So I've been getting in to Ruby on Rails a little bit lately. In the course of my investigation into RoR, I took a look at JRuby, which lets you run Ruby scripts from within Java. Well, within ColdFusion, we can access Java objects as well, hence we can also run Ruby scripts from ColdFusion. How do you do this? Well, I've wrapped it up nicely for you into a little CFC called RubyLoader. You can find RubyLoader as a project on my Google Code site.

After a bit of downtime, thanks to a corrupt VPS, I am back in action.  Special thanks to the support folks at HostMySite for getting me back up and running.

If "Web 2.0" was all about interactions and experience, then what I like to call "WebNext" is going to be about how we communicate with our services. The experience revolution that we've been a part of in the last 5 years has changed the way we use the Web, but WebNext will fundamentally change the way applications communicate and that will open up doors we never thought possible. So what is going to drive all this? Well, it's quite simple. Ever since we've had the Web, and into Web 2.

A few days ago I was on a call with some sales people from Curl who were pitching us on their platform. I've sat on this a while because I wanted a chance to fully look into it and give it a fair shake. Having said and done that, I can say that I am not impressed. One of the first points that the sales person made was something to the effect of "We're huge in Japan." That's all well and good, but the RIA market is much more than Japan.

I know this is purely speculation, but I have to wonder if that with resignation of Sean (angered by Vince et al .... again) and Mark ("defecting" to Railo), that OBD is losing momentum? Maybe I'm reading too much into these two resignations that came so close together. Still, I would think that two of their highest profile champions bailing out signals, at least to a lot of people who pay attention to the CF blogosphere, that something is not right with the ship.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I despise the term "Web 2.0". It's not that I think it's a bad idea, I think that people get it wrong. Web 2.0 is not about the technologies, it's about the experience. People who say that they can develop Web 2.0 applications by simply using Flex, Flash, or AJAX are not wrong, but they're not right either. These technologies are nothing new. XML is over 10 years old. Javascript is over 13 years old.

This came into my inbox via ThinkGeek.

Want to see what's going on at WebManiacs?  Want to see if what you were doing got caught on film?  Want to post pictures to the WebManiacs Flickr group?  O?uz Demirkap? has setup a flickr group for WebManiacs 2008.Just like cf.Objective(), I've created a Flickr Group Viewer app.

Here are the slides from my preso today:  "Fundamentals of Mach-II".  Enjoy.

I head out to Webmaniacs tomorrow.  I'm speaking at three sessions:Fundamentals of Mach-IIFlex & Java (Implementing BlazeDS)Open Source Flex / CF PanelI am also trying to organize a trip to a local DC area rock gym.  If you're interested, or know of a good one in the area (Metro accessible), leave a comment.