If you missed Ray's presentation tonight, you can view the recording which is also available in Charlie Arehart's UGTV (User Group Television). Connect crashed a few times on Ray after about an hour in but he logs back in pretty quickly (Adobe really need to fix the Leopard compatibility problems with the Connect Add-In!). It was a great talk - well attended - and I learned a lot about how powerful Spry really is (I hadn't looked at it before because I thought it was "too simple" - my mistake).

The ColdFusion Jedimaster, Ray Camden, will be in San Francisco in person tonight to talk about Adobe's Spry JavaScript framework and how it can help ColdFusion developers create great user experiences using idioms that are already familiar to them. Details on the BACFUG website. It's too late to RSVP but if you turn up "unannounced" you can still get a security badge to get into the meeting room. Bring photo ID. All non-employees entering the Adobe building are required to sign an NDA.

Vince Bonfanti has posted a good explanation of several of the details and implications of opening up BlueDragon. I was pleased to see him call out my blog post about the announcement! Hopefully his post will clarify a lot of the misconceptions I've seen expressed in a number of discussions. Vince points folks to the new Open Source forum on the New Atlanta website which has a lot of good information about the details of dual licensing, the expected process for contributions and so on.

Just noticed a great article by Roman Villareal on the Adobe Developer Connection about customizing Eclipse for ColdFusion development. It walks you through installing CFEclipse and the ColdFusion Extensions from Adobe, using snippets (and the SnipEx server), tasks / todo lists, code / application wizards and so on. If you're new to Eclipse or still on the fence about it, it'll be good reading.

In a move that has surprised some folks, New Atlanta has announced plans to create a free open source version of their J2EE BlueDragon product. They will continue to develop, sell and support a commercial version of it, as well as continuing the .NET version and the standalone JX version (neither of which will be open sourced).

As many folks know, I've long been an advocate of Paul Kenney's cfcUnit unit testing framework. I felt it offered the most solid code base and the best all-round feature set in a package that was idiomatic for ColdFusion developers. Unfortunately, the website has not been updated in over 18 months and, although a new build was made available on sourceforge.net a year ago (1.2.0 Beta 1), there has been no progress on integration with Eclipse.

Fusebox 5.5.1 is a minor bug fix release and is now available for download from the Fusebox website. You can read a PDF of the Release Notes from the docs directory in the Subversion repository. If you're using the new no-XML style of Fusebox development, introduced in Fusebox 5.5, you should upgrade to Fusebox 5.5.1 as soon as possible. If you're using the traditional XML approach, you should read the Release Notes and decide how important this upgrade is for you.

Are you an intermediate / advanced level ColdFusion developer in the Ohio area, looking for an opportunity to work with Mach-II, ColdSpring, Transfer and Flex - with some experience in at least some of those areas? If so, you might be a fit for one of my clients. Feel free to contact me if you're interested and want to be introduced to my client.

The ColdFusion Jedimaster, Ray Camden, will be in San Francisco in person to talk about Adobe's Spry JavaScript framework and how it can help ColdFusion developers create great user experiences using idioms that are already familiar to them. Please RSVP via the BACFUG website.

You can now register for Scotch on the Rocks and get the early bird price up until April 30th. This is because you can now get one-day and two-day tickets as well as the original three-day ticket. The three-day ticket is still just 199 GBP (+vat) but will increase to 299 GBP (+vat) after April. Still a reasonable price for what you're getting but why not save yourself a hundred quid?