The next JaxFusion meeting has been announced. The meeting will be held at the new location at the Modis building in downtown Jacksonville. The topic this time will be covering integrating .NET with ColdFusion. There are a lot of new features coming in ColdFusion 8, but it is possible to integrate older versions of ColdFusion and .NET. The presentation will cover the differences between the different versions of ColdFusion and BlueDragon.NET. If you live in the Jacksonville area, come on out.

One of the problems in the past with ColdFusion has been that you could not load CFCs into the session scope of your server in clustered environments, and have those CFCs replicate to the memory of the other app servers in your cluster. The issue was that session scope memory stayed resident in the memory of the application server. You could replicate simple data such as strings, but complex objects would not. In the Java world you can serialize java objects across servers.

The ColdFusion 8 beta is now up on Adobe Labs. If you have not an opportunity to get on the earlier betas, now is your chance before the final product is released.

Ben Forta has responded to the Mary Brandel piece on ColdFusion being dead. In his response, he mentions that Computerworld has refused to hear from Adobe or listen to their side. All in all, sounds like Shoddy journalism from Computerworld.

Lets analyze the facts. Is ColdFusion Dead?

This paragraph is taken from a Computerworld article today that I saw on DIGG. This once-popular Web programming language -- released in the mid-1990s by Allaire Corp. (which was later purchased by Macromedia Inc., which itself was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc.) -- has since been superseded by other development platforms, including Microsoft Corp.'s Active Server Pages and .Net, as well as Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other open-source languages.

The JaxFusion user group will be moving to downtown Jacksonville. I do not have the next meeting scheduled yet, but the meetings will be held at the Modis building in downtown Jacksonville.

John Lyons had a post about whether to encapsulate your business logic in CFCs vs. Stored Procedures. The answer to this question is "it depends".

There are a number of dynamic languages that are already supported by .NET, such as Iron Python and JavaScript, but according to this article at eWeek, Microsoft has made this easier to do with a dynamic language runtime. The article inteviews Jim Hugunin and John Lam of Microsoft about the language support.

If you are curious about some of the new features in CFMX8, Ian Smith posted some of the new features that Ben Forta presented on last night in Seattle.