Before I stareted developing applications in Flex, I was primarily a ColdFusion developer (and still am). OK, there was that brief time when I used PHP, but I was going through a 'phase'. I missed the seemingly mythical debugger in earlier versions of ColdFusion, so when I started developing Flex applications, the debugger was just this thing in the toolbar that had a nifty little button, but I was really not to sure what to do with it.

This is just a quick entry to point out that Alagad's Model-Glue training prices have been dropped by 40%. I received some helpful feedback from the community and decided this was the right thing to do. Anyone who has already registered will receive a refund for the difference. Click here for more information on the Enterprise ColdFusion with Model-Glue training class. Click here for the February 2008 training session to be held in Arlington, VA.

In my opinion, one of the least discussed but more useful features of ColdFusion 8 is the easy integration with Microsoft Exchange Server. Without having to navigate through the quagmire that is the Exchange LDAP directory structure, you can easily retrieve and manage mail messages, calendar events, contacts and tasks. There are several projects I have worked on where this functionality would have been a blessing.

Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, VMWare and Xensoft are colaborating in an initiative to create an industry standard for distributed virtual machines. The proposed name for the standard is OVF for Open Virtual Machine Format. This was announced on September 10, 2007 and in my opinion is another important milestone in the evolution of virtualization and is also indicative of the rapidly maturing possibilities offered by virtualization.

With In the previous articles in this series, we looked at all of the different concepts that went into developing Validat and making it as flexible as possible. In this last article, I want to actually show how easy it is to implement Validat into a form validation scenario. Validat could easily be used to validate business objects or in other data validation scenarios as well, but for now, we will just look at a form validation situation as I expect that will be the most common usage.

The last piece of the puzzle for Validat is a concept called Data Transformers. When we were researching the requirements for Validat, I made several blog postings trying to determine how people handled validation. One of the things that came out of those postings was that the data being validated was not always in a structure such as the form scope.

For those that have been working with Flex, or at least just reading some of the press, you will know that Adobe also puts out a very nice IDE called Flex Builder. While Flex Builder gives you a lot of time saving features, it is not strictly necessary for deploying Flex applications. It is possible to compile your Flex applications from the command line using the free compiler that is available for Flex.

The first installment of my new FusionAuthority monthly column is online. The column is called "Community Chronicles" and the goal is to write impactful and unique columns reflecting the state of the ColdFusion community from a different perspective than has been traditional in the ColdFusion community previously. In the first installment, I include quotes from Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, and Jonathan Wall, leader of the developer relations team.

In my continuing quest into all that is good with Ant, one of my tasks was to interface with our Subversion repository in order to export the latest code base, possibly tag it, al before shipping it off to the testing or production server. In looking around, there are several ways to doing this - some that are limited to use within Eclipse, some that require third party downloads, and several others that were not documented well enough to know what they did.

Earlier this week I announced that Alagad would be offering training sessions on Model-Glue and several related technologies. Simply put, the feedback I received was tremendous. As a result, I’d like to announce that our first off-site training session will be held in Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington DC, from February 4th to 7th, 2008. Program details can be seen here. Details for the session can be seen here. Registration has officially opened.