Yahoo! Sideline is an Adobe AIR desktop application built with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). It allows users to monitor Twitter by creating and grouping custom queries by topics of interest. It's a great example of an HTML/CSS/Ajax based AIR app, and lots of details have been posted on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog.

Brian Kai has created CF_REF, a CFML reference application for iPhone.

[Via a post on the CFUnited blog].

Adobe and Facebook have just announced a new ActionScript 3 Client Library that can be used to build Facebook applications in Flash. The library is free and open source, and includes more than 60 new APIs designed to compliment current Facebook APIs to ensure seamless implementation. Details are now online at http://www.adobe.com/go/facebook.

SAP Community Network has created a new page with details on how to get started building rich clients for SAP applications. The Web Dynpro for ABAP framework in SAP NetWeaver 7.0 EhP1 provides new libraries that make it easy to add rich data visualization to your applications using the Flex framework. SAP NetWeaver Product Manager Thomas Jung introduces the new page for eLearning, blogs, and other learning materials from both Adobe and SAP.

Mike Chambers has posted an entry entitled Rich Runtime Install Sizes Matrix in which he compares the download size of RIA runtimes Flash 10, Silverlight 2, Silverlight 3 beta, and JavaFX.

Tour de Flex has been an absolute hit since we released it back at MAX in San Francisco. The AIR based app downloaded numbers are staggering. But, some have wanted a Web version, and so, here it is, nearly 200 running Flex examples complete with code for your viewing and learning pleasure.

A user asked me to provide an example of related ColdFusion powered Ajax data grids, where a selection made in one grid would update the contents in a second grid. So, here is a simple example which uses the sample databases that are included with ColdFusion 8. One <cfgrid> lists the artists in the database, and the second <cfgrid> lists the art created by that artist.

First the CFC:

The client side code is pretty simple:

The code uses <cflayout> tags to place the two grids side-by-side. The first <cfgrid> is bound to the getArtists() method, and selectonload="yes" is used to force an initial selection so that the second <cfgrid> can be populated. The second <cfgrid> is bound to the getArt() method. It specifies bindonload="no" to prevent getArt() from being invoked before a row in the artists <cfgrid> has been selected. When getArt() is invoked, the standard four cfgrid attributes are passed to it, along with {artists.artistid}, the artistid of the currently selected row in the artists <cfgrid>.

Adobe partner Universal Mind has announced the private beta of SpatialKey, a next generation information visualization, analysis and reporting system, designed to help organizations quickly assess location based information critical to their organizational goals, decision making processes and reporting requirements. An intro video has been posted, as has a complete feature list. The app is built using Flex and BlazeDS.

Foundeo has announced the release of Web Application Firewall for ColdFusion, a high performance, customizable engine that blocks many types of attacks on ColdFusion applications. The application comes with filters that help block XSS, SQL injection, session hijacking, password dictionary attacks, and more, and supports ColdFusion 6.1, 7, and 8 (and some of the ColdFusion clones). Pete Freitag has posted details on his blog.

Paul Kukiel wrote to tell me that his TweetTrail app is in beta. TweetTrail is a Twitter client which lets you enter a search term to find the top 20 Tweeters on that topic. TweetTrail is powered by ColdFusion and jQuery.

The Center for Consumer Freedom is a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting personal responsibility and protecting consumer choices. The organization believes that only you know what's best for you, and objects when activists try to force you to live according to their vision of society. The Center for Consumer Freedom operates a whole slew of web sites, including PETA Kills Animals, ActivistCash.com, CSPI Scam, Animal Scam, mercuryfacts.org, PhysicianScam.com, HumaneWatch, and more. And all of these sites are powered by ColdFusion 8.

At MAX 2008 in San Francisco, we announced the date and venue for MAX 2009. Lots of you have been asking about plans for Europe this year, and we were unable to respond while we went over the numbers to try and make things work. Unfortunately, MAX Europe 2009 has fallen victim to the economic downturn. This has been an excruciating decision to have to make. MAX Europe in 2007 and 2008 were great events, and we hope to host MAX in Europe once again in the future, but there will be no MAX in Europe in 2009. That's the bad news. The good news is that we are going to make more of the MAX experience available online, making far more content available to a far bigger audience and doing so far quicker, too. Ted Patrick has posted some thoughts on the MAX blog.

Adobe is looking for ColdFusion users with minimal Flex experience to take part in a research study. You'll need to be available for 2 hours on April 2nd in our San Francisco office, and you'll get paid $150 for the session. If interested, please fill in this survey.

SapphireSteel has announced the release of beta 4 of Amethyst, their Flex plug-in for Visual Studio .NET. New to this release are snippets for ActionScript and MXML plus a dedicated snippet editor, context-sensitive help on Flex classes and methods, and a slew of other improvements.

Barney Boisvert has announced the official release of CFGroovy 1.0. CFGroovy is a way to leverage the Groovy language from CFML, and it also provides a plug-in for enabling Hibernate support.

The HP Web Security Research Group has released HP SWFScan, a free security tool to help developers find security vulnerabilities in applications developed with the Adobe Flash Platform. HP found that developers building applications with the Flash Platform often leave security vulnerabilities unintentionally in their code. They decided to develop SWFScan to help not only their own customers, but also developers around the world to make the web a safer place.

Coming out of MIX last week, The Register's Tim Anderson has posted a story on how Flash is helping to define Silverlight features and direction, and he focuses specifically on comparing Adobe AIR to Silverlight 3 running outside of the browser. This one is an interesting read.

Just one this week:

• Unnamed client (San Francisco, CA) is looking for a ColdFusion developer for a 12 month contract. Requirements include knowledge with Mach-II or other MVC framework, and experience with J2EE technology stack. Contact recruiter Manoj Naidu at Aditi Staffing.

Our partners at HD Interactive have posted a report on the Tampa usergroup meeting that several of us attended a couple of weeks ago.

The ColdFusion 8 project-based curriculum is designed to teach web developers how to create dynamic, database-driven web applications using ColdFusion 8. Two courses are available for the download, "Introduction to ColdFusion 8", and "Advanced ColdFusion 8 Development". These can be used in conjunction with the free ColdFusion 8 educational license.

Check out JetBlue's Welcome Bigwigs. ;-)

Adobe AIR applications can be made to be self-updatable. Several months ago, fellow evangelist Mihai Corlan wrote an excellent getting-started article for the Adobe Developer Center entitled Using the Adobe AIR update framework which explains the basics of building updatable AIR apps, be they built using Flex, Flash, or Ajax. And yesterday, ADC published a follow-up article by David Deraedt, appropriately titled Tips for building AIR applications that can be easily updated. Between these two articles, you'll have all the info you need to build your own updatable AIR applications.

Great Indian Developer Summit is one of the premier India tech conferences and events. And this year they are featuring a series of talks on Rich Internet Application development. The web site features rotating banners highlighting different speakers and sessions, and this is the banner highlighting the "team of killer RIA experts".

And who are these experts? From left to right, the first five (Anirudh, Harish, Raghu, Ramesh and Sujit) are members of the Evangelism team, and the next two (Rakshith and Hemant) are members of the ColdFusion engineering team!

Nice to see recognition where deserved!

This one sent to me by Shane McMurray, founder of The Wedding Report, Inc. Cost of Wedding attempts to help couples budget and plan wedding costs. While the list of items that "are included in the average wedding cost or wedding budget" definitely raised my eyebrows, the site is simple, focused, intuitive, and was ranked #14 in The 75 Best Wedding Web Sites on Brides magazine's brides.com. And, of course, the site is fully powered by ColdFusion.

The Adobe AIR team has announced that an update to the Aptana Studio plug-in for AIR development is now available. The update includes some pretty cool features, including an integrated JavaScript debugger, and tools for generating application security badges. An article on the debugger, complete with a video overview, has been posted to the Adobe Developer Center.