Oreilly's Ajax Design Patterns has a list of Ajax/ColdFusion frameworks on page 585 and it lists ajaxCFC. It says Restricted open source license (free to use in any context but not redistributable) by Rob Gonda. which used to be the case, but the license changed in February 2006. The book came out in June, so it is understandable that the information was a little outdated... this is what happens with every book on cutting-edge technology .. but the time it's published, some/most/any of the covered topics could have changed, or the is a new, better, or improved way of doing things.

Talking about books, my Real-World Ajax book should had come out a few months ago, but due to delays in x,y,z it will come out next month, during the AjaxWorld Conference. It's a nice book, but I wish it had come out a while back as planned... just like I said, it may be missing some of the new tendencies that came out in the last 6 months; nevertheless, it covers all the basics, intermediate, and many advanced topics, and includes many examples in many different languages...

So lately I ran into this problem where my CMS was converting Flash embed tags into invalidtags and it drove me crazy ... I initially blamed the fckeditor, but when I tried to update my DB with a plain textarea and it did the same I realized the problem must be either in the DB or in my drivers... For those of you who haven't experienced this yet, every time you submit text content to be saved in the db, and 'script', 'embed', and probably many other tags will be automatically replaced by 'invalidtag' tags.... so my clients were uploading swfs, and it kept breaking.

I finally found the problem... ColdFusion has an option in the admin:  Enable Global Script Protection, which I guess after the 7.0.2 update started blocking embed tags coming from form posts. I'm not sure how much protection it provides me since I'm usually pretty good validating all my data, but this fact alone made me turn it off in every development and production server.

Now you know, if you start seeing invalidtag's appearing randomly, just disable the global script protection ...

I've been thinking about doing this for the longest time, but I finally got around to add some non-blog content to my site... I added a basic bio (copy/paste from linked-in), my agenda with this year's presentations (will add links and downloads soon), and a flex app with community jobs.

I like the idea of managing my content from the back-end, so I'm using the page editor from blogCFC, slightly modified to use the fckeditor instead of a plain textarea.

I also didn't like the page.cfm SES ... while it's better than straight up dynamic urls, I'd like them to be cleaner, so I'm using isapi rewrite. I would love to use it for all my links, but after a year of blogging over 500 pages indexed at google I'm not sure it's a good idea... thoughts? should I rewrite my urls and leave both working for a while? this will affect the age of my content ... any expert out there?

I just updated ajaxCFC with a massively refactored utils class, including highlight handler, improved form serialization, debugging, and the ability to use image loading indicators (brought to you by Rey Bango).

to use the image loading indicator use:

if you're looking for a simple chat application for your web site check out CFOpenChat. It's a simple customizable chat for ColdFusion using ajaxCFC, works with mssql, mysql, and it's free and open source.

Adobe Flex 2 has been out for a couple of months now, and lots of ColdFusion customers are discovering that the combination of ColdFusion and Flex allows them to deliver powerful and engaging applications easier than ever before.

One area of confusion appears to be the Adobe Flex server: Adobe Flex Data Services. What is Adobe Flex Data Services? What exactly does Flex Data Services allow you to do that you wouldn't be able to do without it? What does this mean specifically to us ColdFusion developers?

Ben Forta's new article Adobe Developer Center article entitled ColdFusion and Flex: Do you need Flex Data Services? explains.

I'll be presenting Ajax for ColdFusion Developers to both the local Boston CFUG and also the Online ColdFusion Meetup Group.  The event detail for the OCFMG is:

http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/events/5113555/

I was tempted to use the same pressos I have at the Ajax World Conference, but I think I may change it up a bit and add some opinions about Spry, Ajax Vs. Flex, ColdFusion Frameworks, and then some... I want this not to be another Ajax presentation, but something that clears up doubts in the community ... if you have any specific topics you want me to cover, there is still time...

See you all there.

just uploaded a new release of AjaxCFC with a couple of fixes:

• backwards compatibility for single arguments with an object, provided by nathanael waite. You may add the setComplexInputStruct(boolean) to the top of your function to enable or disable allowing argumentCollections to be passed to ajaxCFC. If enabled and a single object is passed as an arguments, it will be threaded as a collection. This is enabled by default.
• fix in the argumentCollection option mentioned above to allow passing a single array argument.