Please update your bookmarks and feeds for my site.

I now have a Mango Blog at:

http://www.andyjarrett.com/blog

Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/andyjarrett

I've just posted a comment over on Simon Whatley's blog which made me think some people still might not know that ColdFusion is free for education and this includes all qualified students, faculty and staff of eligible education institutions.

You can find out more at freeriatools.adobe.com/coldfusion/ though you will have to prove you eligibility with some form of ID.

Also don't forget that Adobe offer Flex Builder under the same conditions as well.

It was about a year ago there were reports that Futurama was coming back and now TV Squad has a post about recent news from Comic-con of the return.

The show will return on November 27th as a full-length high-def film sold on DVD. It will be followed by three additional films, and each film will be divided into four episodes each to be aired on Comedy Central. So, that's 4 DVD movies or 16 new episodes depending on how you look at it.

The four movies are:

1. Bender's Big Score - [imdb]
2. The Beast with a Billion Backs - [imdb]
3. Bender's Game - [imdb]
4. Into the Wild Green Yonder - [imdb]

After Bender's Big Score the others are planned to be released throughout 2008!

Zapp Brannigan: Captain's journal. Stardate...uh...
Kif: April thirteenth.
Zapp Brannigan: April thirteenth...point two. We have failed to uphold Brannigan's Law. However, I did make it with a hot alien babe. And in the end, is that not what man has dreamt of since first he looked up at the stars? [pause] Kif, I'm asking you a question!

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Under the Mozilla Public License(MPL) Adobe are planning on releasing Flex to the Open Source community.

This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create Flex applications that run in any browser - on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux and on now on the desktop using "Apollo".

What does this mean to the average developer though? Well, it means we can get more involved in feature requests and discussing these with project committers as well as following submitted bugs through an open bug tracking system. Adobe will keep the builder separate of course as this is surely there key revenue for the project.

Now time to sit back and dream of a time where maybe.... just maybe CFMX is free so the two can be combined into a powerful open source RAD environment to combat all languages.

Press release
Adobe Labs Wiki entry
Flex open source FAQ
David Wadhwani, VP of Flex Engineering and Ely Greenfield, Flex Architect discuss the Flex Open source announcement with Robert Scoble of PodTech.

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Ted Patrick has announced on his blog that "One Solid Flex Release 2.0.1" is now live and ready for download.

What does the .1 release bring. In short:

• Faster Compiler
• Module Support
• Apollo Support
• Runtime CSS
• and my favourite, Mac support!

Check out Teds post for a better description.

What makes this nicer is that I won a copy of the licence at the CFDevCon and have been waiting for the Mac version to come out. So I think its time to collect on that too!

Flex here I come!

WooHoo, I don't know if he was the first, but Sean has just mentioned that Flex 2 beta for Mac is out!.

Though as David mentioned in his comments, ". Some day, we (Mac users) won't have to wait 6 additional months for apps.". Fingers crossed, knock on wood and all that, that this isn't the same for Fireworks.

I finally managed to get myself to London again for the Ben Forta presents on Flex 2 for ColdFusion Developers presentation, and as usual it answered lots of questions and I think amazed quite a few people. The PowerPoint slides should be available soon on the UKCFUG site, and the code demo'd is available at http://labs.macromedia.com/. So what came out of it:

1. Beta 2 is coming any day - it was actually out on the day of the presentation!
2. The pricing has been a major factor in this release, after all the posts and messages last time Adobe have focused on price. To prove this you can actually develop Flex apps for Free by creating the MXML in an editor of you choice and compile it using the freely available Flex Framework and SDK
3. Support for Mac is coming, though there is no official news on Mac-Intel
4. Flex apps 2 are 100's of time faster on the initial load then Flex 1. If anyone who saw the Pre Flex 1 presentations, or experimented with it will remember how slow a simple hello world app would take to start.
5. Flash 8.5 was actually rewritten to improve speed and is not compatiable with previous version, but to ensure backward compatibility has the pre 8.5 engine available within it
6. There will be a new Flash Lite to use with Flex 2, so you will be able to push these apps to Mobile devices

That was just the general spill, below is whats new in Flex 2 and/or beta 2

1. CFC CRUD, Bean wizards. Seeing this in action was pretty amazing. - This actually is available as a seperate download so you can use it in conjunction with CFeclipse. Look for the ColdFusion Extensions to Flex Builder 2.0
2. RDS - Shown last night it was a nice feature to have available agin. This is also available to use when you download the ColdFusion Extensions
3. ActionScript to CFC and CFC to ActionScript wizards availabe by right-clicking on the appropiate file. Again available via the CF extention
4. Charting Components are now included in the beta 2 of Flex, which might mean that selling it as a seperate package might be out of the window.
5. Live Charting - Charts feeding directly from data

There was some more covered but my notes at that point get scarce. Needless to say I think there will be a few downloading Flex 2 today after the meeting, but even if you don't want to go near Flex make sure you download the ColdFusion Extensions for RDS support and CFC wizards.

The one point Ben made a few times was that if you want it in the application/server let Adobe know. Without letting them know there is a demand they won't include it.

By the way the sample app used was Phone Selector.

So i had a few comments left in my last post and thought just wanted to make a post out of them incase no one read them:

Community Flex - http://www.cflex.net/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt (need to be a Yahoo user)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ (need to be a Yahoo user)
http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com
Kevin Hoyt
Christophe Coenraets (product evangelist)
Peter Ent (Flex support)
Matt Chotin (Flex engineer)

You can get a comprehensive list of Flex blogs at the MXNA Flex Feed list

Cheers to those who posted comments.

So i've decided to jump into Flex 2 now, as i'm sure a few of you might of with the reduced price plan in place :o)

Anyway i've been looking around and apart from the official offering for help, there doesn't seem much external sources for reference? This is probably where its been an enterprise product only. So i was just wondering, where is everyone going to leanr Flex?

a.k.a Another Adobe and Macromdia post

So its coming to the end of the day in the UK soon (6:15pmish here now) and i realised that for the first time in ages i hadnt fired up FeedDemon all day WOW - last time that happens. So incase you havent heard there's gonna be a huge merger between Macromedia and Adobe - for more info check out the mini site at www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobeandmacromedia.html. If you are looking for a more personal touch in finding out what this means you NEED to check out Mike Chamber recent blog entry.

Well i could go on about relative links out there but MXNA and Goog have done that well with all the post stating their concerns.

One big concern i have that doesnt seem to of been addressed that well anywere is the community focus. With the likes of of all the MM staff blogs which are an invaluable resource, there participation on mailing lists right down to MXNA? What will come of this?