Tonight! If you want to kick back you heels and listen to an overview of FarCry there are several upcoming presentations that might be of interest. With the upcoming release of FarCry 5.0 (Fortress), these are the first opportunities to take a look at some of the latest features to come out of this vibrant community.

New Atlanta have open sourced their BlueDragon ColdFusion engine under the GPL2.0 open source license. Why do this? Will it work? How open will it be? What should we do? And what should Adobe do?

Daemon is throwing it's hat in the ring for this years, "Google Summer of Code", in an attempt to get the FarCry code base onto the program. It would be a first for ColdFusion, and with any luck we might get some great projects off the ground. But we need help!

XML style tags... I'm a sucker for their "completeness". -- it's a personal thing. Each to his own you say -- just make sure you write your custom tags to let me have things my way. Custom tags seem to be in the hinterland of ColdFusion development these days, but i just love 'em. If you're going to build them, build them right. Make sure that you can call them in "xml style".

The CFCAMPs in Australia were a great success last November. Thought I might link to the information and notes speakers have provided for the various CFCAMPs across Australia. We're missing a few sessions, but what is there is yours. Enjoy!

Pulse is a nifty service that allows you to install and maintain an Eclipse development environment. Adding additional plugins is as easy as picking from a catalogue. But what if you want to install plugins that aren't on the official list? Well it turns out you can manually install these for each profile on your system.

Been playing with the new Pulse profile manager for Eclipse and I'm loving it. This no-nonsense, customisable Eclipse distribution is way better than trying to work out which version of Eclipse platform you need and trying to install and debug your favourite plugin configuration. Another major bonus for development teams is the ability to share profiles so that you can easily get the whole company running a similar programming environment.

Application Specific Mappings are a furphy and do not work as advertised in CF8. If you thought that Application.cfc mappings feature allowed you to override ColdFusion mappings you'd be wrong. cfimport, "extends" and "implements" do not adhere to application specific mappings as defined in Application.cfc.

CFCAMP is a free, mini-conference for coldfusion developers by coldfusion developers. We're celebrating the release of Coldfusion 8 all over Australia -- and there's a lot to celebrate. Ben is in town!

The upgrade to Leopard may cause some havoc in your ColdFusion 8 development environment. We've cobbled together some tips and tricks from the community at large to get you going again, until Adobe have time to catch up and release an official update.

FarCry is getting increasingly popular since the 4.0 release. It's a mature product, in a commodity space so seeing that sort of traction is really motivating the Daemonites. It's interesting to compare the relative popularity of various ColdFusion framework Google Groups. Turns out FarCry tops the list despite playing second fiddle in many peoples perception.

Recently tasked with getting Flex 1.5 serve up and running on ColdFusion 8 Enterprise with Apache web server. We encountered a few troubles along the way and thought we might jot down some of the issues we faced and what we did to solve them.

One of the new CF8 tags I want to leverage in my Inspire session at MAX is CFPRESENTATION. CF8 commandeers the old Breeze "presenter" engine for generating Flash based presentations that resemble fancy online Powerpoints. As a trainer for Breeze I picked up a few tricks that apply to making the most of this interesting new feature of CF8 -- namely the correct image formats to be included in CFPRESENTER.

Yxplorer is a Flashlet and accompanying component that allow you to drill down and explore your session, application and server scopes. Very nifty tool if you've been wondering what's in there. Yxplorer is part of the FarCry framework, but something that can be used on its own just about anywhere.

dp.SyntaxHighlighter is a Javascript library that converts textarea form elements into pretty code highlighting boxes -- you can see examples on this page :) Unfortunately, the out of the box implementation of tinyMCE is going to give you some trouble.