Since I just moved AjaxCFC to its own homepage, I moved the SVN repository from RIAForge and created a Trac project. If you had RIAForge's SVN mapped, please update your records: ajaxcfc.com/svn . I maintained the same structure and history, though I plan to restructure it very soon.

Please file any bug and enhancement request into the new trac site.

We all know, and if you didn't, you do now ... Rey Bango is a jQuery evangelist, now part of Ajaxian.com, and long time user of AjaxCFC ... Rey and I have previously discussed adding him to the AjaxCFC team, so I'm proud to announce, he's in ... Rey's first task will be to add jQuery 1.1.4 to the AjaxCFC build, which will go into the RIAForge repo. Some people have updated it manually, but it belongs in the core distribution as well ... jQuery 1.1.4 has massive speed improvements over 1.1.3 and 1.1.2, which is the latest in AjaxCFC's distro. I'll fix a couple of memory leak problems with the DWR version and release it soon, hopefully next week. Welcome Rey and stay tuned.

Anyone successfully deployed CF8 with jBoss? I spent part of the weekend trying a few installs, but I couldn't get even near... note that I'm a Windows guy, I don't even know where to start with Linux ... so I downloaded a Centos 5 VM image, ready to go ... I cheated and installed the GUI (yum groupinstall "X Window" "GNOME Desktop Environment" ... of course, it's because I was running a local development VM, not a production environment .... so performance is not that critical... after that, I installed mySQL, PostgreSQL, Java SDK 5.0.... everything went through smoothly ... Then jboss.... how the heck do you install that? I found on some blogs that people installed it on FC4 and FC5 with "yum install jboss4-all", but that didn't fly with Centos ... I'm not sure if it's because I need to change the servers there yum points to... so I downloaded the files from the jboss.org site... initially I downloaded the latest build, or perhaps, the latest source file, just to find out I have no idea what to do with it ... so I downloaded a previous build JAR installer... ditto, couldn't run it with Java ... ok, so I downloaded a tar.gz... The office site says that it requires no install, just go to the bin folder and execute run.sh ... but that through like 1000 errors... ok, so I gave up on Centos.
I downloaded j2easy, which is a pre-build FC5, Apache, mySQL, PostGre, Jboss4, mod_proxy, ready to rock ... and indeed, it ran fine, but once again I had no idea how to continue from there... I got the cf8-lin.bin file from Adobe .... and .....

I give up... so much for trying to go linux, maybe next month ... I'm sticking with Windows, JRun, and CF8 multi-server deployment. The entire idea was to try to go open source stack, but I can do that with the db alone to save some money ... Linux with PostgreSQL Vs. Windows with SQL Server 2005... that I have running w/o a problem.

Anyone out there can shed the light on a xNis jBoss CF8 install?

Yeah, just finished upgrading my site to ColdFusion 8. The upgrade did not go as smooth as I thought it would. First, my install failed... something about executing an ANT script to delete some file... It had nothing to do with Windows DEP, since I had it disabled... anyways, I reverted my VM to the previous snapshot (oh yes, my site runs on a VMWare ESX Server)... and I tried again ... the only difference is that this time I stopped my CFMX7 services first; well, the only one that was running was Macromedia CFUsion Application Server, since I'm running Multi-server. Well, this time the install worked flawlessly ... or not. It didn't! it wipped all my cfusion admin settings... I had to add all my datasources and mappings again ... what a pain ... luckily I didn't have too many.

Ok, so now the install is not, but my site blows up ... I haven't updated my blogCFC version in a while, but the first thing that blew up was lyla captcha... the way it was invoking XMLSearch was not supported anymore ... I downloaded the latest version and that fixed it... next, blogCFC blows up ... the error was "Expected static method coldfusion.runtime.CfJspPage._arrayGetAt" ... I downloaded the latest version of blogCFC and started patching code... I didn't wan to overwrite my instance since I made tons of chances... though I will probably this week .... so I overwrote the tags for table and column manager and scope cache... now the blog runs fine.

If anyone gets and error please let me know ... I assume I will get an email, but who knows :)

This release is the first one to include contributed content from Tom de Manincor, Brian LeGros, Sana Ullah, Aaron Roberson, and myself. The ColdBox Team and contributors are growing. The following is a list of what this release is composed of:

• Documentation updated and more guides
• New Sample Apps:
  
• Lightwire Sample
• CCTApp by Tom de Manincor  and myself. CCT is actually an application template with ColdBox, ColdSpring, and Transfer, that works with MS-SQL, My-SQL, and PostgreSQL. It contains some more goodness such as a transfer base decorator to enhance your transfer objects, account management, security interceptors and services, a UI table manager, and more... this is just the beginning my friend; wait till you see what's coming for ColdBox 2.1.
  
• #169 Structure variable declarations in the config updated, you can now also use = and : when declaring complex variables.
• #178 LightWire is now fully supported and included with ColdBox for out of the box IOC. You can now develop your applications using a dependency injection framework right out of the box. Thanks to Aaron Roberson & Peter bell for contributing this key feature
• #200 queryHelper new methods: getColumnArray(), getCountDistinct(), getRowNumber() thanks to Sana Ullah
• #205 Critical Concurrency fix in the coldbox.cfm template.
• #206 Removal of client variable references.
• #207 clientstorage plugin syntax updated
• #208 sessionstorage plugin syntax updated
• #209 ColdBoxFactory.cfc updated with new method - getColdboxOCM(). To get a reference to the cache manager from within coldspring. Now you can take advantage of the ColdBox Advanced Caching Control without having to inject the instance of the framework into your business/service layer.
  
• #210 Samples Gallery Content Updated.
• #211 Var scoping optimizations
• #212 Illidium Scaffolding Templates
• #213 Configuration file now named: coldbox.xml.cfm or config.xml.cfm
• #214 Testcontroller - When unit testing relocations, the setnext event will now save the event and querystring
  in the request collection for assertions.
• #215 Significant Performance Optimizations, you thought ColdBox was fast, well now you will fly!! If you are running ColdFusion 8, the performance boost is SUBSTANTIAL
• #217 Eclipse Dictionaries and snippets Updated
• #218 ColdBox Cheat Sheet Updated
• #219 Samples with JQuery updated to 1.1.3.1
• #220 rc scope can now be found natively in all layouts and views. No need to declare it. This does not apply to handler/plugins.
• #221 Logger plugin has been optimized and its 50% faster. You can also define the maximum number
  of archives to keep in the rotation, you can configure it via the settings.xml
• ColdBox Dashboard 2.2.1 is also now included to take care of all setting updates.

For a more in depth overview, look at the Trac Site

So enjoy this release. The ColdBox website is also being renovated and will be launched soon. Development is now strong for version 2.1.0 and we have some extraordinary features coming your way.

It seems like Jason Delmore (ColdFusion product manager) shared some logos with Rey Bango... I'd like to see more variety, but hey, it's the first batch ... check'em out.

YUI 2.3 has been released with six new components, as well as a skinning architecture and a new look for the components. [from Ajaxian]

Features

• Rich Text Editor: Cross-browser support has always been a major challenge for RTEs, and we think you’ll be impressed with how well this editor works across the various environments. You can instantiate it with just a few lines of code for simple implementations
• Base CSS: Nate Koechley continues to extend and refine the YUI CSS foundation. Base CSS itself applies consistent and common style treatments for the foundation
• YUILoader: A mechanism for loading YUI components (and/or your own custom components) on the page via client-side script.
• ImageLoader: Allows you to defer the loading of some images to speed initial rendering time on your pages.
• ColorPicker: The Color Picker provides a powerful UI widget for color selection, featuring HSV, RGB, and Hex input/output and a web-safe color-selection swatch.
• YUI Test Utility: YUI Test introduces a flexible unit-testing framework for the YUI ecosystem and serves as the foundation for our own unit-test battery.
• Skins

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).