When I first read Luis's entry on ColdBox Beta 2: Flex/AIR Integration this is pretty much that immediately went through my head ...

Gotta be honest: at first I didn't buy into it... You have to be careful on separating your logical layers... if ColdBox is a front-controller, why would a Rich Front End talk to it? It should talk to your Service Layer... and your Service Layer doesn't need ColdBox ...

However, after talking to Luis I discovered, what if, what if you make ColdBox become your enhanced service layer manager? What if your ColdBox Handlers become part of your Service Layer API? What do we have? We have a Service Layer with built-in environmental settings, logging, error handling, event interception and chaining, you name it ... Now it all makes sense...

This is good; real good ... perhaps you'll see a full 60 or 90 minutes presentation on this at CFUnited or CF.Objective() 2008.

Keep it up.

That's right. If you're planning to speak at CFUnited 2008, tomorrow is your deadline. If you don't plan to speak, you can still suggest topics or speakers.

I just submitted a few topics, including but not limited to advanced framework development, enhanced service layers for ria's, ria's data security, db real time data manipulation, some facebook secrets, and more ...

See you at CFUN08.

If you ever see the following error when performing a cfhttp call:

It means that ColdFusion is trying to connect to a secure socket layer, but unfortunately, it can't.

So here's the situation, we launched a huge campaign and everything worked on the local environment. There's this one piece where Flash had to connect to a 3rd party's API and post some data using sendAndLoad. The 3rd party has a /crossdomain.xml allowing remote calls, therefore that will not be the problem when it breaks... Amazingly, everything worked from the IDE, but not when published... Still can't figure it out, but we're already late and I need a solution ... I know Flash can connect to my ColdFusion back-end, so I choose to write a proxy ... really simple, loop over every item in the form scope and create a cfhttpparam for it... I write it and deploy in about 3 minutes. It does not work!

Why? cfhttp cannot connect to the 3rd party ... I notice that they're using a 256bit encryption, which I cannot recall, but I might have read somewhere that it won't work with cfhttp. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I had no time to research ... The point is, cfhttp will not connect to that server.

When I google'd the error, thankfully, the first result was from my respected friend Steven Erat. It's a 3-year-old entry showing how to import a certificate to ColdFusion MX, but it still applies.

I followed step by step his instructions, and 10 minutes later my ColdFusion server was connecting to the 3rd party, effectively proxying the Flash RPC call.

Next step now is to find out why I could not connect directly, but my client and I can sleep tonight.

Thanks Steven.

One of my Subversion repositories got corrupted today and every single operation started failing, returning an error message: PROPFIND request failed on '/path/to/repo/ No Such Revision 296.

After researching for an hour I could not find anything, nada, nothing at all ... I found a few posts on dumping the data, creating a new repo, importing again ... but like I said, every operation on the repo failed... I couldn't even try those options.

So I chose to backup the repository's file system and fix it myself... I noticed that the error claimed that revision 296 did not exist and indeed, when I opened the db/revs folder it only went up to 295. With a completely wild guess, I opened the /current file and noticed that it had the 296 revision number on it, so I assumed this is the pointer to the latest revision, but the data never made it to the server... I modified the number to 295 and everything immediately started working.

Again, it was a wild guess, but it worked ... Hope this saves someone a few hours.

update: I think I found out how it broke. Someone committed a file that Nod32 caught with a virus; SVN increased the repo version, updated the indexes, and then the antivirus deleted the data...

ColdBox 2.5 Beta 1 is out with tons of new goodness:

• Application.cfc support
• OnSessionStart/End support
• Interceptors
• Request Context Decorators
• Request Context Persistence for NextEvent
• White Space Control
• Unit Tests Updates
• Much more...

Check out Luis's announcement for more detail.

People, listen up ... Ext 2.0 Beta 1 was released today ... for those of you still not familiar with Ext, it is what powers the ColdFusion 8 Ajax UI: Windows, Menus, Grids, Trees, etc. With the 2.0 release you have an amazing power to build desktop-like apps on the Web .. Start Menu, Desktop Icons, Task Bar, Windows, ... you really have to check it out. It blew my mind .... Where to go from here?

• Official Blog PR
• Desktop Application Example
• Portal Example
• Updated API Documentation

It's not dead (or even dying), it's just...
Not dead, just ... stealthy
Not dead, just ... getting the AJAX treatment
Not dead, just ... in an upgrade cycle

Read more at a new ComputerWorld rectifying story.

Thermo is amazing! It will bridge the gap between designers and developers, allowing developers to get in the game at an earlier stage; allow customers to feel the application and not just see it in planning phase... Prototyping just upgraded to a whole new meaning. The customer doesn't know what he wants until he sees it; now this applies to RIAs as well, how nice is that?! I really can't wait to start using it.
You read about it on the blogs, but there's nothing like seeing it in action ... even on early stages, I can already visualize us being an early adopted and using it on every RIA project.

Without getting too deep into the demo, Thermo allows to create a new RIA project, spits out Flex code... allow designers to use familiar tools such as layers ... or you can import a PSD, separate all assets, convert graphics into controls, group data into arrays for dummy data.... it's amazing ...