I will be heading to the airport in about an hour to fly to Minnesota for the cf.Objective() conference.   There is so much good content crammed into the next 3 days that I plan to come back with my head completely abuzz with new ideas.  I imagine next week will be a string of nights with little sleep as I usually end up on a coding binge when I get back from conferences!

Last night (April 30), Ben made a visit to Dallas to present to the Dallas Ft. Worth ColdFusion User Group on ColdFusion 8 Scorpio. Below are some of the notes I jotted down as he went through. I start with the tags and new attributes that he introduced. CFIMAGE - This is some really amazing stuff. Since the beginning of ColdFusion we have always had to use external programs to manipulate images, from cfx tags in the early days to more recently using Java libraries to do the work.

As the subject says, this is a last minute reminder that Ben Forta will be presenting to the DFWCFUG tonight.  For those that are either on the fence about going tonight or had lost track of their days....  DO NOT miss tonight's presentation.  So far we have about 80 confirmed attendees and if you are not one of them, you will be missing out! For all the details, check out the DFWCFUG blog. See you there!

I often find myself working in Javascript and thinking "Man I wish there was a JS equivalent of the CFML xyz() method!" Tonight was one of those nights as I was about to make my own ListAppend() method. Instead, I came across a Javascript library that is collection of ColdFusion functions ported into Javascript, written by a guy named Randy Anderson. If you are ever looking for any of the functions listed below, go check out Randy's Javscript Library of ColdFusion Functions.

It seems that the community is abuzz (and rightfully so) about the news that Adobe has open sourced Flex.  In the middle of all of this Flex hype, I wanted to point out a couple of great presentations both today and tomorrow covering ORM database abstraction tools that are being coordinated by the Online ColdFusion Meetup Group lead by Charlie Arehart and Raymond Camden .

Earlier I made a post about Ben Forta visiting our ColdFusion User Group next Tuesday night. This would have been great except for the fact that he will be here Monday, not Tuesday! Unfotunately, by the time I corrected the entry, the aggregators had already consumed by feed and the link to the original post is no longer valid. That said, you can read about the visit here: My original post on the subject on this blog: Ben Forta in Dallas next Monday night!

Just a reminder for all of you that Ben Forta will be joining us next Monday night here in Dallas, presenting to the DFWCFUG. This is going to be a really awesome meeting, and I urge anyone even remotely near the metroplex to come out for this rare opportunity.

I am currently working with an existing Mach-II /Reactor application that we are planning on moving to BlueDragon7 JX under Linux.  Yesterday I ran it under BD for the first time and found some errors that we had not seen before, so I began walking through a series of changes to get the application running.  So far the only changes I have had to make are within the Reactor framework itself.

I visited Sean's blog this morning and saw that he had posted his schedule for cf.Objective() over the weekend.  Considering the fact I always wait till last minute for that kind of thing I figured that I would break my routine and do something ahead of time for once (unlike my taxes!).   I registered for cf.Objective() based on the reports from last year, and the speaker list from this year but hadn't really taken time to go through the schedule.... well...

Last night Steve was kind enough to do a remote Connect presentation to Dallas/Ft. Worth CFUG demonstrating his free, open source project DataMgr, which is a really slick data abstraction tool. I gave a fairly detailed account of his presentation on the DFWCFUG spot, including links to demo and download the project.  Go read through the bulleted features and give it a try.  Pretty cool stuff! Here is the presentation summary .   NOTE:  CFUG Managers...