This Wednesday Adobe's Kevin Hoyt spoke in Kansas City to a captive audience of about 75 people including ColdFusion programmers, HTML/CSS builders, and designers. The meeting was great. It also included Jack Stack BBQ and shwag from Uhlig, Emfluence, and Tek Systems to name a few. Kevin didn't drop any bombs I hadn't heard about yet, but there were definitely a few things I learned about Adobe's up-and-coming products. Here's a quick overview of my notes:

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If you live in or around Kansas City, Kevin Hoyt is coming to speak about ColdFusion, Bolt, Flex, and Flash Catalyst this Wednesday. I am pretty excited. First of all, to receive some local attention from Adobe. Secondly, to get to hear Kevin (Adobe Platform Evangalist). Thirdly, they are promising BBQ. What else could be better?

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Flex 4 (Gumbo) is now in Beta and new training tutorials are available from Trilemetry. There a handful of new articles you can read on Adobe's site and follow along with to learn Flex 4 with ColdFusion!

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Today I offer you a question of preference. Should optional method parameters be defaulted to blank and assumed to exist, or should they only be defined if you intend to use them?

In the name of code reusability I will find myself writing generic service methods such as userService.loadUser() which have a large list of optional parameters such as lastName, firstName, userName, companyID, userID, password etc. I will reuse this method any time I want to load a user or a list of users. The question is this: is it more correct to default all of the arguments or check for their existence?

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Just a couple things I wanted to mention... The first is that the CFML Advisory Committee has been at work drafting their first version of the CFML language spec. Also, while looking through www.opencfml.org I noticed they are using CodexWiki which runs on ColdBox which is pretty cool. Speaking of ColdBox...

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I've been following Sean Corfield's nice series, Railo for Dummies on installing Railo, Tomcat and Apache. (Does that make me a dummy?) His latest entry showed the simple steps he followed to convert his blog corfield.org over from Java 1.4 and CF7 to Java 1.6_13 and Railo 3.1.0.009.

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I went to add a custom tag path onto my dev server this morning. Feeling a little lazy and not wanting to type in the full path by hand, I clicked the "Browse Server" button. There are similar buttons for adding ColdFusion mappings and searching for file-based databases while adding data sources. The Browse Server page uses an applet to let you choose directories or files off your server. I was greeted with an error message:
Server Error
IO error on server communication

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This is a reminder of a great developer resource right here in our community. If you ever find yourself looking for a list of blog aggregators, hosting providers, job listings, code formatters, database tools, cf tools, editors, debuggers, time tracking apps or anything vaguely related to programming, you don't need to look much farther than

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A recent thread on CF-Talk brought up this very good topic. It deals with the performance hit you can get when SQL Server implicitly converts your data to nchar and nvarchar for you when you have enabled Unicode support in your data sources. Unicode text cannot be stored in normal char or varchar fields. It must use nchar or nvarchar. These data types use two bytes per character, which means you can only store half as much text in them (limit 4,400 instead of 8,800). The problem is two fold:

1. SQL Server cannot directly compare a varchar and nvarchar value so it must convert one.
2. String manipulation or conversion on an indexed column will render the index useless

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I've noticed a theme this past week in CF blogs. More and more people have been commenting on the usefulness and proliferation of ColdFusion and just generally railing against the whole CF is Dead mentality that incessantly dogs us. I'm kind of curious what has gotten us stirred up lately. Whatever it is, I'm enjoying the passion it is revealing in the community.

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