Ben Forta announced in this morning's CFUNITED keynote that Adobe has formed a CFML Advisory Committee that will be responsible for guiding and reviewing changes to CFML going forward. The committee is made up of: Sean Corfield, lead Ben Forta, Adobe SanJeev Kumar, Adobe Gert Franz, Railo Ray Camden Rob Brooks-Bilson This is brand new information and details are still being worked out. I was not actually expecting it to be announced yet but I'll post more information as and when I can.

I hardly ever win anything so this is a big surprise and I'm very excited: I won a T shirt in Ben Nadel's National Regular Expression Day competition. If you are not reading Ben's blog every day, you're missing out! He has some of the most interesting and insightful investigations of the behavior of ColdFusion. Ben reminds me of the cartoon with the cat at the therapist... the therapist says "Tell me, on a scale of one to ten, how curious do you feel?

Vince's post stirred up an interesting discussion on the OpenBD Steering Committee mailing list and unveiled Alan Williamson's true feelings about the CF community and many of the people I know, like and respect. I had expressed concerns about the CF community's negative feelings for New Atlanta affecting the perception of Open BlueDragon but Alan doesn't care about that because, well, Alan doesn't really care about the CF community. He cares about CFML and he cares about BlueDragon and OpenBD.

Note: Vince updated his post to use more neutral language - thank you Vince! - so I have updated this post to be more neutral as well. Vince Bonfanti just announced New Atlanta's "new ColdFusion-to-.NET and ColdFusion-to-Java migration services." and goes on to say "As experts in ColdFusion, ASP.NET, and Java technologies, New Atlanta is uniquely positioned to assist organizations that want to migrate their ColdFusion applications to either the ASP.NET or Java EE web application platforms.

Gert is kicking off the Railo keynote at Scotch on the Rocks. Big announcement: Railo is going open source and joining with the JBoss project! It will be LGPL2. Railo Enterprise will still exist and will contain the non-open source features such as video handling and PDF generation, as well as having support offered.

Scotch has a nice, relaxed feel to it (some people might call it disorganized but I rather like it). The keynote was Ben Forta and Adam Lehman tag-teaming the state of the ColdFusion world (CF8 doing very well, working hard on Centaur). Big news for European CFers - there is now a dedicated EMEA ColdFusion specialist, Claude Englebert, so that there is a direct contact for all sales-related issues. This was the hottest issue brought up at MAX Barcelona so it's good to see the U.S.

May has been a quiet month on the blog because it has been an extremely busy month at Broadchoice. We completed our 2.0.2 and 2.0.3 releases and launched the new platform with a fair bit of press coverage. The platform is powered by ColdFusion 8.0.1, running Model-Glue 2 (BER), ColdSpring 1.2 BER and Transfer 1.0 BER and runs on a cluster of 64-bit Linux servers with synchronization of the Transfer cache managed through a set of ActiveMQ JMS server instances. The database is MySQL.

Alan Williamson continues his blog series with an article explaining how to write new CFML tags using the Plugin API, which lets you extend the functionality of OpenBD without changing the core code. I'm hoping to get back to working on OpenBD more seriously over the next few weeks and several of the steering committee will be at Scotch on the Rocks next week.

The recording of tonight's presentation can be viewed online. Thanx to Ashwin Mathew for coming to present. He'll be back in August to present on the ColdFusion 8 Server Monitor. There was no food at tonight's meeting because we couldn't get anyone to sponsor pizza. Hopefully companies will step up to sponsor future meetings.

COLDFUSION 8 AJAX - ASHWIN MATHEW 5/21/08 6:30 PM Adobe San Francisco - Kojak Connect URL: http://experts.acrobat.com/bacfug Former Adobe ColdFusion product team member, Ashwin Mathew, will talk about how to leverage the power of and other gems in the AJAX features introduced in ColdFusion 8. 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 The Kojak conference room is in lobby but you still need security clearance.