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.

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.

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/

jQuery 1.1.3.1: 800%+ Faster, still 20KB

1. Improved speeds, with DOM traversal over 800% faster than in 1.1.2.
2. A re-written event system, with more graceful handling of keyboard events.
3. A re-written effects system (with an accompanying fx test suite), featuring faster execution and better cross-platform support.

* I'm finally back from all my traveling.
* Cannes was great; we got shortlisted for the Guinness Hands microsite
* CFUnited was great; gave the 8h flex class to about 20 students. IMHO it went pretty well; tons of examples, started slow and then got well advanced. Then I gave two sessions, one on Factories and one of Flex and Ajax. I liked the factories one, but I wasn't fully satistied with the Flex/Ajax one.
* Happy 4th of July.
* I ordered my new MacBook Pro yesterday. It may take a few weeks (so they said), because I chose to upgrade the HD to a 7200RPM one.
* I will be speaking at Max on ColdFusion (CFMX8) Powered Ajax
* I'm officially hooked into ANT now and will release some scripts soon.

Wow, it was a great trip. Just got back from Cannes, so sorry if someone wrote and I haven't got back to them; in fact, I have about 580 new emails to go through in the next couple of days. I flew directly to D.C., just in time for CFUnited. My Flex class is tomorrow and it's going to be fun ...

I'll post some pictures soon; Nice, Antibes, Cannes, and beautiful cities...

so anyways, good to be back ... Hope to see many familiar faces this week.

I know it's been in the blogsphere for a few days, but if you missed it, ColdFusion 8 Public Beta is Live on Labs; it will let you develop next-generation Internet experiences faster and more easily than ever before. Here are just a few of the key features that you'll discover in the public beta:

• Significant performance improvements - up to 5Xfaster than ColdFusion MX7.
• Server monitoring identifies server bottlenecks, allowing for tuning and improved performance.
• Code debugging speeds your development with set breakpoints, variables monitoring, and step through ColdFusion code with an Eclipse plug-in debugger.
• Integration with Adobe Flex(tm) and AJAX features let ColdFusion power personalized, multimedia-rich applications to enhance your users' experiences on the web.
• High-quality, on-demand presentations can be created dynamically on the server.
• Applications can interact with PDF documents and forms for a printable, portable way to intelligently capture and share information.
• Create and manipulate images with more than 50 new CFML tags and functions
• Native support for .NET objects to easily integrate all of your enterprise data and infrastructure services.
• Server-side printing

HostMySite is offering free ColdFusion 8 (code name Scorpio) hosting, which includes everything you need to test the new functionality, such as .NET framework 3.0, SQL Server Access... not sure if they're going to give me a restricted CFAdmin account to check the server monitoring ... but worth the money -- cough, free -- ... get your Scorpio account now.
I'll post an update as I start playing with it.

So it took me too long, but I just realized that IIS6 does not uses gzip compression by default. IIS6 ships with gzip compression capabilities, but they're turned off by default, and moreover, not straight forward to turn on. You can turn them on for application/dynamic files and static files... the static ones are rather simple, but for the dynamic you need to specify the extensions either through scripting or editing the metabase.xml.

Nevertheless, guess what, couldn't get cfm/cfc files to compress ... well, haven't spent more than 10 minutes, but it shouldn't really take more than that. After these 10 minutes I remembered that there's software out there to tweak and ease up configuring the IIS settings. The most popular one is port80's httpZip, and there's also pipeBoost. After after reading Microsoft's instructions and looking at the two commercial products, which one would you recommend? Have you guys have any experience with either and ColdFusion servers?