ColdSpring has a brand new website and an official 1.2 release that you can download immediately! There is a brand new quick start guide fully updated for the 1.2 release courtesy of Broadchoice's own Brian Kotek. It covers everything from the most basic usage of ColdSpring up to AOP and remote proxies and includes parent beans and factory beans, both of which I use a lot.

Gert Franz just announced the release of Railo 3.0 and one of the important changes for many CFers is that this release combines the previous Community and Professional editions into a single free edition with no restrictions for use (it's a single "web" with no multimedia support, no clustering support and some server administrator restrictions but there's always the commercial Enterprise edition if you need those features). Railo 3.

From the BACFUG website: Image Manipulation in ColdFusion 8 - Seth Duffey 9/17/08 6:30 PM Adobe San Francisco - Kojak Connect URL: http://experts.acrobat.com/bacfug Seth Duffey will walk us through what's possible with and the dozens of image manipulation functions introduced in ColdFusion 8. Location: 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, California 94103 The Kojak conference room is in lobby but you still need security clearance (so you must RSVP!).

Teratech and Adobe have worked together to create these impressive posters for ColdFusion 8. User groups will be raffling off some of these shortly (BACFUG will raffle three off each month while supplies last) but you can also fill out a Teratech survey to get your own copy (U.S. only due to shipping costs). See the CFUNITED Blog for more details.

Details will be announced at A Wee Dram Of Scotch and attendees at that one day event will get a 10% discount on Scotch 2009 tickets!

On October 1st, I'll be speaking at the UKCFUG about Design Patterns in ColdFusion. Thanx to Kevin Roche for setting that up. As mentioned before, I'll be giving the same talk at the Devon CFUG two days earlier and a talk on Subversion and branches at A Wee Dram Of Scotch on September 25th.

A Wee Dram of Scotch has a location - The Square Pig in Holborn - and has posted the full schedule for the day: Adobe Keynote - Adam Lehman and Claude Englebert ColdSpring - Mark Drew RAD Object-Oriented CFML Development - Peter Bell High Availability: Clustering ColdFusion Applications - Mike Brunt Subversion: Better Living Through Branches - Sean Corfield Setting up a Solid Local Development Environment - Kurt Wiersma Railo 3.

As announced at CFUNITED this year, ColdFusion 8 is now available for free for learning purposes to all students and educational staff worldwide. This is something that many people in the community have been requesting for years so it's great to see Adobe pull this off! For more information, check out these links and blog posts: Adobe ColdFusion 8 for Education on freeriatools.adobe.

Michael Sprague has created a nice set of custom tags that use jQuery to provide alternatives for cfgrid, cfwindow and cftooltip. Currently a "prerelease", this will become a RIAforge project in due course. Another example of the power and simplicity of jQuery.

I was checking the Proton Arts web site today and noticed that Jeff Peters' much anticipated How to Drive Fusebox 5.5 is now available! Just under twenty bucks gets you 110 pages containing sample applications that illustrate each of the new approaches possible in Fusebox 5.5. I love the cover art - especially the freeway sign showing the five possible styles of application! See also this book review by Niall O'Doherty.