Matt and Peter were able to talk to Vince Bonfanti about the recent decision to open source BlueDragon (a topic we discussed on the podcast two weeks ago). As always, you can get it by either subscribing to the podcast via ITunes or by downloading it from the ColdFusion Weekly web site.

My manager is attending the BEA Participate conference in May (we run their portal product), and yesterday he and I sat down with a developer who was creating the portal for the conference itself. The conference portal was designed to promote social networking: attendees will be able to track the status of other attendees, see what their interests are, leave comments for them on their comment wall, and communicate with them via a Twitter channel.

In this episode of the podcast, Matt and Peter talk to Charlie Arehart about the sessions he'll be presenting at the cf.Objective() conference, one on step debugging and the other on the server monitor in ColdFusion 8. As always, you can get it by either subscribing to the podcast via ITunes or by downloading it from the ColdFusion Weekly web site.

The latest ColdFusion Weekly podcast has been released. The topic: New Atlanta's announcement that they will offer an open-source version of BlueDragon, their CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) processing server. Just like last time, you can get it by either subscribing to the podcast via ITunes or by downloading it from the ColdFusion Weekly web site.

For those who don't know, ColdFusion Weekly is a podcast about ColdFusion and ColdFusion-related technologies hosted by Matt Woodward and Peter Farrell. It's been on a bit of a hiatus because Matt and Peter have been really busy, but it's back. You can get it by either subscribing to the podcast via ITunes or by downloading it from the ColdFusion Weekly web site.

My colleague Chris, a Java developer, was making arrangements to attend this year' JA-SIG conference. As he was finishing up, he found a link to Google Maps that ended up taking him the Google Maps Street View of St. Paul. He'd never seen the Street View feature of Google Maps, so he showed it to me. It was only when I saw the view of the hotel from the street view and saw the name of the hotel did I realize that JA-SIG is being held at the same hotel as cf.Objective(), the Crowne Plaza.

Given all the other blog posts I've seen coming through my RSS feeds, this is hardly news at this point, but New Atlanta has decided to open-source their J2EE version of BlueDragon, a web application server package that runs/executes CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language, the language of ColdFusion): New Atlanta announces free open source BlueDragon edition I'm certainly happy about this development (as are many ColdFusion developers) because that means that anyone who wants to develop with ColdFusio

One of the new features in ColdFusion 8 is the ability to manipulate images using ColdFusion tags and functions. For example, the code below (all server-side code) will take an image file on the server, overlay it with text, and create a brand new image file in temp space and display it to the browser: A week ago, an idea popped into my head: "What if you could create a UI tool that would let a user decide what text should appear on the image and where it should appear?

So it's official now: eligible Americans will be getting a tax rebate check in the mail, probably in May, between $300 and $600 each ($1200 total for an eligible couple filing jointly). The government's hope is that we'll go out and spend this money, thereby stimulating the retail economy. Personally, I doubt it'll help the economy that much, but I'm willing to spend a little of that money for the cause.

I was trying out the ColdFusion 8 <cfdbinfo> tag for the first time today, attempting to retrieve the names of all of the tables in a particular Oracle datasource. I used a <cfdump> to return the results, and I was startled to see a query object containing over 2,000 records. A bit more than the 35 records I was expecting. All of the unexpected entries were system tables or views. I have no idea what purpose they serve or if they're even part of the datasource per se.