the past to represent Macromedia as a lecturer at Ivy League universities.

Every now and then we create reusable components, and so far we are giving them away for free. Some pathetic bloggers call this 'giving back to the community'. We look at it simple: if we do not have time to productionize the component, we donate it.

It's really convenient for anyone coming from an HTML background that we can now provide colors to Flex using html standard syntax for hexidecimal number (#000000 = black, #ffffff= white, etc). I've recently been building some tools to convert drawings in the flash player to and from SVG format. SVG, like HTML, likes to specify hexidecimal numbers with a '#' prefix, but the flash player drawing API needs hexidecimal numbers to be prefixed with '0x' To help migrate back and forth between hexStrings and AS numbers, I wrote a few static methods, which are working well for me:

ColdFusion Extensions for Flex, included in ColdFusion MX 7.0.2, enable Flex Builder 2.0 developers to automate the more mundane tasks like CRUD (creating, reading, updating and deleting records) by creating ColdFusion components, ActionScript class files, and code to invoke a Web Service.

Amidst the hustle and bustle leading up to MAX, I managed to steal some time to work on a skunkworks project. The idea was to let people experience the fun and instant gratification of Flex, without needing to download and install anything at all. And thus The FLEXifier.

The sign of an experienced developer is solid design. Novices edit examples they find on the Net, journeymen figure out how to code something as they do it, but craftsmen plan their work. Starting out, this can look like wasted time, but if your app is any good, your customer will want to expand it. Then, if you need some help, you'll have to explain all that intuitive code to ten people, all of whom you are paying by the hour. Diagrams would be nice then, right?

At this year's CFUnited, I gave a talk titled 'Supercharging Fusebox Project Management.' As indicated by the title, that presentation was aimed at managers who use Fusebox. While I am a major proponent of Fusebox, this article deals with some aspects of team management, regardless of what framework is used. We'll take a look at some basic management goals, and how we can use simple tools to ease the task of managing development in a team environment.

FusionDebug is an easy straightforward tool, but if you leverage the experience of others, you can be even more productive.

While the IPO market on Wall Street has cooled substantially, there is a new IPO looming on the horizon that has the potential to make you millions of dollars in the coming years. This is not hype. This is not a pipe dream. This is not a fantasy. It is a reality that is yours for the taking.

I remember a particularly long weekend sitting in a computer lab for 12 hours and trying to write an assembler program on a VAX machine that would read and write files. (A VAX is a big archaic mainframe computer.)

'The innovation we are most excited about,' said Bruce Chizen, Adobe's CEO, 'is Apollo, which we believe will revolutionize the way the world will interact with the Web in the future.' He was speaking at MAX 2006, the biggest ever Adobe developer conference, in Las Vegas.

The opening keynote was superb, definitely one of our more exciting keynotes, and without a doubt the loudest. After several 'let's tease Ben' segments courtesy of Kevin and Shantanu, I got to present two segments. The first concentrated on ColdFusion. I talked about the CF/Flex integration in CFMX 7.0.2, showed the ColdFusion Flex Application Wizard, and then discussed 'Scorpio'.

At its first MAX developer and customer event since joining forces with Macromedia, Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ: ADBE) today will demonstrate technologies and future product workflows that make it possible to create and deliver new kinds of high-impact, rich applications and engaging content and experiences. Adobe is previewing the company's next-generation technology, code-named Apollo, for developing rich Internet applications for the desktop, and debuting the public beta of Adobe Digital Editions, new software for interacting with eBooks and digital publications (see separate release).

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today introduced the public beta of Adobe® Digital Editions, a Rich Internet Application (RIA) built from the ground up for digital publishing. With native support for Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) as well as an XHTML-based reflow-centric publication format, Digital Editions delivers an engaging way to acquire, read, and manage content, including eBooks, digital magazines, digital newspapers and other digital publications. Initially available as a free public beta for Windows®, Digital Editions will support Macintosh systems as a universal binary application, Linux® platforms, as well as mobile phones and other embedded devices in future versions.

Usually, when something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. We've all seen the spam - 'Increase your 100%' e-mails that are clearly nothing more than ridiculous claims with no validity.

ColdFusion developers have known for years how powerful rapid development can be and how much of a difference that makes when building dynamic Web applications. Over the course of a little more than a year we've watched as the Web model was turned on its head in favor of something that feels much more intuitive and is much more user-friendly. Part of this change has come about because of what most people call 'Web 2.0.' Web 2.0 has brought about more buzzwords than a marketing convention. A lot of normal users have stopped trying to figure out what tagging is, what AJAX means, or what the blogosphere really is. They have to be wondering why most of the Web sites they're using suddenly have 'beta' on them.

'By creating a specialized, consumer-friendly application like Digital Editions, Adobe is ensuring publishers can securely deliver high-impact content to the widest possible audience, across hardware platforms, operating systems and devices,' said Shantanu Narayen, president and COO at Adobe, as he today introduced at MAX 2006 the public beta of Adobe's new Rich Internet Application (RIA) built from the ground up for digital publishing.

There is quite a debate when using Ajax/DHTML on whether to use DOM nodes or innerHTML. I've been a follower of innerHTML, not only because it's easier, not only because you reuse the same view layer, but now also because it's indisputably faster.

Your footsteps echo down the unmarked path. Gravel shuffles everywhere as you slow and strafe around the corner of a generic concrete bunker. You reach for the double- barreled shotgun but it's too late. A loud bang rips through the air but it's the soft thud as you hit the ground that confirms your worst fear, you're dead...again. A quick click of the mouse and poof...like magic you're all the way back to your last reached checkpoint.

One of the biggest problems developers face everyday is moving a project along and producing solid code without cutting corners. This typically means a lot of copying, pasting, searching and replacing, and a whole lot of manual editing. At every point the potential for error increases. Confidence in your code diminishes and your day gets longer.

When I found out this month's issue would be a 'back to basics' issue, I was torn between several topics that I hope are of interest to every CFML developer. I settled on the array, which is a powerful tool in the hands of a skilled coder. Just to make sure everyone's on board we'll start with the assumption that we need to explore the nature of an array first.