Up until now I had not come across any bugs in CF8 which would force me to upgrade to CF8.0.1, but I did earlier this week.

The bug was in onMissingMethod and came to light when I installed Bob Silverberg's ValidateThis! framework.

I'm running Windows XP and unfortunately my attempt to upgrade to CF8.0.1 failed and I had to do an uninstall and reinstall. The Uninstall also failed which then led me down the horrible route to registry editing. I always feel a little sick when doing things with regedit as its a bit like doing brain surgury in the mirror. One false move and you're dead!

Anyway its all over now and the ValidateThis! demo runs on my desktop machine. I am trying some new ideas in the scaffolding which will build validate this into one of the template sets.

I wasd just reading some comments about the announcements yesterday on ECMAscript.

It seems that Adobe's attempt to make ECMAScript 4 standards based around AS3 have failed, which is a pity but understandable in the circumstances.

One of the comments on Josh's Blog was comparing Adobe (AS1, AS2, AS3, JSFL, MXML, Lingo, ColdFusion, etc etc) and Microsoft Languages (C#, Silverlight, ASP, XNA). This made me wonder what it would be like to have AS3 as an option in ColdFusion to replace CFScript. OK so I know we can already use AS3 in CF8 as a client language but what about the server?

Is there a need to standardise in this way? Do the things I want to do on the client have enough commonality with what I want to do on the server to use the same language?

What do you think?

Update

I have been working on a new project which requires AJAX functionality and unlike some projects have some more time available to try out alternate ideas. The result has been interesting, so I thought I would share it.

There are a number of pieces of funcionality planned and in almost every case there has been a choice of using a CF function or a Spry equivalent and I have come down in favour of the Spry equivalent.

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CF8 just gave me an error in some code that ran OK on CF7.

The error message is:

coldfusion.compiler.ASTsimpleVariableReference cannot be cast to java.lang.String

Which was caused by the use of a variable as an index in a loop. This would have taken ages to find but for a blog posting by Mike Rankin, thanks Mike.

I finally got time to work on this again after a few weeks of hectic madness, which included passing my Coastal Skipper exam and visiting my sister for a weekend. I spent Sunday afternoon and yesterday evening generating code using the ColdSpring Templates and finding the bugs in the generated code. Then I found the place where the bug was generated and fixed the template.

Its quite tedious as on my laptop it takes a couple of minutes to regenerate the application with my test database.

I have uploaded what I have done so far to SVN as it makes my life easier to download it all from SVN onto the various machines I have to test it on. There are probably still bugs in the ColdSpring templates and I know that in the process I have broken the Reactor Templates.

I also changed the order that code is generated in. This is mostly for my own benefit as I was finding it difficult to find things. In the past code in the circuit.xml file was generated in order of fuseaction then object. Now its in alphabetic order of object then fuseaction. This means that all the fuseactions related to a particular object are next to each other.

The new Fusebox 5.5 will be realesed on December 1st so I am working to get my changes and fixes complete by them but I suspect the scaffolding will still be in Beta at that point as I haven't had as much opportunity to test as I would have liked. I been installing new servers or updating old code to later versions of CF rather than developing new code.

You can get the latest code version from SVN at: http://svn.fuseboxframework.org/framework/branches/dev/extensions/scaffolding

I had a note yesterday from Jackie Hill of Peachpit with details of a some new books that they are releasing this month.

Ben Forta's bestselling ColdFusion book has been updated for version 8, Adobe ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit, Volume 1: Getting Started. May well be of interest to my readers. I checked on Amazon and they also have Volume 2 and Volume 3 of the book affectionately known as CFWACK. I have posted links to all three volumes in the right hand menu bar.

With so much new stuff in CF8, Ben has had to split the book into three volumes. The pricing is also interesting since Volume 1 is way less than the other two. Maybe Adobe are getting the point that there needs to be a better path into CF for beginners.

On publicising CF. I see that Kay Smoljak is going to be blogging about ColdFusion at SitePoint. They regularly feature interesting articles about web site development and I often read with interest the articles on Javascript, AJAX, Search Engine Optimisation and CSS issues.

I just read an interesting article on ColdFusion in Computerworld. It highlights the recent improvements in CF8 and its positioning for Web 2.0.

Rob Brooks-Bilson has blogged about the sneak peek of a possible new tag in CF which allows the creation of an AIR application from the CF Page. The application has ability to work offline in disconnected mode and upload the data when next connected.

Fantastic! Will it be released soon or do we have to wait for Centaur?

You need scaffolding!

So you read something somewhere that said you should be using scaffolding and want to know how? Let me tell you a story.

ColdFusion has been developed to make creating applications easier right?

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ColdFusion 8 has now started shipping. Come along to discover and discuss the new features that make this new release a must have upgrade. We will be showing an exclusive Video specially prepared by Ben Forta for user groups.

* Where: Phones International Network House Globe Park Marlow SL7 1LY
* When: Wednesday 8 Aug 2007
* Meeting starts: 19:00
* Meeting ends: 21:00

Some of CF8s new features include:

* Performance increases
* Server Monitor
* PDF features
* Ajax features
* .NET integration
* Microsoft Exchange Server integration
* Interactive debugger
* Adobe Flex integration
* Per-application settings
* Multi-threading
* Image manipulation
* Presentations on demand
* Atom and RSS feeds
* ZIP and JAR file features
* User-based Administrator and RDS access
* Improved file manipulation functions
* JavaScript operators in CFML
* CFC improvements
* Strong encryption libraries
* Reporting enhancements
* Database interaction improvements
* Argument collections
* Array and structure creation improvements
* Expanded platform, OS, and database support

Come along and see why you just have to have this new release. More details on the UKCFUG web site.