Three positions this week:

• Unnamed client (Carlsbad, CA) is looking for 2 Flex developers. Requirements include experience with Flex and with LiveCycle Data Services. Contact recruiter Natalie Fay at Outsource Technical - Information Technology Staffing.
• University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC) is looking for a ColdFusion developer. Requirements include knowledge of ColdFusion, DHTML, CSS, XML, and JavaScript. Knowledge of graphing, statistical and GIS software preferred. Apply via the USC Employment website, refer to requisition number 000505.

Remember the ColdFusion Exchange? It's been languishing and suffering from neglect for a while. But ColdFusion team member Ahamad Patan has taken over Exchange moderation and is committed to reinvigorating this resource.

Download Day 2008 is a planned attempt to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in a single day. As per the FAQ, they'll need over 1.6 million downloads, but want to shoot for 5 million. Which is nice, but sorry Firefox, that'll be no record. Flash Player blows that number away daily, not the 1.6 number, I mean the 5 million number. There have been over a billion downloads of Flash Player this year alone (less than 5 months), which averages out to over 6 million a day. And we've actually publicly stated that we've had days where downloads exceeded 10 million in a day. Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox, use it almost exclusively, and will definitely be downloading Firefox 3. But a Guinness World Record? Sorry, that's quite unlikely.

MAX 2008 registration is now open at the Adobe MAX site. Right now we've only opened registration for MAX U.S. in San Francisco. Registration for MAX in Milan and Tokyo will be opening shortly.

Vertabase Timer is a free utility to help you keep track of time spent on client projects. And the new version 1.5 is a Flex based AIR application (as described in this forum post).

Samuel Asher Rivello has posted his ActionScript 3 and MXML Coding Standards. If you're getting started with Flex, this may be of use to you.

EarthBrowser is an interactive 3D globe of the earth which provides all sorts of regional data, weather information, and much more. (A bit like Google Earth in some ways). And the latest release, version 3, is built as an AIR desktop application (as explained by creator Matt Giger).

And now we have another open source CMS option for ColdFusion. Blue River Interactive Group has announced the release of Sava CMS, its open source ColdFusion-based content management system. The features look pretty impressive, as does the UI in the screenshots. If anyone has personal experience with this product, please share.

UK based Software Editorial magazine has published a detailed review on ColdFusion 8, and concludes "Companies choose ColdFusion to create complex and robust mission-critical applications for internal and external access. While there are a number of ways to integrate web content with relational data, it is a simple task with ColdFusion, and the support for modern technology (Ajax, .NET and Java) is a valid reason to consider using this product." The review wraps by saying the product has "So many positives" and as for negatives, "None I could see. While the price seems steep, even small companies shouldn't have an issue with the price when considering the tools and functionality that the product offers." I couldn't have said it better myself!

The winners of the 23rd Annual SIIA Codie Awards have been announced, and ColdFusion 8 has won the award for "Best Web Services Solution". Other Adobe winners are Connect for "Best Collaboration Solution" and Captivate for "Best Corporate Learning Solution".

The Adobe AIR Marketplace is an online exchange where developers can post their AIR applications. AIR applciations need to be digitally signed, and doing so requires a code signing certificate. Developers who submit an unsigned AIR application to the Marketplace are eligible to receive a complimentary Thawte code signing certificate ($300 value).

I just arrived in Bucharest for two days of meetings at the Adobe offices here in Romania. No public events or customer visits here, just lots of meetings, and then I head to Brussels on Wednesday night.

I just presented an opening session at WebManiacs in D.C. in the magnificent auditorium at The Carnegie Institution. Less than a handful of those present had any experience with Data Services, and so I spent the bulk of the time on LCDS, BlazeDS, data management services, and more. If you have yet to tinker with Data Services, you may want to check out Christophe Coenraets' LCDS Test Drive and BlazeDS 30 Minute Test Drive.

I am on the way to Washington, D.C., for WebManiacs which starts tomorrow. I present an opening session, and then will have to duck out to catch a flight to Europe where I have meetings in Bucharest and Brussels. There still are some slots left for WebManiacs, so register now.

Fellow Adobe Evangelist Lee Brimelow has posted a video on how to get started with new Flash Player 10 functionality.

Yesterday evening I presented a session on data services at a Flex Camp in Toronto. I ran through a series of demos (and ran over time, of course) and several attendees asked (repeatedly, both during the session and afterwards) for me to clarify which needed Data Services and which didn't, as well as which needed LiveCycle Data Services versus those which could use the free open-source BlazeDS.

And so, in the order that they were presented:

1. Basic HTTP calls via <mx:HTTPService> - nothing special needed on the back-end, any server or app that can respond to HTTP calls can be invoked this way, and this is definitely the crudest (and generally least preferred) form of integration.
2. Web Service calls via <mx:WebService> - nothing special needed on the back-end, if you have code that is exposed as a Web Service, then the Flash Player can invoke it (although this generally does not perform as well as the next option).
3. Flash Remoting via <mx:RemoteObject> - this obviously requires a back-end that can respond to AMF requests, if you are a ColdFusion user then you have Flash Remoting built-in and so nothing more is needed, if you are a Java user then you'll want to install data services to give you this functionality (either BlazeDS or LiveCycle DS will do), and if you are using some other back-end then you'll want to look at community and 3rd party offerings (as a rule, use this option over Web Services).
4. Messaging via <mx:Consumer> and <mx:Producer> - this is what powered the chat apps and real-data push updates, and this does require data services on the back-end, and either BlazeDS or LiveCycle DS (including the LiveCycle integrated into ColdFusion 8) will do.
5. Data management and synchronization via <mx:DataService> - this is what powered the synchronized data editing screens (including pushing updates, conflict resolution, auto-commits, and more) and this requires LiveCycle DS on the back-end (sorry, BlazeDS won't do for this one).

The beta of Flash Player 10 has been posted to Labs. New features include 3D visual effects, a new text rendering engine (which also supports right-to-left text), and more. Demos and videos have been posted, too.

Long time ColdFusion developer and community member John Farrar has written ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial which is due to be published in August 2008. Congratulations John, it's great to see another ColdFusion title, and I can't wait to see a copy.

I'll be in Toronto on Thursday for Flex Camp, and in Washington, D.C., on Monday for the opening of WebManiacs. Registration is still open for both events.

When Flex 3 was launched a few months back, we also launched a series of extensions that can be used from within CS3 products to create Flex skins. These extensions (for Flash, Fireworks, Illustrator, and Photoshop) allow designers to skin controls which can then be imported into a Flex 3 project. We've been demoing these extensions for a while, but in the past few weeks several users have e-mailed asking where to find them, so I am posting the link here.

My Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes has been a top seller on Amazon.com for a long time, consistently in the top few hundred computer books and in the top couple of thousand across all books. But I was just informed that is #3 in the Databases category on Amazon.com, and #1 in Database Management Systems, Relational Databases, and MySQL categories. The MySQL version of the book, and the Kindle edition (I didn't even know there was a Kindle edition!) are also in the top 100 database books.

I've been doing some maintenance and code cleanup on my ColdFusion ISP List, and noticed that some entries have not been updated in years. If you know of any companies that are no longer in business, or who no longer offer ColdFusion hosting, or anything else I should be aware of, please let me know. Thanks.

Yesterday I wasted an hour or so debugging a Flex itemRenderer that I was using to display an image instead of a value in a DataGrid column. The renderer had to simply pick one of six images based on the column value, and so it contained a single <mx:Image> tag and a function that set the Image source dynamically. And then I called that function on the renderer's creationComplete event.

Simple enough. Except that the wrong images were sometimes being displayed, the column had the right data, but the code used to select the image seemed to sometimes pick the wrong image. And what it picked seem to change each time I scrolled the DataGrid up and down!

I actually ran into a very similar issue with a TileList renderer a few weeks ago, but then I had no time to figure out the cause, and so I hacked a workaround. But this time, having been bitten by the same issue twice, I had to find out what was going on.

And what I discovered (by using traces and alerts) is that the creationComplete event does not get fired as I had expected. Rather, it seemed to fire only occasionally, and not once per DataGrid row, and so my image selection function was not being executed as expected.

Once I had figured out the problem I searched the docs for any info on renderers and creationComplete, and found this page. And sure enough, "Flex might reuse an instance of the item renderer or item editor, a reused instance of an item renderer or item editor does not redispatch the creationComplete event". Well, that explained it.

The right way to do what I wanted is to trap the dataChange event instead of creationComplete, as "Flex dispatches the dataChange event every time the data property changes".

And so I am posting this for my own future reference, just to make sure I don't run into it a third time.

ColdBricks is a ColdFusion based CMS and site generator, and it's free and open-source. There's a very impressive live demo online, too. This one via fellow evangelist Serge Jespers.

ColdFusion is case-insensitive, and Flex MXML and ActionScript are very case-sensitive. For consistency's sake, when ColdFusion variables are sent from ColdFusion to the Flash Player via Flash Remoting, names are converted to uppercase (that's the default behavior, and it can be changed if needed). So, a structure member named FirstName will be named FIRSTNAME when it arrives on the Flash Player (and referring to it as FirstName in MXML or ActionScript won't work).

But, you actually can force case to be maintained in structures, depending on how structure members are defined. Look at these two examples. The first won't preserve case:

In this example, if the structure were returned to the Flash Player, the members would be named FIRSTNAME and LASTNAME.

Here's another example, one that will indeed preserve case:

This example accomplishes the exact same result as the previous example, in that it creates a structure and defines two members. But in this example, structure member names will be preserved, and they would indeed be named FirstName and LastName when they arrive in the Flash Player.