Ben Forta User Group Tour

Greetings, Well, Ben Forta was in town last night for his latest stop on the User Group Tour. He said that it started out as a two week tour and just seems to keep getting extended. It is now planned for about two months. (Sort of like Gillign's Island. o/~ A three hour tour... ~\o :-) He started off explaining why Macromedia has taken the route they did getting this far. He showed off some nifty new things that will hopefully all make it into the final release of Blackstone. And of course he gave his standard answer as to when Blackstone will be released ('Soon.') So, does anyone want more details, or do y'all want to wait until Ben shows up in your neck of the woods to find out? James Husum Visit the Writers' Portal - http://www.smotu.org/ Brainsludge- all the shtuff running around my brain - http://www.brainsludge.com/ Currently reading: ColdFusion Lists,Arrays, & Structures by Jeff Peters

> So, does anyone want more details, or do y'all want to wait until Ben shows > up in your neck of the woods to find out? If you're allowed to talk then yes, please give us more details. I'm pretty sure Ben won't be coming to my neck of the woods (Northern Europe) anytime soon :( -- .erki

Greetings, Well, Ben's first caveat was that we could share anything he discussed as long as we put it in our own words and didn't record what he said. All for legal purposes. Also, anything he discussed is strictly alpha code and may not be included in the final release of Blackstone. He did say that there were some European stops coming up and then a few in Asia but he didn't give any more specifics than that. So he may possibly be in your neck of the woods. Anyway, as for all the stuff he covered - First he explained that the tour was to let folks know where Macromedia was headed and more importantly to get feedback from users as to what they want to see in the next release. There were several times when he said something like 'If you had to choose between A and B, because we only have limited resources to get them both in the product before launch, which is more important?' This next release they feel is built on a solid architecture which they can now start working on developing and adding features to it. Ben said there is an updater for CFMX 6.1 coming out. It isn't necessarily recommended for everyone to download and use. It has a lot of database driver updates in it, and some hotfixes - nothing crucial to the operation of 6.1 as it is. The rough timeline of the release covers the user group tour this summer, opening up the beta testing in the fall (probably before Max), and a release of Blackstone in early 2005. Ben went through a few things meant to help Dreamweaver/designer type people get more into the coding realm. He covered building forms. CFFORMs are now updated to make use of XForms for display. You will be able to 'skin' the forms on your site through an XSLT stylesheet. Macromedia is planning to release a number of predesigned forms that developers can use and 'tweak' to their own ends. And all you have to do is tell the form which stylesheet to use, and put your form elements in place - CF will do all the rest of the work for you. One of the nifty features in the new CFFORMs is that many of the input fields are now Flash widgets. You can even design the whole form to be a Flash form. After showing us several of the individual form elements, Ben showed off a re-creation of the Orbitz travel frontpage. It had tabs, databinding between elements on the form, and an accordion panel. It looked a lot like a Flex app, and apparently uses some of the same underlying technology that Flex uses. One item I asked about was databinding between dropdown boxes. You know, something where you would have a list of States in one box, then when you select a State, another dropdown box would be populated with the cities in that State. Currently such a task is a pain in the butt to do. With the databinding Ben showed off it would be a piece of cake. Unfortunately Ben said they had not worked that bit out yet. I certainly hope they can get it worked out before Blackstone is released. Next Ben showed off the new CFDOCUMENT tags. Very slick. He generated a .pdf file based on a query and a few lines of output. It used headers and footers, and supported page breaks, page numbering and other stuff. This was one of those 'Choose between A and B' moments. PDF formats will probably be handled with CFDOCUMENT but Ben also wanted to know if Flashpaper, RTF, or other formats should be used too. It looks like RTF has a large following, as does Flashpaper. I think Ben put up a poll on his blog (http://www.forta.com/blog/) asking for input on this topic. He also discussed using Flashpaper as an alternative for printing documents - same basic power as PDF but none of the overhead with too many options that the user probably won't use. Next he showed off CFREPORT - a tag for generating complex, printable reports. Again with a query or two and a few lines of code he had a nicely formatted sales report, broken down by areas sold, and by salespeople. He also showed off a report building app that will generate the report forms for you. The report builder will be a separate program and Ben wasn't sure if it would be distributed with Blackstone or not. Ben then covered some native security/authentication options that could prove useful. One that was in the demo (but he didn't elaborate on) was a CFNTAUTHENTICATE tag, presumably to use native Windows NT authentication easily within your app. New versions of the CFGRID and CFTREE tags were shown off. The output looks like the earlier versions but now they are Flash based and will actually work everywhere the Flash player exists (which is almost every desktop on the planet). Ben discussed being able to bundle your entire app as a .jar, .war, or .ear file and distribute it as a single file. No more having to worry about your code being exposed. Finally he discussed exposing the CF admin APIs. This way developers can code out web-based segments of the CF admin interface to allow administrators to do things like set up DSNs, or turn on/off debugging, without having to give them access to everything in the CF admin area. There was more to his presentation that he didn't get to cover, because our group was asking a lot of questions. I think I've gotten everything he covered in a nutshell. If Ben is coming to your area and you have a chance to go see this presentation, do so. I don't think you'll be disappointed. Also, be sure to visit Ben's blog, or Tim Buntel's blog (http://www.buntel.com/blog/) if you have any feedback on what you want to see in the next release. Now is the time to get your comments in while they are actively looking for what the developer community wants. At 04:05 PM 6/16/2004 +0300, you wrote: ----- Excess quoted text cut - see Original Post for more ----- James Husum Visit the Writers' Portal - http://www.smotu.org/ Brainsludge- all the shtuff running around my brain - http://www.brainsludge.com/ Currently reading: ColdFusion Lists,Arrays, & Structures by Jeff Peters

Wednesday, June 16, 2004, 3:51:23 PM, James Husum wrote: > I think I've gotten everything he covered in a nutshell. Yes, nice summary. Ben was at our CFUG on Monday evening...photos at http://www.samcfug.org/forta/index.html I was especially impressed with the Printing (CFDocument) and Reporting (CFReport) features. Some nice things coming down the pike in Blackstone! Cheers. -- Chris Montgomery Airtight Web Services   http://www.airtightweb.com Web Development, Web Project Management, Software Sales 210-490-2415 (office), 210-232-2790 (mobile) Airtight Web Services uses plain text e-mail. I encourage anyone corresponding with my company via e-mail to set e-mail clients to send using plain text as well.