Simon Horwith

This month was a busy one for the ColdFusion development community, so it's not surprising that we have two community-related columns this month.

Kelly Brown reviewed the CFUnited conference (if you weren't there, you really missed out on a great conference) and in my regular community column I discuss all of July's community events including the CF 10th birthday party at Macromedia headquarters in Boston, CFUnited, and many announcements about upcoming conferences. The most noteworthy event announcement is that registration for MAX 2005 is now open, so read the article and then go register! I'm looking forward to seeing all of your familiar faces there again this year. Another noteworthy bit of community news is that Macromedia is now going to support the CFEclipse project. This is significant news for developers and I was extremely happy to hear it publicly announced.

We also have many XML-related articles. Our case study column by Tom Shreck is a product review and development case study of cfcPowerTools and how it uses XML. Nick Molnar has written an excellent article about using XPATH in CFML applications. We have an article by Leon Oosterwijk that introduces you to XML basics and then shows how you can use ColdFusion to parse an iTunes music library. In his regular CF101 column, Jeff Houser explains the basics of XML in ColdFusion, for those of you who need an introduction to and explanation of the basics.

In addition to the XML and community articles I've mentioned, we also have some terrific articles about other topics. In the regular "Macromedia Speaks Out" column, Tim Buntel introduces the ColdFusion Administrator API. This API is new in CFMX 7 and allows developers to programmatically access the CF Admin functionality and data. Duncan Jack has written a terrific article about UML and UML tools, which I highly recommend. In his regular column, Hal Helms has written another "etudes" article - focusing on ColdFusion structures this month. We also have a great article from frequent contributing author Isaac Dealey that explains the Rule Manager Façade design pattern. Last but certainly not least, Guy Rish has written Part 2 in his Event Gateways article series. If you're not using or experimenting with gateways yet, I strongly urge you to do so...they're unbelievably powerful and useful in application development.

While I was at the CFUnited conference, I spoke with many of our readers and authors about what we can do to make the magazine better. As a result, more monthly columns are currently in the works, including collaborating with House of Fusion, introducing more server admin topics, and (re)introducing a "letters to the editor" column. If I receive emails (simon@horwith.com) I promise to add this column to the magazine. I haven't included a contest column this month, as I have not received any entries for the last two contests. As soon as time permits, I'll go ahead and develop entries for those myself if nobody beats me to it. There is a very interesting upcoming issue in the works right now, which I won't say anything more about other than the fact that it will aim to explore all of the various frameworks and development methodologies that are popular with ColdFusion developers today. I'm really looking forward to that issue and I'm sure it's going to be of major interest to all of our readers.