Having never been before I am looking forward to seeing how this show is run. There are a host of new exciting things that i'm specifically interested in this year so the timing couldn't be better. What i'm hoping to get out of Max this year is a greater understanding of the Adobe product suite, specifically looking at Flex 2, Flash Lite and some Coldfusion 8. I must admit that I have been sceptical about the furture of Coldfusion for a while, but I keep using it because it's easy and reliable.

It's great the WebDU is on again, but for me I was hoping it might have moved interstate this year. After a lengthy discussion on cfaussie. I wish to post that everyone should try to attend this event. I'm going to try to get one person from my work to go, but what I want is for more Melbourne and Interstate people to go and tell them to bring the show to Interstate one day. http://www.webdu.com.

Following on from an interesting idea from Andrew Scott I had a play at reducing the Coldfusion whitespace. Doing this with Andrew's gzip method could get some pretty good results. Here's how to trim most of the whitespace from coldfusion pages easily, and it's easy to improve. Take this simple page Test Page Line number #i# Rendered in the browser is 7.80k Now without changing this code or any CF settings, I can get this down to 4.

I've been recently pondering the merrits of Coldfusion and the use of some framework. Although Fusebox, Mach-II and the like are all fairly robust and mainstream there are a couple things to consider before adopting one. 1. Is it going to make the process easier or better long term. 2. Is it going to be supported, can you get help when you need it. 3. Are you going to have to rework your code with every new release. When recently managing a team of Java developers, they loved frameworks.

After many years of Macromedia / Adobe people telling us we couldn't have a Coldfusion debugger. A third party has created one, FusionDebug. http://www.fusion-reactor.com/fusiondebug/index.html I've been playing with it and in my opinion it is fantastic. It has all the features you would expect. Stepping into / over lines. Adding breakpoints / watches. It is very easy to use, not too hard to get up and running. Overall it's a nice bit of work.

For a long time I have wished that CF would have complete support for cfscript. Especially when writing components doing this tag style is just not really logical. I have come to the conclusion, that Adobe should dump cfscript and support ActionScript for CF development. Having had a look at lots of Flex apps, I love the ActionScript syntax. It's clean consice and familiar. Not only that, it makes sense. Why should I have to learn two languages.

Tariq Ahmed ran a poll and posted the results here. I don't quite agree with the scoring, so have posted my own version here.

I hate the fact that Coldfusion makes you use big long scope names. It would be great if you could define aliases for them or if CF8 had this standard. Application = app Session = ses Form = frm Request = req Variables = var URL = url Caller = cal You get the idea. <cfset application.myStruct.node = application.myStruct.node & "2" /> becomes <cfset app.myStruct.node = app.myStruct.

At the request of some people on cfaussie I have made availble a FTP sync component. This is a simplified version of a larger component that we use at work. If anyone wants any additional features let me know. It allows you to copy files from a FTP server into a local destination, perfect for backup purposes. There are two parts sync.cfm an example calling page sync.cfc the sync component It can be downloaded from http://dale.fraser.id.au/downloads/sync.

I attended the ColdFusion Victorian UserGroup for the first time in 5 years. It's a long time between drinks and i'm sure there are a lot of other people out there who have attended in the past and not been in a while. I strongly encourage everyone to get involved in their local group, there are so many new things happening in ColdFusion and Adobe in general that i'm sure you will learn or be inspired. I was inspired to setup this Blog and try to promote the groups further.