Robert Diamond

One of the ever-repeating themes here at CFDJ since Macromedia and Allaire merged has been the converging of their technologies and our place in the ever-changing technology landscape as CF developers. We spoke about it first while looking into the future with a sense of hope when the merger took place. Then we covered it as details began to emerge on what they had planned.

Since then, as CFDJ evolves along with the ColdFusion market, we've continued to cover all sorts of cross uses of these technologies. CF and Flash, CF and Java, and other such combo possibilities are increasingly becoming part of our collective development projects. The choices on what to use on most programming projects are becoming as varied and as long as a Chinese takeout menu. Further complicating things, Microsoft is working very hard to make sure that the next time I write about convergence my first example is CF and .NET.

I got some interesting feedback to my editorial last month, in which I attempted to roughly map out ColdFusion's place in the i-technology universe. Most readers agreed, more or less, with my choice in positioning, and e-mails I received on the subject sparked a lot of lively discussions. The majority also felt I was right in saying that Macromedia was doing their part to keep ColdFusion in that spot, their commitment to this being critical to our desire and confidence about investing in their products.

Macromedia's mission, under the MX umbrella, is to help developers toward their goals of creating the best possible applications, with the least amount of nightmares along the way, and also, of course, staying competitive as workers in the developer marketplace.

Simply being a ColdFusion developer is a good start on the mission, but it's just a start. I've spoken to lots of folks recently who have been unsure of where to start to expand their base of knowledge. Luckily for them, and even for advanced folks who are also branching out, Macromedia has released a good new resource, their Pet Market application.

There are actually four separate versions of the Pet Market application: two Flash front ends, one for Microsoft's .NET Pet Shop and one for Sun's Java Pet Store. More interesting to CFers than the Java versus .NET debate that rages around us are the two blueprint applications: one for Windows, one for Linux/Unix (another dangerous topic of debate). The latter are built using a combination of CF and Flash, and are worth some time playing with if you're ready to jump into these new waters. They use ColdFusion components (CFCs), which are my favorite new feature in ColdFusion MX, so I'm especially partial to seeing good examples used to get the word out. It's also got some good uses of a lot of the time-saving features of the new Dreamweaver, which I'm happy to say has simplified my development life.

It's available in Macromedia's Designer/Developer center, so go play with that - and read on - we've got a great issue!