I'm researching the world of gaming and thus far I have to candidates: Flash Communication Server (1.5, or 2.0 Media Server), and XML Sockets.

I successfully deployed XML Gateways using a modified version of the default ColdFusion XML Gateway. For my purposes, both are working fine.

I'd like to hear comments on why I should decide on one or another… here're some queue points: price, scalability, reliability, and deployment time just to name a few.

FlashCom is way more expensive; even paying CF enterprise licenses. On the other hand, FlashCom has built in HTTP tunneling, allowing XML sockets to penetrate large corporation's packet filtering.

Both can be easily clustered. I have no benchmarks at all, but I could guess that FlashCom will handle load better.

Please provide your opinions; I'm hiring consultants on this topic, so expect to see more on this topic soon.

Ray Horn, a ColdFusion developer with over 30 years of experience decides to show his ethics and cause some polemics in the blogshpere today.

Ray Camden wrote this nice Blog software, which over 100 blogs out there are using including mine, and this guy –Rabid—chose to take the open source software, make a few modification, encrypt it, remove documentation, remove the link back to Ray’s site, and sell it. How dare he!

Anyways, enough said, find below the links to today’s threads and please join us to ban Ray Horn from the CF community.

Ray Horn's Blog where he claims Ray should pay him! (comments have been removed)
Ray Horn's lame apology
Joe Rinehart
Dynamic Flash
Drisgill
John Beynon
Wayne Graham  good point about Copyright and Intellectual Property
Stephen Collins
Sean Corfield
Ray Camden (official blogCFC author)
Rick Root
John Wilker
Robert Blackburn
Pete Freitag (Open Source Licenses)


UPDATED: Ray Horn just removed his shameful comments on his blog; nonetheless, the word is out!  Luckily, I had the comments opened in my browser:

A few months ago Ray posted some code to generate a google sitemap.xml for blogCFC. He said it’s not final and it will be included in version 4… I guess there was no demand, or no one reminded him because it wasn’t included… In case anyone needs it, here’s a slightly altered version of the code to work for everyone.

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.

GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer.

GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to.

Ever since Google started to offer users a GMail e-mail account, which includes storage space of a 1000 megabytes, you have had plenty of storage space but not a lot to fill it up with.

With GMail Drive you can easily copy files to your GMail account and retrieve them again. When you create a new file using GMail Drive, it generates an e-mail and posts it to your account.

The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. GMail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the GMail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures.

But basically GMail Drive acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer.
You can copy files to and from the GMail Drive folder simply by using drag'n'drop like you're used to with the normal Explorer folders.

Because the GMail files will clutter up your Inbox folder, you may wish to create a filter in GMail to automatically move the files (prefixed with the GMAILFS letters) to your archived mail folder.

You may want to create an email address used only to store files... but this extension works and it's extremely handy.