One of our stops in Europe last week was in Liège where Serge Jespers and I presented at a local RIA event. While there, community members Cyril Hanquez and Steven Peeters interviewed me briefly for their local usergroup. They have now posted that video interview online:

Interview with Ben Forta on March 9, 2010 in Liege, Belgium from CFUGBE on Vimeo.

India based PCQuest has published an article on getting started with ColdFusion 9 Using Adobe ColdFusion Builder.

Thanks David Dharmaraj for sending this one my way.

DZone Refcards are free printable cheat sheets for popular applications, tools, languages, and more. DZone has now posted its ColdFusion Builder Refcard, created by our own Terry Ryan.

FlashCamp is coming to Boston next week on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 5:00pm. This is a free event with limited space, and the speaker lineup is pretty phenomenal, and includes Deepa Subramaniam, Heidi Williams, Doug Winnie, Chet Haase, ColdFusion's own Alison Huselid, as well as presenters from Zend and more. Registration required, so sign up now.

I ordered a part from the Lenovo web site, and just received an e-mail shipment notification pointing me to the Lenovo Order Status site which is powered by ColdFusion!

TechRepublic is running an article by Brian Kotek entitled A look at ColdFusion 9's new features.

We've just posted a ColdFusion 9 performance brief entitled Improve application performance and scalability with Adobe ColdFusion 9, 13 pages with all sorts of details. Key findings show that overall server performance in ColdFusion 9 is up to 40% faster than in ColdFusion 8 and up to 6 times faster than ColdFusion MX 7. Good stuff!

The CODiE Awards, originally called the Excellence in Software Awards, were established in 1986 by the Software Publishers Association (SPA), now the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), so that pioneers of the then-nascent software industry could evaluate and honor each other's work. Since then, the CODiE Awards program has carried out the same purpose - to showcase the software and information industry's finest products and services and to honor excellence in corporate achievement and philanthropic efforts.

ColdFusion has won this award previously. And ColdFusion 9 is a finalist in the Best Web Services Solution category.

Title says it all. Details posted in this TechNote

There is a Security update available for BlazeDS. ColdFusion 9.0, 8.0.x and 7.0.2 are also affected by this issue, and this technote provides fixes for the security issue along with the installation instructions.

Here are the slides from last week's ColdFusion 9 - Solutions For The Open Government Directive presentation.

The templates discussed will be available shortly. I'll post details when I have them.

I'm spending a lot of time in Europe right now. I was in London a week ago, am heading back there this week, and will be back in the area in March to discuss Flash Builder 4, ColdFusion 9, and ColdFusion Builder with customers, partners, and at the following public events:

• London, UK - March 4th, 2010
• Paris, France - March 8th, 2010
• Cologne, Germany - March 9th, 2010
• Liege, Belgium - March 9th, 2010
• Amsterdam, Netherlands - March 10th, 2010

Registration for these events is now open. (And it appears as though London sold out completely, within 20 minutes of registration opening)!

A vulnerability has been identified in ColdFusion 9, which could allow access to collections created by the Solr Service to be accessed from any external machine using a specific URL. A solution to the reported vulnerability has been posted online.

One of the most intriguing features of ColdFusion Builder (now on Labs) is its ability to support extensions written in CFML. Adobe Developer Connection is running an article by Brian Rinaldi entitled Creating self-updating ColdFusion Builder beta extensions.

ColdFusion Builder is built on Eclipse, and Eclipse can be used for many different languages and types of development, each of which likely has different editor needs. To address all of the different requirements of different languages, Eclipse supports a feature called perspectives. A perspective is a simply a group of layout configuration settings that you can activate as needed. And as you switch between development platforms or languages or stages in development, you simply change perspectives, or have them switched automatically for you.

Just like every other Eclipse plug-in, ColdFusion Builder has a default perspective, a default editor layout for ColdFusion development. And I don't like it. I find the editor area too small, and I don't like where views are placed and grouped. But, Eclipse makes tweaking perspectives really easy, and so I've been tweaking away for a while. And here's where I have ended up:

• I like a big coding area, so I don't like views in panels on both the left and right. So, two panels on the left.
• The top panel on the left contains two views, Navigator and File.
• The bottom panel on the left contains five views, Outline, RDS FileView, RDS Dataview, Services Browser, and Snippets.
• And then I still have the ever useful tab panel beneath the coding area, and it contains Servers, Console, Problems, TailView, Extensions, and Progress.

Much better. At least for me. If you have other ideas or layout tweaks that work for you, please share!

ColdFusion Builder is the planned and eagerly anticipated IDE built specifically for us ColdFusion developers. Lots has been written about ColdFusion Builder already, and lots more will undoubtedly be written. But one feature that has been mentioned and not discussed in much detail yet, an absolutely vital feature for me personally, is the FTP integration. And having been using it extensively this week, and realizing in doing so that it is sometimes less than intuitive (although to be fair, the product is still in beta and not quite finished yet), I thought I'd share some notes on how to get started with ColdFusion Builder's FTP integration.

But first, a quick introduction. ColdFusion developers don't (well, shouldn't ever) write code on production servers. Ideally, they use a local Developer Edition (it's free!), write and test, and then deploy to another server, perhaps a staging server or a production server, as the case may be. Moving files to remote servers often requires the use of FTP, and so ColdFusion Builder features built in support for FTP (as well as FTP's more secure cousins, SFTP and FTPS). Using the FTP integration it becomes possible to easily upload and download files (or folders or even entire sites), compare local and remote file versions, and more.

To use ColdFusion Builder's FTP integration, you first need to define your FTP server, including specifying login information. To do this, open the ColdFusion Builder File view (by default is it on the left, under the Navigator view), and scroll down to find the FTP connection types (FTP, FTPS, SFTP). You can then right-click on the FTP connection type, and select the Add New FTP Site option to display the Create A New FTP Connection dialog box.

You'll need to specify the following:

• Site Name: A unique name for each defined FTP connection
• Connection Type: Should be set correctly based on the FTP connection type you right-clicked on
• Server: FTP server host name or IP address
• Username: FTP login name
• Password: FTP login password (or leave blank to be prompted for it when needed)
• Remote Path: Path to starting directory on FTP server (this will usually be / unless you have multiple sites defined, if it's wrong you'll know when you browse the server and see the wrong files and folders)

Once you have filled in the form, click the Test button to make sure you can indeed connect to the server. And finally, click OK to save the connection.

Note: ColdFusion Builder will default to using FTP passive mode. To change this if needed, click the Advanced Options button.

Once your FTP connection is defined, it'll show up under the appropriate FTP connection type in the File tab. You can expand and collapse the defined FTP connection to browse and access remote files and folders.

So far so good. But now let's connect this to ColdFusion Builder projects. When you work in ColdFusion Builder you define a ColdFusion project, which is accessed via the Navigator view. ColdFusion projects can be associated with FTP connections so that you can easily upload, download, and synchronize files. To do this, right-click on the project in the Navigator view, and select Synchronize, and then select Create New Synchronize Connection.

You'll be asked to define the connection, as follows:

• Connection Name: A unique name for each defined connection
• Path Local: Select your project, if it is not already selected
• Path Remote: Select the FTP server connection from the drop down list

Then click OK to save the connection.

You've now associated an FTP connection to your project, and you can use the synchronization options available from within the project right-click menu. To upload a file or folder, right-click on the desired file or folder, select Synchronize, and then select Upload. To download a file or folder, right-click on the desired file or folder, select Synchronize, and then select Download. You can also select Synchronize to perform a full synchronization, which will upload, download, and update, all in one step. This option displays the Smart Sync screen, which is used to actually manage the synchronization.

Note: Smart Sync runs based on the selected folder, and also includes all child folders. To Smart Sync an entire site, start from the site root. To Smart Sync a specific folder, make sure that folder is selected when you launch the Smart Sync window.

The Smart Sync screen lists all files that are not in synch, and indicates which way the synchronization needs to go (based on which is newer, the local file or the remote file). You can skip specific files and folders by clicking the Skip column, and can also instruct Smart Sync to delete orphaned files (ones that don't have matching files on the other end). Once you have identified the files and folder to synch, click the Start Sync button to initiate the synchronization process.

Note: By default, the Smart Sync screen displays all files and folders in a long list that can quickly become unmanageable. You may want to click on View Options and select Tree to display the Resources in a tree view.

One last tip to keep in mind. You can see exactly what the FTP connectivity is doing (down to each FTP command executed and the response received) in the Console view (by default this is under the editor area). The Console view is used for all console output. If it is not displaying FTP information, click on the Display Selected Console button above the view and select Aptana Synching Console.

Per the recent release of the Open Government Directive, federal agencies are required to develop and deploy agency specific websites to inform the public on all activities and processes related to Open Government initiatives. Public facing dashboards that visually illustrate the status of the agency's effort will be an important feature on these websites. As the requirements of Open Government continue to mature, the ability to rapidly develop and deploy becomes essential to ensure timely responses rather than long development cycles. I'll be presenting a 1 hour online seminar on January 28, 2010, discussing and illustrating the benefits of Adobe ColdFusion as the platform of choice for Open Government dashboards. Details and registration information are online.

The ColdFusion Throwdown is intended to bring awareness to amazing projects within the ColdFusion community, by providing an environment where developers can compete for prizes and recognition for their ColdFusion powered creations.

The current ColdFusion Throwdown is the Mura Plugin Throwdown, which runs until January 29th, 2010.

Learn about ColdFusion in the cloud (including how you can deploy your next ColdFusion application on Amazon EC2) at an online seminar on Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 11:00 A.M. West Coast time. Registration is now open.

Hemant Khandelwal is the ColdFusion Engineering Manager. DZone chatted with him at MAX 2009 about ColdFusion 9, and posted the video interview entitled A Deep Dive into ColdFusion 9 (as a follow-up to my own interview with them).

Over the past few days I referred several people to the Adobe Developer Connection Learn Flex and ColdFusion page, none of whom knew it existed! And so, linking it here too, just in case.

BestWebDesignAgencies.com has posted its Rankings of Best ColdFusion Development Firms. Odd thing is how few of the listed companies are ones I've heard of. Does anyone know anything about how these ratings and reviews work?

The Adobe Community Help application is Adobe's next-generation AIR based help experience (now available in a preview form). It was initially configured to work with Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst content, but now also supports ColdFusion help as of ColdFusion Builder Beta 3 (as noted by Adobe Technical Writer Mallika Yelandur).

I previously mentioned that the public beta of ColdFusion Builder Beta 3 was available. Well, if you have not upgraded yet, here's another reason to do so, the ColdFusion Builder team has noted that Beta 2 will expire on January 1st, 2010.

Beta 3 of ColdFusion Builder has been posted to Adobe Labs. Go grab it!