Ben Forta's Blog

Amazon.com Loves My SQL In 10 Minutes Book

Fri, 09 May 2008 11:40:00 -0400

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 c...

ColdFusion ISP List Update And Maintenance

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:26:00 -0400

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 anyt...

Flex Renderers Can't Rely On creationComplete

Thu, 08 May 2008 08:23:00 -0400

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 <...

Check Out ColdBricks, A ColdFusion Based Open Source CMS

Wed, 07 May 2008 15:09:00 -0400

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.

Preserving ColdFusion Structure Member Case In Flex

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:48:00 -0400

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 de...

TIOBE Responds

Tue, 06 May 2008 09:10:00 -0400

Paul Jansen is TIOBE's Management Director, and he responded to my post yesterday about the ColdFusion being taken off the TIOBE Programming Index. Here is his message: Hi Ben, Thanks for your reply on our TIOBE index. I have added an extra que...

Goodbye MXNA, Hello Feeds

Mon, 05 May 2008 21:12:00 -0400

Adobe Feeds is up and running, replacing MXNA, and running on newer faster servers running ColdFusion 8.0.1. But more importantly, some significant code changes were made to get rid of lots of the problem code - code which was written for tens of fe...

TIOBE, From Hype To Fiction

Mon, 05 May 2008 09:30:00 -0400

I've never taken the TIOBE Programming Community Index overly seriously. It's not really a gauge of anything overly meaningful. As TIOBE itself explains: The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming la...

ColdFusion Positions In NY, Ontario, And CT

Sat, 03 May 2008 23:31:00 -0400

Three ColdFusion positions this week, including one in Canada: New York City Human Resources Administration (Brooklyn, NY) is looking for a ColdFusion developer. Requirements include at least 8 years of ColdFusion experience, as well as strong ski...

Adobe Announces Open Screen Project

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:40:00 -0400

We just announced the Open Screen Project which will be working to enable a consistent runtime environment, starting with the Flash Player, and in the future AIR, to remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and application...

Enrique Duvós' New Blog

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:57:00 -0400

Enrique Duvós, who heads up Adobe Platform Evangelism in Europe (and who's been at Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe for about as long as I have), has a new blog at http://www.duvos.com/.

Resurrecting MXNA, And What Comes Next

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:26:00 -0400

Mike Chambers has posted an entry entitled Update on MXNA (or what the %@#! is going on!) about, well, I think it's pretty self-explanatory.

Check Out YSlow

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:30:00 -0400

Ted Patrick turned me on to YSlow, a Yahoo! Firefox add-on that integrates with Firebug to analyze web page loads and make performance recommendations. I've been using it for a few days now, and this one is very cool, check it out!

Mark Mandel Announces Transfer 1.0

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:52:00 -0400

3 years after starting the Transfer project, Mark Mandel has announced the release of Transfer 1.0. Congrats to Mark and all those involved on this momentous accomplishment! And if you've not bumped into Transfer yet ... Transfer is a ColdFusio...

Four ColdFusion Positions In CA

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:27:00 -0400

Four positions this week, and all in California: VMWare (Plato Alto, CA) is looking for a ColdFusion developer. Requirements include 5+ years of full-time ColdFusion development with at least 3 years experience with CFMX or later (it is strongly p...