For those of who know of Flex 2, Adobe's tool for programmers to create Rich Internet Applications, it has this one feature that sets it apart from Flash, and incidentally, its brother Spry shares. It allows you to put a variable surrounded by curly brackets, and at runtime, anytime that variable changes, it'll update whatever variable is being set to it.

SYS-CON Media (www.events .sys-con.com)announced today the promotion of Robyn Forma to Vice President of Sales andMarketing. Robyn joined SYS-CON Media in 1998 in the advertising sales department while earning her degree in Business Administration. After a fewshort months, Robyn was promoted to advertising account manager forColdFusion Developer's Journal, a new publication at the time, andsuccessfully oversaw the launch and advertising sales of that magazine,which is in its eighth successful year.

PaperThin, Inc., a leading Web publishing and content management software vendor, today announced that The International Broadcasting Bureau, an international multimedia broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government, recently implemented CommonSpot for its Voice of America site. VOA (www.voa.gov) is one of the largest ColdFusion-based Web sites ever constructed, consisting of 45 sites in 44 different languages. CommonSpot offers IBB a scalable, flexible solution for maintaining and distributing Web content across multiple sites and platforms. Extensive workflow and multi-language capabilities support the agencies’ online globalization strategy, enabling it to efficiently reach its audience of more than 94 million worldwide, via the Web.

This month Darron's Diary looks at an Iterator implementation, at ECMAScript 4, and previews his own latest book. Because ActionScript is based on the ECMAScript standard, anything that happens in ECMAScript will almost certainly happen in ActionScript too. Not to mention, quite a few of the Adobe folks are on the ECMAScript committee...

lynda.com announces today its addition of Flex 2 Essential Training with Adobe-certified instructor David Gassner, to the lynda.com Online Training Library(TM). The training is delivered in QuickTime movie format, and is 4.5 hours long.

When ColdFusion was first released there was one main feature, more than any other feature, that made it very popular very fast: ColdFusion makes it ridiculously easy to create Web pages that can talk to databases and display database information. Now, almost 11 years later, this is still one of ColdFusion's primary strengths and most popular features.

Spammers come in many forms - e-mail spammers, search engine spammers, comment spammers, trackback spammers, message board spammers...

I just got an e-mail from a recruiter of sorts. They want me to do phone Flex/Flash consultation for a 20-40 minute paid phone call. Apparently, Ether (www.ether.com) could make money if they employed some sales teams. It seems all of California is reaching out worldwide, looking for people to come to live and work there. The reason? To be tech lead in their startup and manage contractors and outsourced individuals to make bling and fame in Web Deux Point OMG. If my hunch on what this call is about is correct, this'll be the third startup this month looking for Flexcoder meat.

Using RSS as a means to create automatic dynamic content with minimal work fascinates me. Most bloggers probably create feeds on a regular basis - most likely at least a Flickr feed, and possibly del.icio.us. These provide JavaScript services to parse the feed into your site; however, with the prevalence of server-side scripting, why not have fun and parse the feed into your blog yourself?

This article describes the differences between CVS and Subversion and explains how to install Subversion and migrate an existing CVS repository. It also describes how to configure Subversion in a Windows environment, explains a basic Subversion project structure, and introduces the main Subversion clients. Finally, it shows ways to use Subversion with Ant and how to get connected to the repository via JavaSVN and ColdFusion.

Developers are no different, yet I see 'improv developing' all the time. A project manager will just describe what's needed - the outlines of a plot - and let the developers work it out. The results are often what you'd see with a movie. However, designing an application with UML can act as a script for developers. They're still free to use their own creativity and experience when implementing the design, but the UML documents provide them with a map of what the final product should be.

The 'Real-World Flex' One-Day Seminar will delve deep into the central workings of Flex so that the seminar delegates can integrate this timely new technology into their applications, creating powerful interactive content. And CFDJ Editor-in-Chief Simon Horwith will lead one session devoted to ColdFusion and Flex.

Guido Bellomo has announced the release of wddxAjax v. 1.1. wddxAjax is a ColdFusion Custom Tag to enable AJAX on *.cfm templates. It was co-developed by Guido Bellomo and Stefano Vitta, of Bloggers.it. wddxAjax is fully compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

FusionReactor is a must for administrators and hosting companies who need to monitor their systems and recognize and act upon issues before they present critical danger to their runtime environments, the company says.

I've written a lot lately about the growing strength of the ColdFusion development community - shown by the onslaught of frameworks and the rapid adoption and support for these frameworks, the growing number of bloggers, new conferences and the great success of the CFUnited conference, and by the commitment to the community being shown by Adobe.

Enterprise Application aRchive (EAR) files are a standard and portable manner for packaging applications to be deployed on J2EE application servers, such as Adobe JRun, BEA WebLogic, and IBM WebSphere. An EAR file is, in essence, just a big ZIP file with a special layout of the directory tree inside that contains a full application, see the following code. EAR files have a well-defined format and make Java bytecode truly portable. The same EAR file that we compile and build on our i386 Windows laptop can also run on a 64-CPU mainframe running commercial Unix.

I'm planning to make several presentations on using Adobe Flex 2 with or without Java in New York and New Jersey this year. As the saying goes, 'If you want God to laugh, tell him about your plans', so let me put it this way: this is what I believe I'm going to be doing later this year.

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced the Adobe MAX 2006 Conference, to be held Oct. 23-26 in Las Vegas. MAX 2006 will give developers and designers a forum to network, share ideas, get hands-on technical training from certified experts, gain new skills and learn about new and emerging Adobe products and technologies. Adobe also announced the call for entries for the fourth annual Adobe MAX Awards, which recognize customer achievement in eight different categories.

Adobe today launches Flex 2, with a free Adobe Flex 2 Software Development Kit (SDK) aimed at equipping developers to build a new class of rich Internet applications with improved usability and effectiveness.

The ColdFusion team also has a few exciting updates to share with developers. Adobe has created a deep level of integration and productivity tools for Flex and ColdFusion making it easy for ColdFusion developers to get started and become productive building Flex applications, the company says.

Adobe Flex 2 has been released as planned. The first question is how much. The quick answer is better than expected, and here's the breakout. Flex 2 SDK, command line compilers and Flex Data Services Express (must run on a single-processor server), Flash Player 9, which is actually a virtual machine that 'weighs' only 1.1Mb and is about 10 times faster than Flash Player 8.

So often in this column I feel that I'm writing about basic concepts and using trivial examples. It's often up to you, as the reader, to figure out how to apply these concepts to your development. I thought it might be a good idea to take some space to try to bring a lot of the concepts together and build an application. I don't always take the space to do so, but thought I'd give it a try here.

For the past several weeks, I've been immersed in writing a large application - so immersed, in fact, that I missed writing my column for last month! This application has been particularly interesting to me because it makes such extensive use of AJAX - that combination of JavaScript, DOM manipulation, and the XMLHttpRequest object that has caught the attention of the general public. It's also been interesting because it has allowed me to experiment with the idea of creating an object-oriented (OO) presentation layer.

SYS-CON Events, Inc. (www .events.sys-con.com)annou nced today that the first event in the 'Real-World Flex'(www.flexseminar.com ) One-Day Seminar series will take place on August 14,2006, at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Adobe Systems Inc. is theplatinum sponsor of this event, with additional sponsorship opportunitiesavailable.

As ColdFusion has become a leading choice for large-scale quick-to-market application development, new CF server releases have been adapted to make it possible to integrate object classes into your Web applications. Since ColdFusion MX, developers have been able to architect applications using CFCs.

Code reuse has always been an important principle in a software developer's toolbox. While this principle often applies to source code, developers have also tried to apply the same formula to Web content. By grabbing content from one Web site, the developer can reuse it in new and unique ways.

One of the latest crazes in Web development is AJAX. Unless you've been living in a cave for the last year, you've heard of this old, yet currently popular, technique for making HTTP requests to a server without refreshing the Web page. While claims of smaller bandwidth, faster response, and highly interactive user interfaces may intrigue you, one must ask, 'Will it work for my user base?'

Putting support for XML processing in ColdFusion 6.0 was regarded as a major feature upgrade. With the switch to Java, ColdFusion could leverage the existing Java functions in Jakarta Commons and add support for things like Web Services (Axis). However, binding itself to Java also bound ColdFusion to the limitations of the Java feature set.

Using Cold Fusion 7.01 and MS SQL Server technologies, the Riley Children's Foundation developed a Web services system (EFT Payment Management System - EPMS) that efficiently processes thousands of credit card pledge payments each month. The system pushes large volumes of credit card payment requests to a third-party credit vendor and, based on credit card payment results, automatically creates pledge payment batches in Advance. The system provides a comprehensive dashboard control panel for launching and monitoring payment processes, and it provides several utilities for managing individual payment change situations (e.g., pledge payoffs and pledge withdrawals).

When the March 2006 issue of CFDJ arrived, I had just begun working on the maintenance interfaces for the support tables of a new system. There are many of these tables, and implementing the associated maintenance routines looked set to consume a lot of time.

Let me begin by saying that I don't consider myself a ColdFusion expert. In fact, I didn't even write my first ColdFusion application until 2004. Nevertheless, ColdFusion MX 7 still has made me a 'hero' (as Simon would put it) at the office, and this is how it happened.

I've been spending quite a bit of time in FlexBuilder lately, and have started to rely extensively on some shortcuts. Some of these are actually Eclipse shortcuts, but regardless, these are some of my favorite:

Most ColdFusion applications that require users to be authenticated follow the pattern laid out in the official ColdFusion documentation and in the ColdFusion MX Developer's Guide.

Last month I announced a CFDJ essay writing contest; the topic for the essays was 'How ColdFusion MX 7 made me a hero in the office.' I received many great entries and thank each of you for your submissions.

A new project just landed on my desk. This is not a maintenance project; it's brand new, start from scratch, development. The client asked me to build a site in ColdFusion 5. It's my fourth project in the past year that's based on a legacy version of CF. I could have saved the client both time and money by building it in CFMX, since I have a lot of the functionality pre-built as ColdFusion Components. But CFCs don't work in CF5, so those pre-built components are pretty useless. There's no better time to upgrade than right now; in this article I thought I'd show you the process I'd take when upgrading a server from CF5 to CFMX7.

Web Host Industry Review is running a story about how 'minor league hockey organization the Ontario Hockey League has begun conducting its draft online through an interface resembling those used in many online fantasy sports pools.' As per the story, the application saves time and money, and 'is built using AJAX, ColdFusion and Oracle'.

Some people take the dog for a walk, other go play a round of golf. Not Christophe Coenraets. His idea of a good time is to illustrate Flex and 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 beta 3 is now available for download from Adobe Labs. Download new versions of Flex Builder, Flex Data Services, Charting, Flash Player, the ColdFusion/Flex connectivity bits, and the sample applications. The ColdFusion updater updated ColdFusion to 7.0.2. In addition to the Flex connectivity features, the updater also includes other goodies, including an updated reporting engine, a fix for ColdFusion generated Flash to address the IE EOLAS update, and more. Damon Cooper has posted details.

In Flex 2 this all changes. A server is no longer needed to actually serve Flex requests. You may in fact want a server (Flex Data Services), but it is not actually needed. In Flex 2 you can write your code (MXML and AS) and then compile it, generating a complete SWF (in much the same way as Flash generates standalone SWFs from FLA files) which can be deployed on your HTTP server just like any other assets (HTML files, GIFs, CSS files, etc.). And the generated and deployed SWF can talk back to the server via HTTP call, AMF (Flash Remoting), and SOAP (Web Services) - and no, once again, this can be accomplished without needing Flex installed on the server.

We're being really open with the Flex 2 beta. Anyone can download the bits from the Labs site, and you are free to share the MXML/AS code you write and even deploy the Flex 2 apps that you create. Just keep in mind that in order to execute your apps, users will need to be running the Flash 8.5 player which is also currently in beta. As this player is a beta, it will not be automatically installed the way player updates usually are.