It was only a matter of time. Writely announced today that they are now part of Google. Another undeniable proof that Google = Web 2.0

sources: [news.com] [writely]

I know a few people have already blogged this, especially Mr. _Eat-Sleep-and-Breathe Flex_ Jesse Warden, but I wanted to street that you can download now a Flex Ajax Bridge from Adobe Labs. This bridge define a new simple API extends the functionality of the ExternalInterface class allowing seamless integration between Flex and the different HTTP Remote Request methods, hence, ActiveX for IE and XMLHTTPRequest for all others.

You can view a sample application using this bridge here. Note that you need Flash 8.5 Beta to view this app.

I just booked my hotel for the Sping <br /> conference 2006. It's probably the best bang for your buck ever! For $25 you get a full day of four different tracks: Designing & User Experience, Programming &
Development, 3D Gaming, and Adobe & Related Products, including lunch! How can you go wrong? If you're in the South East Ohio area, you CANNOT miss this one.

see you all there.

Laszlo up to this point was always compared to Adobe Flex, but OpenLaszlo just made a huge announcement: Their system will now be able to generate AJAX / DHTML pages too. IBM just released their contribution to Open Ajax, but this could be one hell of an IDE and a nice step forward in the Ajax path.

Laszlo Systems is expected to announce this week that it will modify its Web development toolset to let applications run alone in browsers without the Flash presentation system. The company plans to show a preview of the tool at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference this week.

The company's OpenLaszlo development tool is designed for writing Web applications with a rich, interactive user interface, often referred to as AJAX-style applications. The present version of the tool relies on Adobe's Flash to run OpenLaszlo applications. But by the end of this year, the company will have a "Dynamic HTML" option for OpenLaszlo, according to company executives. That means applications would run in a modern Web browser--including on mobile devices--without the Flash plug-in.

source: news.com

I just uploaded a new release of ajaxCFC, and this one carries a rather significant update. I modified the way you pass arguments from JavaScript to your ColdFusion function. Before, due to that you were passing unnamed arguments, you were receiving them in a ColdFusion arguments array; Thanks to Kenton Gray's contribution now you receive all arguments as separate named arguments. The main seller was that you could have built-in validations ... I’m using metadata to retrieve the names of the declared arguments, and if you’re passing more arguments than you declare, they come in as ‘unkwnownXX’, xx being a counter or unknowns. I tested the code in CFMX6, 6.1, and 7, but not yet in Blue Dragon. If any of you could do that for me, it would be greatly appreciated.

Your old code WILL NOT WORK with the new ajax.cfc. You can make it work by one of two methods:
1)    name your arguments and their names in your CF Function. This method is the most advisable.
2)    2 :: the quick method) Remove the args declaration and use the arguments scope as an array by simple removing the args var… use arguments[1] instead of args[1].

Alex Russell has coined a term for a flavour of Ajax that’s been getting more attention of late. Comet describes applications where the server keeps pushing - or streaming - data to the client, instead of having the browser keep polling the server for fresh content. Alex identifies several buzzworthy examples:

• GMail’s GTalk integration
• Jot Live
• Renkoo
• cgi:irc
• Meebo

As is illustrated above, Comet applications can deliver data to the client at any time, not only in response to user input. The data is delivered over a single, previously-opened connection. This approach reduces the latency for data delivery significantly.

The architecture relies on a view of data which is event driven on both sides of the HTTP connection. Engineers familiar with SOA or message oriented middleware will find this diagram to be amazingly familiar. The only substantive change is that the endpoint is the browser.

While Comet is similar to Ajax in that it’s asynchronous, applications that implement the Comet style can communicate state changes with almost negligible latency. This makes it suitable for many types of monitoring and multi-user collaboration applications which would otherwise be difficult or impossible to handle in a browser without plugins.

source: "Ajaxian.com"

IBM has announced the release of their latest offering to the web development community today, an Ajax Toolkit Framework (ATF).

JAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) provides extensible tools for building IDEs for the many different AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) run-time environments (such as Dojo, Zimbra, etc.). This technology also contains features for developing, debugging, and testing AJAX applications. The framework provides enhanced JavaScript editing features such as edit-time syntax checking; an embedded Mozilla Web browser; an embedded DOM browser; and an embedded JavaScript debugger.

The framework is a part of the Emerging Technologies Toolkit (ETTK) and does require a Windows machine (2000 or XP) to run it. If you’d like to download this toolkit, head over to their download site and grab it.

source: "Ajaxian.com"

I still can't believe that Flash doesn't have a built-in regEx match or replace engine, but it can still be accomplished by using external classes. After vast research, I found a class that I really liked and I wrote a VERY simple example validating an email string.

This library is extremely useful because now you can apply patterns to validate numbers, dates, emails, urls, phones, etc. Most actionscripters are not hip or even aware that this is possible, and have to write dozens of lines to validate a simple email address.

You can download the class and the Flash test files, enclosed with this post.

Enjoy!

I just uploaded a small patch for ajaxCFC so it works with ColdFusion MX7 DevNet edition. As you probably know, DevNet adds a little annoying meta tag so you can't use it for production, but it also prevents you from generating anything other than html with ColdFusion, which is really lame.

Anyways, special thanks to Harry Klein for sending this fix. The callback handler has a regEx now that will check for that metatag and remove it prior to processing the response.