From the ashes of a non-activity MMUG we've been working (and still is) to get an active Adobe User Group up and running here in Norway.

We've now launched a new website at www.adobeusergroup.no (if you by any chanse are a Norwegian reading this you should rush over and register - it's free).

Hopefully by time we can be a huge and active group of Adobe users, meeting, learning from each other and socialising.

PS - This is a simple, close to static, out in a hurry solution. The "real" one I plan to be a MG application based on the "Headstart" application announced by Joe.

From Ben Fortas blog I just learned that a framework built on Fusebox basics is now available. The framework is called Underscore Framework, and has it's own site here.

Nic Tunney has anounced the release of objectBreeze.

Here's what  Nic writes: "objectBreeze will create CF objects directly from your Microsoft SQL database, with no code for you to write or upkeep. Change your database? objectBreeze automatically handles this event"

Sounds exiting Nic. I'll be sure to check it out as soon as I get some breathing space.

Oh Boy - there seems to be a lot of exciting initiatives, targeted at easing our ColdFusiong development, surfacing these days. Mark Mandel has anounced version 0.1 of Transfer, a ORM and Business Object Factory Library.

To be honest I'm not a 100% sure what ORM stands for. I guess Object Relation Model or something like that. What I do understand is that this is yet another handsome tool that will save us from the tediousness of writing CRUD methods while keeping our model and db in sync.

There's so much happening in the ColdFusion framework and libraries scene now, that there should be a website put up to list, explain and compare them. Anyone up for the challenge?

UPDATE: Joe Rinehart kindly informed me that "ORM = object relational mapping, or how to save CFCs to a DB"

Rob Cameron has anounced the release of version 0.1 of ColdFusion on Wheels. This is meant to be the ColdFusion equalent of Rails - the hyped framework for Ruby. Judging from the demo video Rob has made, this looks  exciting and promising.

<cf_badJoke>
There's been a lot of talk about a ColdFusion on Rails. But why stay on rails when you're so much more flexible on wheels.
</cf_badJoke>

In my daytime job I needed to connect to the Yahoo Search API. I fired up a cfhttp request and got Connection Failure. "Oh, I've been here before" I thought, and headed over to the earlier blog post I did that describes how to get over such problem.

No luck. Still did not work. Ok - let's see if some googling can help me out. And "cha-ching" I found this post. In the coments the solution was mentioned.

The solution is as easy as adding  charset="utf-8" to the cfhttp tag.

About a month ago I wrote about two OO "Aha" moments. And today I had yet some other ones coming. As usuall I started the day "Googing" and came upon a post "Designing an OO Backend" by Barney Boisvert.

The first moment came when I read this: "Services are also singletons, which means that there should never be more than a single instance of them within an application." I've seen singletons mentioned a lot when reading the different posts and articles, but this is the first time I've seen someone stop for a moment to explain what they are. It can be argumented that the name says it all, but I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer...

The second moment came when Barney further down goes on to explaining the factory design pattern - why to use it and what it does.

All in all a great article - tnx Barney.

A client of my daytime job subscribes to a customized news service from a company called Cyberwatcher. The service is delivered as xml on a given url.

When opening the url in a web browser the xml opens. However when I tried to get the xml with cfhttp I got a "Connection Failure" message.

It was Cyberwatchers support who provided the solution. There's something with CF not "understanding" the compression that MS (and others) apply to http-response. Putting these two cfhttpparam tags within the cfhttp tag fixed the issue:

<cfhttpparam type="Header" name="Accept-Encoding" value="deflate;q=0">
<cfhttpparam type="Header" name="TE" value="deflate;q=0">

 Kudos to Cyberwatcher for finding the solution.

Yesterday I posted a link to a great post; "CFCs - Ten Spontanious Tips" by Joe Rinehart.  Today came a great follow up.

And in reading this post I got this mornings second "Aha" experience (the first one you can read in my post about BOs).

The experience came when I read the following: " Don't talk to application, session, client, etc. - unless, of course, you're building a facade for one of those scope". Suddenly it clicked in my brain why to use scope facades.

I've read about and tried to understand OO consepts for a long time, and it is in such moments when I get this "Aha" experiences I truly understand that it's all worth while.

Keep it coming Joe!

I started this morning reading through the new posts at "the Goog", and came upon a post by the CF JediMaster Raymond Camden, where he answers a question regarding how to handle validation in OO approached CF app. As always Ray makes a good answer.

But what really caught my eye, and made me wake up even before my first cup of tea, was a comment from Callum. He explains how he goes about doing validation in a BO (Busines Object), and in doing so also describes in a easy to understand way what a BO is. This is another one of those OO consepts/expresions that I yet had left to understand. Reading the comment by Callum just made a huge lightbulb appear above my head.

So Callum - Kudos to you!
I now (think I) know what a BO is.