A recruiter contacted me to ask if I knew anyone looking for ColdFusion and Flex work in the Philadelphia area. Unfortunately, I don't. If I did, I would probably steal them to fill an open position in my department. But in hopes that someone out there looking for work in the Philadelphia suburbs might fit, I offered to post the information here.

Flex/ColdFusion Developer needed for a 3 week project in Malvern PA.

Please contact Jacky Barry, j.barry@thebossgroup.com or 610-668-3456

It sounds like freelancers and moonlighters might be able to take it on, but I'm not sure if it requires working on-site or during normal business hours.

If you listen closely to CFConversations Episode 33, you'll hear Terry Ryan and Adam Lehman explain why Adobe's official product names and release dates are kept secret for so long — hence the use of code names like Scorpio, Centaur, Bolt, Catalyst, etc.

"Basically, if we say the name of the product it has to go on our reports, and because we're not selling it yet you get zero's on the report and so that causes all sorts of problems. There are very legal reasons for doing it…" — Terry

"Then there's copyright and trademarks. If we were to (hypothetically!) come out a year ago and say, "it's called ColdFusion 9", but then took more than a year to release it someone could actually steal that trademark. Traditionally, when we go to public beta is when the official names come out." — Adam

That said, Adobe has been publicly announcing (CF, Bolt) that the name of the next version of ColdFusion is (big surprise) ColdFusion 9, and the name for the IDE (that we currently refer to as Bolt) is ColdFusion Builder. I guess we can expect an announcement for public beta any time now, right?

When you put two and two together, you can infer that they will be released more or less hand in hand. It wouldn't make much sense for them to be released a week or two apart, splitting the hype; it makes much more sense to combine them and have one big party. That isn't much of a surprise. Some of the features announced for Centaur — ColdFusion 9 — pretty much require IDE integration. (And some of them don't, but are still pretty badass!)

But the big take away from these announcements is that we can expect ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder to be available for purchase no later than June of 2010. The clock is ticking.

Oh, but there's that big Adobe MAX conference in October, too. I wonder what they'll be talking about…

Personally, I'm pretty excited about this. Peter Elst posted a video from AdobeTV of Ryan Stewart demoing a feature that might be in the next version of ColdFusion. As a matter of fact, here's the comment I left on Peter's post:

Holy @%^&*@#%%^&%@##$%.

So what's this cool new feature? It's actually something being developed by the ColdFusion team, not the Flex team. Essentially, what it boils down to is that by adding a line of configuration code pointing to your ColdFusion server, and setting up a user account on that CF server that has this new remote access enabled, you can access some core ColdFusion functionality from your Flex application without writing a single line of ColdFusion code.

In his example, Ryan uploaded a PDF file, and used CFPDF remotely from his Flex application to access the meta-information about that PDF from Flex — all without writing any CFML. (I'm guessing that the upload itself required a few lines of CFML, but that wasn't what was being demoed.)

It sounded like Ryan said that access can be restricted per-user to specific tags, so it should be highly configurable.

I paused the video at about 2:10, and it looks like these tags are already supported: CFChart, CFDocument, CFImage, CFLDAP, CFMail, CFPDF, and CFPOP. This list has the potential to grow between now and release, too. I would bet they only have code-hinting enabled for features that are already functional, and I'm sure they're hard at work finding and implementing other great tags. I wouldn't be surprised to see CFExchange, CFDBInfo, and a few other tags added to that list. (How cool would it be to have a Flex app to administer MySQL in the same manner as phpMyAdmin?)

Ryan says that this feature "may be in ColdFusion 9, code named 'Centaur'." Let's be real about this: When has Adobe ever demoed a feature or product that wasn't all but guaranteed to be released? They are too careful to do something like that. So this may change form a little bit, but I fully expect it to be included, in some way, shape, or form.

When it comes down to it, this isn't incredibly ground-breaking, because you can already accomplish all of this by writing some server side code. But what's happening here is that the ColdFusion engineering team is doing what they do best: making tedious or complex things easy.

Most of all, it made me realize that we need to start thinking more about the status quo in our applications. How many flex applications do you have that require a username and password that get handed off to be handled by your hand-written server-side LDAP authentication code? You can do that automatically as the application loads, and the user doesn't even have to think about signing in, but still gets their personalized interface. You can do that today, but with these new "Proxy Tags" it would require less code.

I think ColdFusion 9 is poised to be a game changing release. Are you ready?

The developers at my office, Wharton Computing, get together monthly to remind ourselves that we are all normal (well, mostly normal) people with interests and hobbies outside of work, and to relax a little bit; and we're extending the invitation to the entire PhillyCFUG group.

It's a great opportunity to blow off a little steam, get to know your peers, and if you're into that sort of thing, do some networking. (You know, we do have a couple of open positions. You can search in the Org "Wharton Computing and Instructional Technology")

This month we're meeting TOMORROW — June 4th — at 4:00 pm, at Slainté, on the corner of 30th and Market — the opposite corner from 30th Street Station. Typically we're there until at least 6:00, but the bar has a great atmosphere and I've personally stayed at one of our happy hours until around 9:30, just hanging out talking about geeky stuff with a bunch of people, before retreating to the suburbs.

It's a great time, and we hope you'll come join us.

See you there!

I'm a big fan of Twitter clients that allow grouping your followee's into groups. Tweetdeck was probably one of the first to do this, and it was a big step forward. Lately, I've been using Nambu and Seesmic Desktop on the desktop (which I feel are about on par with — or slightly better than — Tweetdeck feature-wise, but more importantly: not ugly), and Nambu and BrightKite on my iPhone. BrightKite's auto-post to twitter and built-in image posting (and hosting) makes sites like TwitPic and Posterous seem very kludgy, and I'm happy to be done with them.

It always seems like the latest & greatest twitter client comes along and makes switching seem worth it, so we all switch. That's great. But now, with the advent of grouping, we've run into a problem. Every time I switch clients, I need to re-enter all of my groups, and so far, nobody has found a way to make doing that quick and easy.

Tweetdeck was probably the best and fastest way for creating groups from scratch, with a long list of checkboxes for everyone you follow. That can get a little bit cumbersome when you follow several hundred people, but worse: the list doesn't seem to update often, and it's not really known when that cache updates, or how to force an update, if you even can.

Nambu has a nice dialog for creating and editing groups — when it doesn't cause the client to crash — but it's about this big —> <— (tiny!) and that makes going through a list of 200+ people a royal pain in the ass.

Seesmic Desktop requires you to see the person's tweet in order to add them to a group. You can search for the person's username, but that counts as an API request, so you're limited to a certain number of those per hour, and you share that request pool with updates, so it isn't ideal. And trying to find a single tweet in the "Home" column — which shows several hundred of them — is like trying to find a needle in a hay stack. Worse yet, some people just don't tweet that often, so not only do you have to find that needle, you have to be searching while it's still in the haystack. I like the interface for adding users to groups after the group is already established, but this is far from ideal for creating new groups.

Something I wish all clients had, and I've voiced this on many occasions in the various feedback forums the clients have, is a special group that shows tweets by people that you don't have assigned to any groups. That would make any of these interfaces much more usable, in my opinion, since it's the catch-all bin for anyone that slips through the cracks.

I used a great web-based client, KinkyTwits, that basically accomplished this by allowing you to set an option so that users from groups were not displayed in the Home list. Actually I really loved this client, but it still has some bugs that are show-stoppers. I hear Ben has been thinking about updating it or rewriting it altogether, but haven't seen anything about it in a while.

As much as I would love to see that feature get implemented and become popular, that's not my biggest concern. Switching clients is a hassle. Any time I switch, it takes at least a few hours to get my groups set back up. This is not a unique problem. Think about RSS and having to switch RSS reader applications for one reason or another. Any RSS reader worth its salt can read and write OPML files, which are the standard format for sharing a list of RSS/ATOM feeds.

We need that. We need some sort of standard to develop for storing groups of twitter names. It's really rather simple, and could be represented very easily in XML. If clients started supporting the import and export of these files, trying a new client out could be so much simpler.

Here's just a sample of what I have in mind:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<groups>
   <group id="{GUID}" name="ColdFusion Celebrities">
      <follow user="ColdFusion" />
      <follow user="BenForta" />
      <follow user="CFJediMaster" />
      <follow user="Adrocknaphobia" />
   </group>
</groups>

There are so many different ways to skin this cat, but I hope that someone, somewhere, starts this trend, and it catches on. I think it's desperately needed, considering how often a better twitter client surfaces that makes switching worthwhile.