CF and the Evolving Web

Last week I spoke at the MD CFUG - the planned topic was CF Powered Flex and AIR, including a discussion of the changing role of CF on the web today. What ended-up happening was a 45 minute discussion about CF's role in the evolving web with an hour's worth of code and demos crammed into 15 minutes at the end. That said, it was a productive and interesting discussion, which I really enjoyed. I plan to elaborate on the main points of that discussion in a blog entry in the very near future.

Unfortunately, the announcement about the availability of BladeDS had not been made yet when I gave the preso. It would have added a bit of relevant very current events to the talk. For those of you who haven't heard about BladeDS, it's the (currently) beta release by Adobe of a subset of the technology that drives LCDS (formerly Flex Data Services) as an Open Source solution. BladeDS includes the specification for the AMF 3 protocol and a (J2EE) server-side communication piece that supports AMF, messaging (including subscription-based messaging) and using the server as an HTTP Proxy for Flex applications. You can dowload and learn more about BladeDS on the Adobe Labs ste at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/blazeds/

As many of my readers are aware, I've been learning LISP in my 'free' time. Most recently, I've been spending a decent amount of my time understanding how LISP handles binary data and bit streams. Needless to say, I've never had to work with data at the bit-stream level on any projects (many languages including ColdFusion abstract this for developers). My new understanding for how to manipulate data as bit streams gave me a lot of understanding and appreciation for how AMF works, as I read over the AMF3 technical specification (http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/amf/amf3_spec_121207.pdf).