A couple of weeks ago, we introduced an open source project we have been working on at Alagad called Validat. If you missed the announcement, Validat is a data validation engine for ColdFusion applications. Validat is designed such that it can be dropped into any application with a minimal amount of customization, and perform any data validation needs for that application.

In part one of this article, we looked at the data definition xml configuration option for the Validat data validation engine. In some cases, hard coding the data definitions is not the ideal choice. For example, your system might allow for dynamically build forms and you might want to dynamically assign validation rules to the form fields. One of the core concepts behind the Validat data validation engine is flexibility and the ability to fit into any scenario.

Many of us have tried ways to run multiple operating systems on a single physical computer. Probably the most notable product in this area has been VMWare . Microsoft is catching on with its own Virtual PC offering and of course there is Parallels which came out of the Apple world. One thing about virtualization that is not widely known is that it is an old principle (in computer time terms). It was actually used in the days when mainframes were the only game in town for high end computing needs.

Data validation in its most simplest terms is applying one or more validation rules to a piece of data. A validation rule might be as simple as making sure a value exists for a required field, it it could more complicated by taking multiple data values and testing them together for certain criteria. Each different application has different data that needs validating and different validation rules of varying complexity that need to be tested.

This was actually announced previously by Andy Allan, but both Scott Stroz and myself will be representing Alagad at Scotch on the Rocks 2008. For those who are not already aware, Scotch on the Rocks is a premiere ColdFusion conference in Europe. It's held in Edinburgh, Scotland and, from what I've been told about past events, is simply fantastic. Personally, I'm excited just to be going to Scotland. However, it's an honor to have been invited and to have Scott invited too.

I recently bought a nice Macbook Pro. (Yes, I drank the kool-aid, at long last.) This post is not about the Mac nor the nearly painless transition. Instead it's about one of the small annoyances I found. It seems that, by default, OS X does not want you to be able to tab to select menus in forms. Instead, the next form element after the select menu will be given focus. This drives me insane as a web developer.

Alagad recently launched a new corporate website. (Not like we've kept this a secret or anything.) As a part of this launch we've begun the process of introducing Alagad training programs. A few people have noticed and asked us for more information. So, here's a quick rundown. So far, we've only announced one program, Enterprise ColdFusion with Model-Glue. We'll be introducing more before long. The Enterprise ColdFusion with Model-Glue training class is a four day, hands on, class taught.

One of my biggest gripes about Eclipse has always been the use of workspaces to organize projects. For example, I had a client not too long ago for whom I had several Eclipse projects created. I had at least three projects for frameworks alone. Then I had the legacy application and the new application we were building. I'm sure there was at least one more in there too. Now, it seems like the most widely known way to separate this from your copious list of other projects was to create a Workspace.

In this post, I talked about how easy it is to skin a button in Flex. While my example will work just as easy in Flex 2 as Flex 3, there is an easier way. Flex Builder 3 gives us the ability to visually style and skin Flex components. Flex Builder 3 includes a CSS editor with a design view which allows you to see your styles and skins as you edit them. First, open up Flex Builder 3, if you do not have Flex Builder 3, you can get a beta version here, and create a new project.

I don't typically watch recorded presentations because I'm easily bored and often pretty busy... but this one caught my eye, mostly because MG:Flex was going to be reviewed. https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a200985228/p12266504/ First thing of note: they didn't give high marks to MG:Flex yet, but they said to keep a strong eye on it because they found the concepts to be interesting and the framework to be worth taking note of.