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.

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

Quick note on debugging a Rich Internet Application. As you probably know, RIAs usually don't refresh and communicate to the server in the background. You can't easily see the traffic, so I usually recommend using Firebug for Firefox, Live HTTP Headers, Fiddler, and my recommendation, Service Capture.... Well, there's a new kid on the block ... not so new perhaps, but I just finally tried it and I'm loving it. Charles is another http/amf monitoring application with many more capabilities than service capture ... actually, forget about the capabilities, the fact that I can open it with Firefox with no problems should be enough ... but if that's not enough, you can see the traffic is a structured view instead of sequential, which allows you to see the requests by domain, then folder, then file, and it even groups all the flash remoting calls together ... it's a beautiful thing. In addition it does have more capabilities such as seeing cookies, request / response sizes, mirror responses to disk, analyze cache, bandwidth throttle, spoof dns, and port forwarding. I'm very impressed.

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 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

Due to popular request, I added an example showing how to easily submit an entire form through Ajax with the fastSerialize jQuery plugin.

All you require to do is to include this plugin:

Jeff Borisch point out that the cfjson v1.6b that I was using for the jQuery AjaxCFC was buggy. I updated it to v1.7 in the SVN and the project download file... I strongly suggest you get this update.

Cheers.

The jQuery team announced that the jQuery Project and Jack Slocum’s Ext Project, mostly know as YUI-EXT, have partnered to integrate the amazingly lightweight and powerful jQuery framework with Ext’s awesome UI library.

This collaboration will greatly enhance the capabilities of both projects and expand the functionality available to developers using the jQuery JavaScript Library and the Ext UI component suite.

For those of you new to the Ext project, it includes a wide and powerful UI library, such as dialogs, grids, layouts, resizables, tab panels... This is great news for the jQuery community. Now you would be able to extend jQuery with powerful widgets from interface and Ext.

Imified is an instant messenger buddy that offers access to productivity tools like notes, reminders, and todo's. The site is powered by ColdFusion and their IM bot is done through CFMX7 Event Gateways. However, the most important business aspect is that their back-end / account management is all AjaxCFC! :->
The concept is great because it's simple, yet very handy... I wish them luck and hope they add many more features.

I also wrote a few bots before, but quickly ran into licensing issues with the networks. All networks restrict the amount of messages a single user can send/receive per day, and some networks charge up to $50,000 simply to allow your bot to live.