Happy New Year, and may god give you the wisdom to come up with the next ground breaking million dollar idea that will revolutionize technology and establish a new direction in the digital era.

I just found this post with a very interesting idea: code does not need to exist on the client beyond connection scripts; JavaScript can be sent to browser to be executed; basically, remote invoking via passing of code (aka using eval with JavaScript received from the result handler)

Just like everything else, it has its pro's and con's, but overall, I think that in a security and even lazy loading standpoint this is a great idea.

I guess it really depends if you are using AJAX as an add-on for a web application, or to build a full application. In a robust application, the 'init' call will load all those JS components that need to be persistent and leave them on memory, and all the rest of the calls can only transfer and load the needed JavaScript, thus optimizing initial loading time.

What do you think?

One of my articles for the CFDJ reached over 40,000 reads today. I had never imagined that it would be such a success; it seems to be one of the most read articles in the history of the CFDJ, which is a real honor. I know most of my readers have already seen it, but if you have not, please do: http://coldfusion.sys-con.com/read/138966.htm

IMO RIA's, including AJAX, Laslo, Flex 2.0, and XAML will be huge topics for 2006, so stay ahead of the competition and start doing your research now.

Btw, XAML is short for eXtensible Application Markup Language, and pronounced "Zammel".

Mozilla has its own version, but it won't go anywhere… it's called XUL, short for  User Interface Language and pronounced "zool"... XUL followers feel free to argue this statement.

I just wasted an hour with a simple cfhttp post problem, and I wouldn't wish any of my readers to go through the same process.

I was integrating with a bank to get a deposit slip completely filled up with client information and allow my client to print it without leaving my site. When I manually posted the form to the bank it worked, but through CF I kept getting a Connection Failed in the body. I knew if wasn't blocking me, because it also provided me with an ASP session cookie; so I looked at the headers using an http packet sniffer and I saw two variables that could be a problem: Transfer-Encoding: chunked, and Content-Encoding: gzip.

After an hour, I discovered that CF, or even worse, Java will not accept gzip encoding, so right when I was about to give up, I found that I can request a specific encoding by supplying http headers for 'Accept-Encoding'.

Here's the magic:

For those of you following script.aculo.us, there’s a new version out with a bunch of bug fixes and a couple of new features added, including dynamic loading of components which allows for optimizing and fine tuning your pages according to your needs… this will help a little with loading times for dial-up users.

Following the suggestion of some of my readers, I just created a Yahoo Group / Mailing List for ajaxCFC. This group may facilitate the communication among ajaxCFC users, sharing, discussing, requesting help, or _showing off_.
 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ajaxcfc/

On a different note, I updated the L&F of the examples and added a couple more. I am also working on blowfish encryption to allow for secure data exchange. If any of you are cryptography experts, I could definitely use your help :)

For all those ColdFusion people who don't read Rob Brooks, Sean Corfield, or Steven Erat's blogs (because they already mentioned this), you should check Rob's blog out. He posted today his top 10 blog posts picks. Whereas it may be a little bias towards object oriented design and design patterns, I do agree that every single one of the posts he mentions it's worth reading. Please do not think I'm against OO, au contraire, I love it, and live by design patterns … but anyways, it's a must read so check it out.

How can you tell if a site is being viewed mostly by a developers' community? While the normal site has 90%+ I.E. visitors, my site has the following stats:

Google Desktop: 10.8% Views; 39.7% Visits
Firefox: 46.1% Views; 20.9% Visits
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x: Views 27.3%; 9.6% visits

Which means that most of the people added my RSS feed to their Google Desktop that pulls my feed infinite times a day … followed by the typical developer that uses Firefox, and last but not least, the business man that is searching for Web 2.0 and AJAX information that uses I.E.

It is amazing how stats change drastically from one site to another… I have other sites where I.E. is 97%, and some others that are viewed mostly by Ad Agencies where Safari reaches almost 40%.

That is exactly why you need to QA for every single browser out there!

So the usual company sends a nice xmas card to their customers; the eccentric people at iChameleon Group decided to send out a candy cane smackdown xmas card instead. You can unleash your rage beating down the key people of our company with a candy cane.

It’s actually very funny. I know some of our clients were beating me for ten minutes when they got this email… j/k, not me, our project managers.
Check it out and let me know what you think.

Happy holidays.

I took the liberty to completely rewrite blocCFC's ping component. I wrote a generic XML-RPC function, that takes pings and extended rpc pings, added a few more aggregators, and modified the timeout for the responses because they are not really important...

I tested every single aggregator and they all work except blo.gs ... but I left it in there because I think it may be temporary. You can ping now @technorati, @weblogs, @icerocket, @blogdigger, @yahoo, and @moreover

I also couldn't get feedster going ... you're supposed to ping http://api.feedster.com/ping, but it seems that the page has been moved or something; I’d appreciate if someone could provide any information on feedster.

I attached the modified ping.cfc to this post. I sent Ray the update, and thus far, he has been great by adding them to new releases.

Thanks again Ray!