As you probably know, ColdFusion 8 came out today and it has tons of Ajax/DHTML goodies. It's based on YUI+EXT, which is a great, powerful, scaleable, documented solution... but it weights just too much. A simple cfwindow requires about a 360k JavaScript download ...

I checked the source code, and it's mostly minimized, which means it's hard to reduce the code-base even more... however, you can gzip it. Most/All modern browsers support gzip data, and the difference is huge.

With Apache you can use mod_gzip, but with IIS is slightly more difficult. The best solution IMO is to install a 3rd party tool such as port80 httpZip.

Check out the following comparisons.

CFWINDOW

So which hosting company will provide CF8 first? I'd say hostMySite...

Who and when?

As Sean said, ColdFusion 8 available for trial and purchase. Standard Edition price is unchanged, Enterprise Edition moves up to $7,500. All language features are available in Standard Edition but "limited". Enterprise Edition adds additional DB drivers (as usual) but also the server monitor, multi-server, user/role management for the administrator and sandboxing.

ColdFusion 8 Updates for DW, HS, Eclipse also available and can be downloaded from ColdFusion Support Center, along with the report builder, the .NET integration service and the Flex/Flex Remoting components (making it easy to connect to CF apps).

The past: Luis Majano and I go way back; I remember the first time we met was when I interviewed him at iChameleon. That that he showed me the framework he developed, which would be equivalent to ColdBox v0.1. It was already pretty interesting; he showed me all kinds of documentation, which immediately made him unique ... Which developer out there actually loves documentation? Name one, please! So at the end, Luis ended up leaving sandals and moved to California, but the framework kept going.

The present: ColdBox has gained some popularity lately, perhaps because of it's vast documentation, because it does not use XML, because it has tons of plugins built-in, or just because slowly people see how nice the framework is. Luis did his first Adobe Connecto last week for cfframeworks and got a decent amount of attendees, many of which started blogging about their interest in the framework. Currently, at version 2.0.2, ColdBox is extremely stable and plays well with ColdSpring, Lightwire, Transfer, cfcUnit.

The Future: I joined the team and will start blogging about it more and more. I'm contributing directly with the core with architecture, refactoring, and many new additions and tools to be announced. I'm really happy to be part of ColdBox, and I hope to help taking it to the next level.

Papervision3D 1.5 (AS3) Official Release. This version of the engine has seen a 40%+ increase in speed! The API didn’t change a bit, and they added some new features like culling and InteractiveScene3D with Interactive materials.

Here are some of the significant changes:

1. Optimized main render loop.
2. Implemented ‘plugable’ face culler - 1 extra available at this time.
3. Moved rendering from Face3D to materials, adjusted all current materials to override drawFace3D().
4. New Materials : BitmapWire, BitmapColor, and CompositeMaterial (add multiple materials to this one single material).
5. Moved all instances to their respective classes…fixed stars, vertices and DisplayObject3D to do so.
6. Face normals are implemented.
7. BitmapFileMaterial bug fixed - if used more than once, bitmap was displayed flat within the model’s body.
8. Added progress events to BitmapFileMaterial and Collada objects
9. Integrated InteractiveScene3D to 1.5
10. Added Interactive materials for use with InteractiveScene3D - makes displayObjects that use an interactive material dispatch mouse events via InteractiveSceneManager.

Extra, extra, tons of frameworks news on the way

• GreatBizTools, LLC (GBT) has recently purchased the copyright to the Mach-II framework
• Model-Glue is finally 2.0
• Model-Glue for Flex Alpah 1 available
• Transfer re-working the entire SQL engine to make it even faster
• Transfer to add composite-keys support in the next release
• ColdBox adds application Unit Testing
• ColdBox to add unit testing to the entire core framework
• More exciting news about ColdBox coming Monday. Stay tunned.

Luis gave his ColdBox presentation through Adobe Connect today. He had some initial problems with his Mac and Connect, I guess they don't play well together. After a few minutes writing jokes on the chat, Luis came back using a PC and gave his presso. It was really well receivied and covered topics such as downloading, installing, configuring the framework, using the CFEclipse ColdBox plugin, installing the CFEclipse dictionary, and the ColdBox dashboard. He briefly mentioned to unique selling points such as built-in intelligent caching, unit testing, internationalization, multiple environments support, and more. Check it out and see for yourself.

Back in December I perform an egosurf test, so I chose to re-take it and see that changed... here're the updated resutls.... not much change at all... is that good or bad?

Resutls for "Rob Gonda"

This is your once chance to learn ColdBox from the creator. I've been asking Luis Majano to present his precious framework since January, so behold, it's here. Luis will be holding a ColdBox worshop over with CFFrameworks.com tomorrow, July 18th, at 3PM EST. Join us using the URL below.

http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/coldbox/

The biggest changes were full Vista support and the removal of the 65,536 piece limit for torrents.

Also added was support for finding local peers (peers on the same LAN) and optionally not having any upload restrictions for them.

It is also possible to turn on automatic updating for betas now, found in the "Other" section of the preferences.

http://download.utorrent.com/1.7.1/utorrent.exe