Products

If you've been following my series on caching in ColdFusion 9, you know that ColdFusion 9.0 includes the powerful caching platform Ehcache from Terracotta. What you may not know, though, is that in ColdFusion 9.0.1 Adobe upgraded the Ehcache engine from version 1.6 to 2.0. This brings several new caching capabilities to ColdFusion and makes them dead simple to implement. If you're interested in learning more, Mike Allen from Terracotta and I are presenting a webinar on August 12, 2010 at 11am Pacific time. Here's the official announcement:

Join me and Mike Allen, the head of product management at Terracotta in a discussion about simple and effective ways to scale and boost the performance of ColdFusion applications using Ehcache.

In this webcast, you'll learn:

• Why caching is important
• How ColdFusion leverages Ehcache to boost performance
• Tips and tricks to leverage the newest features of Ehcache in ColdFusion
• How to take advantage of the ability to snap in Enterprise Ehcache to scale out your applications

Please register for this webcast even if you are unable to attend and you will get an email with a link to the recording.

Register for the webinar

I just received word today that I'll be speaking at cf.Objective() 2010. This is the one ColdFusion conference I've wanted to attend for years now but have never been able to.

If you've been following my blog lately, I've been working on a multi-part series on caching in ColdFusion 9. I also spoke about this topic at Adobe MAX 2009. Caching is something I've been very interested in for the past few years now.

The presentation I'm planning for cf.Objective() is a little different than the one I gave at MAX. There will be some overlap, but the focus of the cf.Objective talk will be on caching for scalability as opposed to a general presentation on caching fundamentals.

I hope to see you there!

Lots and lots of hard work by the ColdFusion Engineering Team has resulted in today's announcement that ColdFusion 9 (formerly code named Centaur) and the new ColdFusion Builder IDE have hit the public beta milestone and are now available on Adobe Labs:

• ColdFusion 9
• ColdFusion Builder

Also tucked in with the release is the availability of the new ColdFusion Public Bugbase.

If you haven't had a chance to download the public betas, you should really give them a try. ColdFusion 9 focuses heavily on developer productivity enhancements. I'm not going to list everything out here, but let me just say that lots and lots of things people have been clamoring for are included!

Looks like the Lightroom 2.1 update has officially been released. For those waiting for it, the 2.1 release includes Adobe Camera Raw 5.1 as well as a long list of bug fixes. For the full list, see the ReadMe (PDF).

Windows Version

Mac Version

I realize that this is another "me too" post as the news has already been widely reported. However, it's good news, and it's too good to pass up. Just in case you haven't heard yet, Adobe ColdFusion 8 just won the 2008 Jolt Product Excellence Award for Web Development, presented by Dr. Dobb's Journal.

What makes this particularly nice is that the winners are "selected by a panel of judges consisting of industry insiders, columnists, and technology leaders.", lending much more credibility to the award.

Congratulations to the ColdFusion Engineering team and to Adobe!

This one has been making the rounds around the ColdFusion blogosphere, so I thought I'd add to the mix and help get the word out. Todd Sharp is running a nice contest over at the new CFSnippets website designed to get developers working with the new Snipex features in CFEclipse. If you haven't been to CFSnippets, it's a public Snipex server with several libraries of open source snippets you can use within CFEclipse to speed up development of common tasks.

The contest runs through November 30th and includes some pretty cool prizes. For more information, click the banner below.

Live blogging from the Sneak Peeks session at Adobe MAX 2007. Sneak Peeks is one of my favorite sessions. It's always interesting to see what's on the minds of Adobe engineers, and what might be coming down the line in future releases.

They're pulling a Blues Brothers skit with Mike Downey and Marc Eaman dressed up like Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. The standard disclaimer applies - the tech previews here may or may not ever make it into products...

There's going to be a vote for best sneak at the end of the session (built with CF and Flex, of course).

First up is Karl Miller and Karl Soule from the visual communicator (Vc) team. They're showing off a new tool (version 3) for doing video production that's supposed to be easy enough for a third grader to use. It has a teleprompter interface for script reading with the ability to place content at various places throughout the timeline. Pretty simple and powerful. It can also communicate with Flash Media Server for live streaming. It can control up to 3 cameras and has both blue and green screen built in. This tool looks like it makes it very simple to do tv quality production on a laptop.

Up now is Danielle Diebler who is showing off VoIP in the Flash Player. She's also mention that P2P in the Flash Player as well as extended codecs are in the works. She's demoing an application now that built using the technology called CoCoNiki. It's an online diary that uses voice and presence awareness. The VoIP quality seems pretty good so far. She's moving on to an Air application now that also does VoIP (she's making a live call to a cell phone.

Ken Sundermeyert is up from the Flash Home for Mobile group. He says Flash Home will let you replace the home screen on your phone (has to be a Flash enabled phone, of course) with a customized Flash based screen. The market for personalization is huge (2+ billion last year, excluding ringtones). Flash Home is capable of getting web data, including from Flash Cast. It is also integrated with the device. No sandbox, so it can access phone functionality natively (address book, sms, call logs, etc.). He's demoing a custom home screen that he built that pulls up a person's location when they call by getting their phone number from the call log, checking the area code, and displaying a graphic of the city. Live demo of someone in the audience calling his phone. The wallpaper on the phone switches from blue background to the Statue of Liberty. You'll also be able to get home screens from a catalog over the air.

Geoff Baum is showing off Photoshop Express, a new online version of Photoshop built using Flex. It's not meant to replace the full Photoshop, but is supposed to provide a "consumer" alternative for performing common image editing tasks. The interface is pretty intuitive. Lots of impressive editing capabilities. It's got a timeline for edits, so you can move backward/forward in edit sequences. All of the editing is non-destructive. Very impressive stuff!

They're setting up for part 2 now, so I'm going to cut this post of here, grab a beer, then come back for more. Stay tuned...

The title says it all. No ETA, but Adobe has given it a name and it's now on the future development roadmap.

I'm here in Chicago this week for the Adobe MAX 2007 conference. Following tradition (well, now that I've done it twice, it's a tradition), I've created a Flickr Group for posting pictures of the event. It's a public group, so feel free to post pics and share the group link:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/adobemax2007/

You can see pics from last year's Flickr group by following the related link below.

With the move from a dedicated listserv to Google Groups, many people are wondering if there's an archive available of old CFCDev posts. There is, and you can find it here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/cfcdev@cfczone.org/

Future archive posts will be handled by Google Groups.