The Acrobat Connect recording for last weeks Nashville ColdFusion User Group meeting is now available. Mark Mandel gave an excellent talk on how to build applications with Transfer ORM. The recording is 1 hr and 11 minutes and includes all Q&A. Watch it here: http://mmusergroup.adobe.acrobat.

For those that may not know, I manage the development department at Nashville-based Dealerskins, a leading provider of Internet solutions to the automotive space. We've been working on something very exciting that until today has not been public knowledge: we've been named the preferred Web site provider for Mazda North America. This means Mazda North America has chosen us to create and host Web sites for nearly 700 dealers.

Tomorrow night (7/31/2008) Mark Mandel will be presenting Introduction to Building Applications with Transfer ORM. Here's the description of Mark's presentation as reported on the NCFUG Web site. When developing an Object Oriented web based application, it is normal to have a database with relational tables and a series of objects that represent that data. Often, the amount of time and effort it takes to manually map these objects back and forth from a database is large, and can be very costly.

Next week the Nashville ColdFusion User Group will host a presentation by Andy Matthews on integrating ColdFusion 8 and BlazeDS to create messaging services. If you're one of the many who've been searching for useful information on BlazeDS but haven't found anything, or if you've been wondering what role ColdFusion 8 plays in providing back-end functionality to BlazeDS, you need to attend this meeting. WHEN: June 26, 2008 at 6:30pm CDT WHERE: Dealerskins 404 BNA Dr.

Friday night myself, Brian Meloche, Jeff Coughlin, Adam Haskell, and Rick Mason recorded the inaugural episode of the new CFConversations podcast. The podcast was created by Brian Meloche in an effort to continue the ColdFusion podcasting legacy created by Matt Woodward and Peter Farrell. CFConversations is not a spin off of CFWeekly but rather a new forum for ColdFusion community leaders to get together and discuss anything and everything related to ColdFusion.

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIAA) has announced the 2008 Codie Awards. ColdFusion 8 was the winner of the "Best Web Services Solution" category. Initial press coverage is here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/05/20/Codie-awards-go-to-Red-Hat-Adobe-Salesforce_1.html And the Codie site is here: http://www.siia.net/codies/2008/winners.

I'm hanging out at Webmaniacs this week and there's been a lot of confusion surrounding BlazeDS and push messaging. This confusion has been rooted in Adobe's marketing of BlazeDS including several presenters saying BlazeDS has the ability to push messages to a client just like LifeCycle Data Services (LCDS). Even this week at Webmaniacs presentations have been given talking about the differences between LCDS and BlazeDS.