2007 Buy CFMX7 At A Discount And Get Scorpio For Free
Tim Buntel just posted a note about a promotion being run by two Adobe partners. If you are running an older version of ColdFusion (pre-CFMX7) then you can buy CFMX7 with subscription right now for 25% off the list price, and as it includes subscription you'll get Scorpio for free when it ships. If you are running CF5 or CFMX, and plan on upgrading to Scorpio when it ships, this can save you some money.
2007 On My Way To Phoenix
Yesterday's Scorpio presentations in Austin and Houston went very well, despite unforeseeable gotchas. In Austin the group needed to find a new venue at the last minute because weather forced another event to be brought indoors forcing the usergroup out of their reserved room. This resulted in us starting over an hour late, which delayed my drive to Houston, which caused that event to start late too. Thanks to the usergroup managers for working around these glitches, and to the attendees for being so patient. Fortunately, all present seemed to think that the sessions were worth the wait.
I am in IAH, about to board a flight to Phoenix for a presentation this evening. If you are in the area, please drop by (or visit any of the other upcoming Scorpio Usergroup tour venues).
2007 Working With JSON In Scorpio
There have been some comments on other entries here regarding JSON. JSON is a data interchange format, and is primarily used as a way to package data for use with Ajax development.
ColdFusion 8 (aka Scorpio) adds support for JSON in several ways:
- For starters, two new functions named SerializeJSON() and DeserializeJSON() make it easy to convert data to and from JSON. Simple variables (numbers and strings), dates, arrays, structures, and even queries can be converted back and forth. ColdFusion queries get converted into JSON objects with two entries, COLUMNS contains a list of columns, and DATA is an array of arrays containing the actual data.
- A supporting IsJSON() function does exactly what its name suggests.
- In addition, CFC methods can now be instructed to return data serialized as JSON by specifying returnformat="json". This is perfect for Ajax controls that invoke CFC methods to retrieve data.