Hugo Sombreireiro

New Atlanta, the makers of BlueDragon CF server announced the release of the J2EE version of their server to the open source community. A commercial version will still be available and NA will still have development control . Additionally the .NET version will remain closed.

This can be good news for ColdFusion since one of the greatest arguments against it has been the price it costs against”free” alternatives. Even if I don’t agree with that being a valid argument, with this move things will change. Unfortunately BlueDragon isn’t 100% compatible with CF and several advanced features delivered in CF8 are not available in BD.

While I think this is a positive move by NA, I think it should have been made by Adobe. Their commitment to open source is becoming more and more of a fact and I think CF becoming open source would, in fact ,be very positive. But lets wait and see, who knows what Adobe holds in its sleeve. That being said, I think the value one most pay for ColdFusion is intirely justifiable and I even think it’s a good business all in all.

In a much deserved recognition Adobe ColdFusion 8 won “Product Excellence Award” in the Web Development category of the 18th Jolt Awards. Finally we get to see this great platform recognized by the industry and another award is always good Check out more here.

Internet Explorer 8, known for being a landmark at Microsoft for respecting web standards compatibility, has entered beta 1 availability. I’ve done some tests already and there are still some bugs around, namely in the DIV rendering, specially handling overflow and floats. But still, it’s a great improvement over IE7. Speaking of it, if you really really miss IE7 there’s even a “Emulate IE7″ mode so you can go back to standards incompatibility Final release is scheduled to be available during summer.

To check it out just follow one of these links:

• Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008
• Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Windows Vista x64 Edition and Windows Server 2008 x64 Edition
• Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Window XP SP2
• Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Windows Server 2003 SP2
• Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 for Windows Server 2003 SP2 x64 Edition and Windows XP SP2 Pro x64 Edition

I’ve recently blogged about cfExt, a ColdFusion wrapper for the ExtJS library. Well, now it’s time for PHP developers to feel happy! ExtPHP is a wrapper for the ExtJS 2.0 library that will feel much more intuitive for PHP developers.
For just a quick example using ExtPHP, to create a login window (we’re going to create just a window on this example), you just need to do this:

$jswin = new Ext_Window(
         $wincfg ->
                 layout('fit')->
                 width(300)->
                 height(150)->
                 closable(false)->
                 resizable(false)->
                 plain(true)->
                 items($login));

$window = new JsVariable('win',$jswin);
$window->show();

And there we have a window. Of course you can add variables, content and methods to the window but that will be covered later with a proper post. ExtPHP is currently available as a Technology Preview on sourceforge. Get it here.

YUI (Yahoo User Interface Library) 2.5 was released on Feb 20th. This is a great lib (and works great with ExtJS when needed) and they have a very cool demo of it running on Y!’s developers site so, check it out. Want to know more about the release itself? Check out the official blog post.