Simon Horwith

Simon Horwith (pictured), ColdFusion Developer's Journal editor-in-chief, will be at MAX 2005 in Anaheim, CA, this week and invites CFDJ readers to be sure to stop by and say hello. It was exactly one year ago that ColdFusion Developer's Journal began focusing heavily on a different topic every month. The feedback that I hear from our readers at conferences and via email indicates that it has been a well-received change in format. While there is no plan to stop this practice, there are other ideas that I'd like to experiment with in order to try and give our readers the most useful content possible. The specialized focus issue format was introduced in order to make each month's issue more informative and to offer something for everyone, regardless of the level of expertise. The new format will be to have both focus and non-focus issues, but with certain common theme... (more)

Fast Track to Flex

Hopefully by now you've heard all about Flex, the most recent addition to the Macromedia server product family. Hot on the tail of its release, Macromedia Training has released "Fast Track to Flex," a new course that introduces developers to developing rich Internet applications (RIAs) using the Macromedia Flex server. If you don't already know it, Flex is a J2EE application that parses XML files (MXML files to be exact) and renders a Flash user interface based on the XML mark-up. Because the server renders Flash based on XML mark-up, no knowledge of Flash or the Flash authoring... (more)

Getting Ready for MAX

It's good to experiment - this holds true for any and every endeavor. Last month I tried something different with CFDJ; almost every article in the issue was about one topic - security. I've gotten a lot of feedback from readers and am happy to report that it was all very positive. Many of you wrote telling me that you really enjoyed seeing an issue devoted to one topic in-depth. I will do my best to organize issues that are focused on one issue in the future. If you have an idea(s) for focus areas you'd like to see CFDJ concentrate on, let me know. I have some ideas of my own, b... (more)

Writing Code...and Your Opinion

I want to take this opportunity to announce a new service to the development community - "blog-n-play." Blog-n-play is a Web site launched by SYS-CON that allows anyone who'd like, to create his or her own blog - and it's free. Your blog is associated with one of the SYS-CON publications (anyone reading this editorial is most likely suited to creating a CFDJ blog). A unique subdomain of the CFDJ domain ("coldfusionjournal.com" in the case of CFDJ) is created for your blog. In addition to my personal blog at Horwith.com, you can also visit my CFDJ blog at http://simon.coldfusionjo... (more)

It's Here!

It's finally here! ColdFusion MX 7 was released about an hour prior to this writing. This release is the most customer driven release of ColdFusion to date - new features for delivering printable content in the form of portable (FlashPaper or PDF) documents or reports, an event gateway that allows the server to communicate with any system or device via Java gateways (including the popular SMS gateway), an application event gateway, new enhancements to including X-Forms support, Flash Forms, and a ton of new validation support, enhancements to its XML support and Verity engine, mu... (more)