While this last sentence may sound like some ass-kissing towards the organization, it isn’t. I have been part of this conference for the last 3 years now and I must say, of all the conferences I’ve attended, this is the one with the most amount of crazy people attending… which is a good thing by the way.

Many of you who read my blog will probably know that for ColdFusion, met pet peeve is actually ORM. I just love that stuff. I also love the way it connects so simple to a Flex application, for instance. But you also know that I have a soft spot for R&D and love fooling around with Phidgets and Arduino. Well, for this edition of SOTR I was thinking why not combine both and use ColdFusion to work with physical devices. So, here’s the short introduction on what I’ll be talking about

Most of you have been programming a lot in ColdFusion, creating compelling data-driven web applications or just plain websites. But these types of applications and websites are just the tip of the iceberg. What if you could tap into the matrix and control what’s really out there? In this session you’ll learn about how you can leverage your existing ColdFusion skills to control hardware such as motors, RFIDs and sensors, which allows you to create all kinds of robots and some real world fun and games. And why not take it one step further and use the latest HTML5 possibilities to control those contraptions with your mobile device? Whether it’s domotics, robots or games, the only limit is your imagination (and budget, of course…)

I will be bringing some practical applications with me – that’s going to be another interesting episode at the airport talking my way through security with a bunch of prototyped electronic devices :-S – so make sure you are in the front row to get a good look at what you could be creating next! I hope to see you there!

In May 2012 I struck out on my own, starting my own company called Silver Lining. Ever since I graduated I was always thinking about whether or not to start up my own company. Back then I had the excuse of not having any real-world experience and it would be a big gamble. At that time I was also living with my parents, no kids and no real responsibilities too. But still, I found my comfort in the fact that finding work was not my problem, but my boss’ . And therefore I decided to start my working career as an employee.

Over time I switched jobs a couple of times and every time I quit my job or got my resignation due to crisis situations in that company, I started wondering again whether or not to start up my own company. Now, by this time, I did get married, had kids, bought a house and a lot more responsibility. Whereas in my first few jobs I couldn’t care less about not being paid for several months, now the situation was completely different. So, again I choose for the safety of being an employee and having a fixed wage at the end of each month.

But do you see the theme here? The interest of striking out on my own was kept alive inside my all that time. And in 2012, after having a very successful career in an Adobe Authorised Training Centre, things started to get a little tricky. I wasn’t feeling satisfied in my job anymore. I was tired of constantly having to battle upper management for things they didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand. So, after some pondering (but not a lot this time) I decided I should just jump in the water, head first and see if we can float in the world of freelance developers. This is something I had learned from my previous boss: sometimes you just have to jump

I thought: “well, I’m an Adobe Certified Intructor for several years now, have 8 years of experience in Flex, AIR and LCDS, have even written a book about it, made it to Unit Manager of the AATC I was working for and even became an Adobe Community Professional. So I haven development, management and presales experience. That should get me started, no?” And that was the only thing rational about making this decision.

The first few months were a struggle. I found it hard to find the proper projects. I was good in a niche technology, but the downside of working in a niche market is that there is not an awful lot of work to be found. Especially not in the sense of project work for a limited time (because I do like to change my environment regularly to keep me sharp). And because of that, the focus of Silver Lining began to shift. I found a nice challenge as Team Manager to get a derailed ColdFusion development team back on track, so that was combining my management and development experience. Something I completely didn’t plan on doing when I started out 3 months before that.

I really like this job and decided to move forward in that same direction. That is why I enlisted in a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt course; to gain extra knowledge in process and change management and be recognised for that as well. I mean, a lot of these methodologies are based on plain common sense. But you can’t sell that to a potential client. I may be right and I will get the job done, but they are more reassured by official certificates from well-known training institutions.

So, there it is. I started my company to get cracking at interesting small web development projects, and 9 months later I’m deciding to move in another direction. Does that mean I’m no longer doing web development? Not at all! It will still be part of my business, just as training will always be part of it. But it’s just a shift in focus. I know this is a gamble, because freelance management jobs are also rather scarce. But in the end, if I don’t go for it and try it, I will never know!

ColdFusion is still very much alive (for those of you who think it isn’t) and now there is another server update you can (and should) install. This update addresses the following bugs:

• ColdFusion server is non-responsive when receiving a POST request with an XML body for a Web Service
• Web sites fail with ‘Service Not Available’ error intermittently
• Pages with multiple frames load the incorrect pages when updating frames, intermittently
• Application pool on IIS 7.5 crashes due to certain Web Service requests
• DateConvert(“local2UTC”, date) breaks other DateTime functions

Before you run this update, make sure you have installed this mandatory update first!

You can also read the full details of this release at http://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/coldfusion-10-update-3.html

Let’s start with the next version that they have mapped out. The codename for the next ColdFusion server is &qout;Splendor", while the codename for the next release of ColdFusion Builder is "Thunder". What do they hold for us? Well, the server will focus more on mobile and social media integration, as well as have a number of new and improved PDF functionalities, while ColdFusion Builder will also focus on mobile development, but will also allow for extended JavaScript development.

Now if that’s not cool enough, ColdFusion will also move into the cloud and of course we mustn’t forget the fact that at the moment ColdFusion is the only server solution with this level of HTML5 integration, which will continue to be elaborated on as well.

What about the next + 1 version of ColdFusion and ColdFusion Builder? Well, the respective code names are "Dazzle" and "Blizzard" Both products will continue to work on the same mobile and social media integration, but will add analytics and multi-screen support. Of course, performance, security and language enhancements will remain on the agenda as always

Now, one big thing with software releases is of course the question about support. How long will the current version continue to be supported? Well, the chart below clearly indicates that you don’t yet have to be worried about not getting your support anymore. ColdFusion 9 will be officially supported until 2014 and with extended support contract you can even last until 2016. I strongly feel that by then you should definitely moved on to the latest version of ColdFusion to benefit from the upcoming features (especially geared towards mobile). The current version of ColdFusion 10 will get support until 2017 (and 2019 with extended support contracts), which is 5 years at least.

Now, I think that is hardly something to worry about at the moment. Especially since upgrading a ColdFusion server is not really a hard to do. And the upcoming features certainly looks promising too…

First of all, there is the concept of multi threading that is being introduced in ActionScript. For those of you who don’t know what multi threading is, it is a system where you can run multiple tasks at the same time and they all get a separate thread assigned, which means they get CPU time all together. Very simply put, if you have a quad-core CPU and 4 tasks to run simultaneous, each task will get a full core to its disposal.

In Actionscript, these threads are called Actionscript workers. Thibault Imbert has some great basic examples that you can download and explore for yourself.

Although this system is mainly conceived for gaming purposes, all developers can use this to their advantage, be it for heavy duty batch processing in the background or optimization of multiple user access. As an enterprise developer, I’m really happy with this, because this will increase the performance of some of the applications I’m writing.

There is however some sad news as well. To be able to fully take advantage of this new feature you’ll need full support in Flash Builder (for debugging), which is not there yet. But it will be here soon. It will become public in August, so they promise.

Secondly, there is now camera support for StageVideo, using the attachCamera() method. This makes using the camera in your application uses very little precious CPU time, because it will now work on the GPU.

Next up is the image processing from the camera. If you wanted to use the image from the camera to work on, up until now you needed to work with BitmapData.draw() to get those pixels. That meant a lot of development overhead in creating additional objects just to get the camera image. Now, you can simply use these 3 new methods:

This makes it a lot easier to work with the camera data, because you can simply create the necessary buffer to store the data, call these methods and don’t have to worry about the rest.

Another major upgrade for this release of AIR3.4 beta is the fact that it now supports debug deployments directly onto iOS devices. Up until now, when you wanted to test an application on iOS devices, it was quite the hassle to get there. You had to use iTunes or the iPhone configuration utility. But now the ADT supports direct launch of debug apps on iOS devices. Of course, that means that you still will have to wait on the Flash Builder update to run it from within the tool itself.

There are a lot more feature updates as well, but for myself, these are the major ones. And I can’t wait to play around with it. To download the Flash Player 11.4 and AIR 3.4 beta versions, just go to http://labs.adobe.com.

Below you can find the links to all of these recordings. Just click on the session titles to watch them and get up to speed on the latest and greatest:

• RESTful WebServices made easy in ColdFusion 10 by Chandan Kumar
• Hidden gems in ColdFusion 10 by Charlie Arehart
• Improve your apps through unit testing by Jamie Krug
• ColdFusion Builder: The professional IDE to boost your productivity by Ramchandra Kulkarni
• What’s new and different about ColdFusion 10 on Tomcat by Charlie Arehart
• Get productive using the language enhancements in ColdFusion 10 by Matt Gifford
• User experience upgrade through HTML5 charts and videos by Dave Ferguson
• Adobe ColdFusion: The most popular server side platform for PDFs by Tim Cunningham
• Revamped scheduled tasks in ColdFusion 10 by Jeff Coughlin

If you’re completely new to ColdFusion you might want to check out the following recordings as well.

• Getting started with web application development using ColdFusion by Elishia Dvorak
• Power your ColdFusion 10 apps with HTML5 WebSockets by Ray Camden
• Building applications using ColdFusion 10 and ORM by John Whish
• Using ColdFusion frameworks for application development by Scott Stroz
• Secure your apps using ColdFusion 10 by Pete Freitag
• Make your site searchable with ColdFusion 10 and Solr by Scott Stroz
• Speed your websites using caching in ColdFusion 10 by Rob Brooks Bilson

If you’ve gotten interested in ColdFusion, but don’t know how to get started, Silver Lining can help you get the proper training, workshop and coaching to get you started on your project. Just contact us and we’ll work something out.

This workshop is going to be one day of intensive coding to create a complete business application from scratch. The application will be hooked up to a server for back end communication and will also incorporate several features of the mobile device, such as multitouch gestures and camera access within the application.

As a technology, Flex has had a rough couple of months now and some people still believe that it does not have a future and Flex is already dead. Well, this workshop is there to prove that Flex is still very much alive and it is still a viable technology to create mobile applications across multiple devices.

It also doesn’t matter if you are already familiar with Flex, but it is preferred that you at least know your way around Object oriented principles and you have a basic understanding of what XML looks like.

The workshop starts at 8.30AM and lasts until 5-6PM depending on the group. Nobody is left behind and everyone walks home with a working application! The workshop will also tour through several European countries, such as France, UK, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.

If you’re not in one of these countries and would like to host this workshop either publicly or internally for your own employees, please contact Silver Lining for details and pricing.

For more information about this workshop and registrations, please visit the Silver Lining website at http://www.silver-lining.be/workshops/flex-mobile-workshop/.

For those of you who are not familiar with the app, it is a graphical representation of the current and daily power output of your solar panel installation. The app was called SolarLogger.

After some time reactions started coming in, asking for an update, because some things we’re clearly missing. And I agreed. I just had to find some time to update the app. And guess what, I’ve finally found the time to do just that.

Now the app is available with some necessary updates, but it is also licensed. However, the basic app still remains online for free. What has been changed?

• Added support for historical data by means of a date selector in the header
• Added support for multiple inverters in case you have a large solar panel installation. Up to 10 inverters are supported in the graphs and data view
• Added support for showing the individual values of the inverters in both the graph display and the data view
• Optimisation of the data conversion and other internal stuff you won’t actually see

For the moment this addresses most of the requests I have been getting. However, I will continue to develop this app for even more support for months overviews and such…

The new app is called SolarLogger Plus, because it is based on the free edition, with additional features, and it can be found on the Google Play store right now. You can go directly to the app by clicking here or by scanning the QR code below with your mobile device.

Comments, remarks and additional feature request are always welcome as I will try to update this app as it goes along.

I chose the name Silver Lining because I believe that just as every cloud has its silver lining, so does every software problem or training need. Things may seem dark at the beginning, but there is always a solution: nothing is impossible (well, at least when it comes down to software solutions ).

Silver Lining focuses on expert consultancy and training in (former) Adobe products such as Flex, AIR, LiveCycle Data Services, Acrobat, LiveCycle Designer, Captivate etc.
Silver Lining also provides presales help, audits and code reviews. And I also work with a team of great individuals who are aces in other Adobe and web related products as well, so I can provide you with all the knowledge you need to solve your software problem.

Founded by long-time Certified Instructor Steven Peeters, the company prides itself on having extensive practical knowledge in Adobe technologies and a firm grasp of how each and every Adobe product can help you solve your problem.

Training can be provided as standard authorized training courses from Adobe, as well as by means of custom trainings, tailor made to your specific needs. Intensive (multi-day) workshops also belong to the possibilities.

Whether you’re in Belgium or anywhere else in the world, Silver Lining takes the training to your location, so you don’t have to worry about moving your employees around.

So if you have a project that needs expert assistance or you’re in need of a decent training or workshop offer, just contact me and find your “Silver Lining”

It has been a while since we’ve heard anything on ColdFusion and what would be coming next. But that just means that the ColdFusion team has been very hard at work. And now the latest and greatest version has arrived. You can download the new version at http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family.html

Now, let me go over some of the things that are new or have changed:

• Security enhancements to protect you from cross-site scripting etc
• Dynamic and interactive HTML5 charting
• Improved webservices support with Axis2
• A very greatly improved scheduler (for scheduled tasks)
• Enhanced caching to boost performance
• Support for HTML5 websockets (which is plain awesome!)
• Microsoft exchange server integration via Exhange Web Services (EWS)
• HTML5 video player support with fallback to Flash Player
• Enhanced bi-directional Java integration
• …and many other features

Let me comment on some of those topics. The HTML5 websockets integration is a really cool feature that allows you to conduct bidirectional communication between several clients at the same time. It is an alternative to the BlazeDS Java integration. You see the term HTML5 popping p everywhere nowadays and thus also in ColdFusion. Adobe is keen on becoming a leader in the HTML5 technology as well and I personally think this is a very good step in that direction.

One thing I find really cool is the fact that the Flash player is now being used as a fallback technology in case HTML5 cannot be rendered. It used to be the other way around, with HTML being the fallback. To me that sounds like HTML5 still has a long way to go before becoming a standard in the industry. Being at the cutting edge of technology myself, I sometimes forget that there are still people out there that use IE6 and not everyone is keen on updating their tools every few months. Especially companies are more reluctant to do frequent updates. They rather wait for a while and do a major update like once a year even. But again, Adobe has obviously though of that and has foreseen that fallback mechanism, so you can use the feature anyway and you don’t have to write some hacks to see if it can or cannot be used.

The extended bi-directional Java support is also something I find very useful. Now you can not only use Java classes inside of ColdFusion, but you can also write ColdFusion components and use them in plain Java code as well. Perhaps this will make the Java guys less reluctant towards ColdFusion technology, because any way you look at it, ColdFusion IS Java. It’s only been made a lot easier and faster to work with.

And of course I mustn’t forget the ORM feature. This is not really new and it’s also not really enhanced that much, but it is still a feature that is not enough used in my opinion. OK, it’s definitely not the holy grail for database applications and query performance enhancements are not always that easy to implement. But it is still a powerful feature for Rapid Application Development. You can even use it in your Flex and AIR applications, which keeps you from bothering yourself with creating the local database, synchronising data with the online server etc. The ORM feature does it all for you.

In honour of this release the ColdFusion User Group Belgium is hosting one of the Scotch On The Rocks events in Brussels on May 24, 2012. If you have a chance to drop by, please do and I’ll explain more about this ORM feature in AIR on mobile devices. But you will also find a lot more great speakers who will explain a lot more about the new ColdFusion 10 features as well. So, don’t miss it and grab your free tickets at http://www.coldfusioneurope.eu