It's official, MAX 2007 dates and venues are:

• MAX North America: September 30-October 3, 2007, Chicago, IL
• MAX Europe: October 2007, Barcelona, Spain
• MAX Japan: November 2007, Japan

Details to follow, save the dates!

java.net has published an article by Kola Oyedeji on why ColdFusion should be of interest to Java developers.

FusionDebug 2.0 is a professional debugger for use with ColdFusion MX 6 and 7. FusionDebug now installs a completely pre-configured IDE environment, including Eclipse 3.2 and CFEclipse 1.3, to help you get up and running as quickly as possible. It enables developers to control program execution by setting breakpoints, stepping into tags and CFC's, examining and modifying variables dynamically, and more.

I just arrived in São Paulo, Brazil. For a while it looked like I'd not make it here. I left Detroit early this morning (a 6:00am flight), flying to Atlanta to catch a connection for the 10 hour or so flight down to São Paulo. The flight left Detroit over an hour late because of delays in the deicing area, and then we circled Atlanta for almost an hour due to local weather. We touched down at 9:25 in Terminal B, with my connecting flight scheduled for 9:40am out of Terminal E. And the not overly helpful Delta rep refused to call the next gate to say we were on our way (there were 2 of us trying to make the connection), and then she casually said "you have 8 minutes, you can run to try and make it, but they won't hold the plane for you" (exact words). Well, we ran like crazy, and got to the gate at 9:45am, only to find that they were indeed holding the flight until 10:00am as there were other connections running late as well. Thanks Delta, that was completely unnecessary! :-(

Anyway, I made it, my 4th visit here in 5 years, and it's good to be back (I posted some trivia about São Paulo during a prior visit). I'll be in Brazil until Wednesday night, three days chock full of demonstrations and meetings and customer visits and press interviews and presentations, including a usergroup presentation and a keynote at a local Web 2.0 conference.

But, first things first, mission #1: Find a can of Guaraná and a caipirinha.

Terapad is blogging on steroids, an incredibly impressive hosted application that starts with blogging but also includes content management, job boards, image galleries, event calendars, forums, integration with third party services (PayPal, Google Analytics, Flickr, and more), complete CSS based customization, and much more. It's also really inexpensive - free with embedded ads, or $5/month ad-free. And best of all, the entire system is powered by ColdFusion and JRun.

Utilizing the power of Google Co-Op, Jeff Gladnick has created a custom unified ColdFusion related search engine at http://CFSearchEngine.com.

If you need to quickly edit or browse XML files, even big complex ones, then you may want to download the freebie Microsoft XML Notepad 2007. It's essentially a tree-view editor/browser, with nice search, move/nudge, drag and drop, and more. It also supports search and replace using regular expressions and XPath, and has a diff tool that you can use to compare XML files. And very cheap too, just download it!

Intelligent Enterprise is running an interview with Adobe's Jeff Whatcott discussing Flex, Ajax, RIAs, and more. Not a technical article at all, but if you need higher level content targeted at execs and technical decision makers, this will be of use.

We've managed to squeeze four more usergroup presentations into the upcoming Scorpio usergroup tour. The new venues are:

• May 3rd: Detroit, MI
• May 8th (midday): Indianapolis, IN
• May 10th: Cleveland, OH
• May 21st: East Lansing, MI

Which brings the final count to 22 U.S. venues in just over 5 weeks, a new record for usergroup tours!

We're still working on Tim Buntel's and Adam Lehman's schedules. Tim is already scheduled for a NC visit, and we are working on more locations.

And finally, we're not forgetting Europe, and I plan on 3 or 4 European locations the week of May 28th. I'll post details as I have them.

CFUnited Express is a new mini 1-day conference being put on by the folks who bring us CFUnited each year. There are two CFUnited Express events coming up, one in New York City on March 8th, and the other in Atlanta on March 15th, and I am scheduled to present "Getting Started With Apollo" at both.

The first four weeks of our upcoming spring pre-Scorpio launch usergroup tour have been finalized. Here are the names and dates of the first 18 venues:

• April 23: Seattle, WA
• April 24: San Francisco, CA
• April 25: Denver, CO
• April 30: Dallas, TX
• May 1 (midday): Austin, TX
• May 1: Houston, TX
• May 2: Phoenix, AZ
• May 7 (midday): Minneapolis, MN
• May 7: Chicago, IL
• May 8: Kansas City, MO
• May 9: Nashville, TN
• May 14 (midday): Hartford, CT
• May 14: Stamford, CT
• May 15 (midday): Albany, NY
• May 15: New York, NY
• May 16 (midday): Piscataway, NJ
• May 16: Washington, DC
• May 17: Atlanta, GA

(Yes, that is 7 venues in week four <gulp>).

This is already shaping up to be the biggest usergroup tour to date, and it's going to get bigger. I'll post additional venues as I have the dates. And because so many cities want to be a part of this tour, and because cloning is still not a viable option, we've managed to rope in ColdFusion Product Marketing Manager Tim Buntel and ColdFusion Specialist Adam Lehman, allowing us to drop by even more groups. Stay tuned, more details to follow!

You've got to check this one out. The Amgen Tour of California kicked off this week, and you can monitor race progress using a Flex app that combines Flex, Flex Data Services, Flash Media Server, and GPS equipped bikes. This is definitely one of the coolest Flex apps I have seen to date, and it was built in 4 weeks! Details in the press release and on Mike Potter's blog post.

I've been keeping an eye on phptocoldfusion.com since the blog was started back in October 2006. While the content is neither revolutionary nor earth-shattering, it does help to keep some perspective when pontificating deep ColdFusion issues and questions. The blog went quite shortly after it started, but with 4 posts this month it looks like it has come back to life, and for that I am glad.

Three positions to post this week:

• Univar USA (Redmond, WA) is looking for a ColdFusion developer with 3 or more years experience. Requirements include knowledge of CFCs and SQL skills. Flash, Flex, and Ajax skills are preferred as well. Details posted online.
• A regional insurance company (Central PA) is looking for several contractors to work on ColdFusion and Flex based RIA projects. Contact the recruiter by phone at (570) 748-3234, ext. 1384.
• Round Table Group (Winnetka, IL) is looking for a full-time ColdFusion developer (perhaps two if the right people present themselves). Requirements include Certified Advanced ColdFusion Developer certification and/or bachelors degree in CS/MIS, experience with SQL, Verity, CFCS, Model-Glue, and more. Details posted online.

Hot Banana's Web CMS is a ColdFusion powered content management system that is used on corporate web sites, intranets and extranets, landing pages and micro sites for more than 200 companies worldwide in more than a dozen languages. Designed for non-technical users, Hot Banana is an SEO friendly CMS that manages content creation, publishing, and optimization processes. This week Hot Banana announced that they had created and deployed a massive new intranet for Ingersoll Rand in Europe. The site contains thousands of pages, integration with Active Directory, and the ability to save static dumps of the content to Flash drives so they can be used offline. The implementation is the work of Connexion Corporate Communications, a Belgian integrator (who I met briefly in Brussels yesterday).

I presented a seminar in Brussels today to a full room of close to 100. The crowd showed up to learn about Scorpio, but I made that wait ... I started with some of the MAX integration demos, then moved on to ColdFusion/Flex integration (demonstrating the value of adding Flex Data Services to the mix), and then eventually on to Scorpio. They did not get as much detail as we'll cover in the upcoming usergroup tour, it's still a bit early for that, but they loved it anyway, all of it (especially, nah, can't tell <g>).

Tomorrow I have a presentation to the European Commission (the largest ColdFusion customer in Europe, and the reason I am here), and then off to the airport and back home.

Tim Anderson of The Register attended a seminar on Flex 2, and reports back on Flex, Apollo, and competing with client-side Java and .NET.

The Java version of Google Maps does not run properly on the Samsung BlackJack (as well as other Windows devices). Fortunately, Google has now released a native Windows Mobile version of Google Maps, and it works perfectly on the BlackJack. To download it, go to http://www.google.com/gmm on your Windows Mobile web browser, and just download the CAB file.

UPDATE: After making this post I discovered a really nice Google Maps feature. Once Google Maps is installed a new menu option is added to the Contacts application. Select any contact, and you'll be able to select "Locate In Google Maps" to do just that. Very cool!

IMified is an IM based productivity tool that works across all the major networks and offers access to a number of popular web applications, as well as tools like notes, reminders, and to-do's all in your favorite IM client. The service just launched on February 5th, and has been adding lots and lots of users, and getting lots of positive feedback.

The service is powered by ColdFusion MX7, and relies on the built in event gateways to provide the IM integration (the public site is also running ColdFusion) and ColdFusion and the gateways have handled the high load they've been under extremely well. In the words of partners Anthony Webb and Dave Hoff, "we've brought to market a really slick and useful service and couldn't have done it, or at least as fast, without CF."

CFOUTPUT makes grouping nested result sets really easy, just use the GROUP attribute to specify the column to group by, and then nest CFOUTPUT tags as needed (and multiple levels of grouping are supported, too). This example will display dept each time that value changes, and then create an unordered list of users for each:

CFOUTPUT also makes displaying partial result sets really easy, just use STARTROW to specify the row to start from, and MAXROWS to specify the maximum number of rows to display. Here's a simple example:

Now, what would happen if you combined GROUP with STARTROW and MAXROWS, like this?

You'd probably expect STARTROW and MAXROWS to apply to the entire result set, so that if you had 5 departments with 10 users in each (50 rows total) the first 25 rows would be displayed (all users in the first 2 departments and 5 of the users in the third). But, nope, it does not work that way. STARTROW and MAXROWS do their calculations based on how many times their CFOUTPUT is invoked, and so when used with GROUP, STARTROW and MAXROWS apply to the outer group. In this example, the first 25 groups would be included, and thus all 50 users.

I am not sure that I actually agree with this behavior, but that's the way it is. In practice, this means that if you do need to use GROUP together with STARTROW and MAXROWS, then you'll probably want to copy the subset of query data to be used to another query first, and pass that second subset query to CFOUTPUT.

I get asked about Flex and accessibility constantly, and was therefore really pleased to see this post by Sr. Technical Support Engineer Lin Lin which provides all the relevant links.

Ok, the page and content do cause raised eyebrows, but the fact that someone over at Figleaf took the time to create that Flash animation is mildly disconcerting, despite the sentiment. ;-)

Just one to list this week:

• Blue Raster (Arlington, VA) is looking for a ColdFusion developer / webmaster for API in Washington, DC. Requirements include strong ColdFusion experience, strong database skills, and a good understanding of relational database design. Flash and CommonSpot experience a plus. Details posted online.

I am going to be in Brazil (home of the caipirinha) at the end of the month, and while there I'll get the opportunity to speak to the Adobe User Group in São Paulo. I'll be covering ColdFusion/Flex integration, some Scorpio, some Apollo, and maybe other stuff too. Simultaneous translation is going to be available, details on the user group web site (and here's the official invitation).

With the changes to Daylight Savings Time in the U.S., some of you have been asking about how this impacts ColdFusion. The following technotes explain all:

• ColdFusion 5
• ColdFusion MX 6 and 7 (and JRun)
• General comments on DST with CF6 and up