I saw Jason Delmore's new wish list last night, and I think it's the best ever. For one reason. He states that Adobe should release a free version. And he uses all the same reasons I've always used. You might be saying, "What's the big deal? Another CFer saying we need a free version...we've heard it before." But this is different. Jason Delmore is the former Product Manager for ColdFusion, and when he talks more people listen than when the average joe CFer says "please release a free version". As far as I know this is the first time a big name in our community has publicly come out in support of a free version (correct me if I'm wrong). People like Sean Corfield and Ray Camden either don't think we need a free version, or if they do they don't talk about it publicly.

By the way, I like most of the other 9 things on Jason's list as well. But this free version topic is BIG, in my opinion. I hope Adobe listens.

To be clear...it's not that I personally want to benefit from this free version. If I wanted that, I'd just use Railo or OpenBD. The problem is that the rest of the web development community is not aware of the free alternatives. The majority of them won't become aware of them UNLESS they first join our community by trying Adobe CF. And they won't even give Adobe a second look because of the huge price tag. I realize there are other reasons that might hold them back, but in my opinion the price tag is the biggest reason that hobbyists continue to ignore CF.

If you are a ColdFusion developer that runs Linux on your desktop, you are probably aware that you can't get an official Linux version of CFBuilder. Well, there is a way to run CFBuilder on Linux, thanks to Mark Mandel. He has done some leg work to find the files you need from the Windows version and then you can run a script he wrote to get it all working. I haven't tried this yet, but it looks promising.

So my next question is...if Mark can do this, why can't Adobe figure this out and release an official Linux version? Especially since they do have a Linux version of ColdFusion.

I have had a few people ask me if I am going to update CFQuickDocs to include ColdFusion 9 tags and function documentation. The quick answer is...it depends. ;)

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Most of you probably won't care about this find, but I'll share anyway. I am debating if I should update CFQuickDocs to include the ColdFusion 9 documentation. To do this, I would need access to a local copy of the doc pages (tags and functions). In the past Adobe has been helpful to me with this, pointing out places I could look. I only mention this, because some of you might think that Adobe wouldn't like what I have done with CFQuickDocs, but on the contrary they are very supportive (at least, they have been in the past).

When I created the ColdFusion 8 version of CFQuickDocs, I used the ColdFusion Eclipse plugins, which included a full copy of the tags/function doc pages as individual html pages. So I would need to find something like this to update CFQuickDocs to ColdFusion 9. Today I found that the new ColdFusion builder has the doc pages in individual HTML pages, but it wasn't easy to find.

If for some reason you need something like this, look in your ColdFusion Builder installation directory, and in the plugins directory there is a file named com.adobe.coldfusion.help_1.0.0.240773.jar. Depending on when you are reading this, the numbers in the file name might be different, but you should see one that starts with com.adobe.coldfusion.help. If you open that Jar with your favorite compression utility, you will see a whole mess of .html files. Each of these files represents one doc page for the ColdFusion 9 help files included with ColdFusion builder.

I am liking CFBuilder (CFB) more and more as I get used to it. I have been using CFEclipse for a few years now, so I was already pretty happy with CFB. But I keep finding new things that improve my approval.

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Microsoft Research is building a new web browser called Gazelle that attempts to be an OS in the browser. They are exploring all of the security/stability issues that would surround using the web browser as an operating system. I know the AIR comparison isn't exact (the big difference is that Gazelle is a web browser, whereas Gears/AIR are browser plugins), but to me reading over their design goals and challenges, it sounds a LOT like what Google Gears and Adobe AIR are trying to accomplish.

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I read between the lines of this post by ColdFusion's new Product Manager and I think I've extracted a couple of facts. One answers a question I've been puzzling over for a long time, and the others are just interesting tidbits.

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I accidentally found something that works in ColdFusion, but I won't recommend that any of you use this. "Don't try this at home, Kids!" :)

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I suppose this will hit the fan here shortly, but I haven't seen it yet. Adobe has announced at MAX that they are working on an Eclipse based ColdFusion IDE, code named Bolt. This is VERY exciting news! To bad it won't be released until next year...I suspect it will come out with CF 9.

The other day I came across a situation where I wanted to use regular expression repetition syntax. I was trying to validate US currency, and I was dealing with the potential of commas for thousands separators. In my regular expression, at the start of the number (the left side) I wanted to allow 1 to 3 digits, followed by a comma. This is a perfect situation for regular expression repetition, which would look like this:

^\d{1,3},

So in that regex, the "{1,3}" says that we will allow from one to three digits. So any of these numbers would be valid:
1,345
12,467,893
345,643,196

I looked in the CF docs and there is no mention of regular expression repetition! I was peeved that CF doesn't support this, but I figured before I went too far looking for an alternative, I'd just try it to see if it works. Lo and behold, it works! So even though regex repetition is NOT in the CF docs, it IS supported. Good to know for future reference. :)