I'd like to to make a case for the ability to nest CFTRANSACTION tags in ColdFusion. I think this would be incredibly useful, since not being able to nest transactions is becoming an increasing pain. I know this is probably wishful thinking, and that it might be a while before we see it (if ever). But I wanted to start a public discussion about it and get thoughts from others, as well as urge people to submit this a a feature request to Adobe using the request form at http://www.adobe.

Ray already blogged with a link to it, but this is so important that I think it needs to be aggregated to everything we can get our hands on. Damon Cooper has put up a survey asking about what features you use and what you want to see added to a ColdFusion IDE. Please fill this out and let them know what you want, and hopefully we'll see a great IDE just for ColdFusion that rivals FlexBuilder.

One of the great things I discovered while working on the Flex version of my Bookstore sample application was another affirmation of the benefits of a good service layer. In this case, it was very easy to take query data coming back from my service layer and convert it into an array of Value Objects that Flex will then translate into ActionScript Value Objects.

I've been using ColdSpring for a long time. I love it. And I love it when I learn something new about it or hear about a technique that I hadn't considered before. Chris Scott recently commented on the ColdSpring list that he always creates proxy objects for his service layer objects. Even if he's not using AOP at that time for that particular object.

I've also been tapped to present at the 2008 cf.Objective() conference. My session is called "Leveraging Code Generation to Jumpstart Your Development". There are two kinds of coding: fun and boring. We all want to focus on the fun kind, but unfortunately the boring, repetitive kind also has to get done. Luckily, a lot of the boring coding can be generated for us! The underlying concepts of code generation will be discussed.

Since I'm learning Flex in preparation for what will probably be a large project, I thought it would be smart to also tackle learning Cairngorm. In case you don't know, Cairngorm is a framework (they call it a Microarchitecture though I don't really see the distinction other than it sounds fancier) for creating RIAs with Flex. I won't lie to you, Cairngorm is a monster.

In my first entry on the process of learning Flex, I mentioned that my primary learning device is my Bookstore sample application. I used this application as the basis for my talk at the ColdFusion Frameworks conference earlier this year. In that talk, I showed how building a framework-neutral model layer makes your programming life a lot easier. To illustrate why, I used a single Model, running ColdSpring and Reactor, to interact with a Fusebox 5, a Model-Glue:Unity, and a Mach-II application.

Just a quick note about some updates to the RIAForge projects for ColdMock and the CFC Stub Generator. ColdMock had an issue when trying to mock a method that was defined in a superclass of the target object. This has been corrected. It will also validate arrays of components as return types (i.e. User[]) (thanks to João Fernandes for contributing this fix). The CFC Stub Generator has some significant additions as well.

Just a quick note that Doug recently posted about a sweet price decrease for his first Model-Glue training class. Setting up a training business is difficult so the price drop doesn't surprise me at all. You really need to build up a base of happy students who spread the word, and in the beginning that means you need appealing pricing. Well, this is good news for anyone interested in building their ColdFusion skill set.

Just wanted to make a quick announcement that I have a ColdFusion 8 Overview article up at CNET TechRepublic.com. It probably doesn't contain much that will be new to the average ColdFusion Blog reader, but my hope is that it will expose some of the great stuff in CF8 to people outside the existing CF community.