The Jacksonville Code Camp needs sponsors. The Code Camp is a free event for developers now in its forth year.
Sponsorships can be as low as $25.00. The code camp needs to raise $10,000 for the entire event.
This years camp should be very good, because there will be tracks for .NET, Java, Ruby, Flex and ColdFusion.
Adobe has released the ColdFusion 8 updater 1. This contains some hot-fixes, but the real news is that Adobe has released 64 bit version for Windows, Linux and Mac OS 10.5.
Previously the only 64 bit version of ColdFusion ran on Solaris only. If you have been running any server software on 64 bit hardware, you have probably seen improvements in permormance and memory usage.
For Mac OS X users, the installer will now work with 10.5. All of my Macs are now using 64 bit hardware with Mac OS X 10.5. 10.5 also comes pre-installed with Apache 2.2
I am a big fan of open standards. One of the things that has prevented me from upgrading to a HDTV and a new high def player is that lack of a high def format standard.
There have been two camps for the last couple of years for high def video players, Toshiba's HD-DVD and Sony's Blu-Ray. This past weekend Warner Brothers anounced that they were going drop support for HD-DVD and go with Blu-Ray exclusively. I read today on engadget that Paramount was switching to Blu-Ray. That leaves only one major studio behind HD-DVD, that being Universal, and I am sure Universal will drop support as well.
I have not purchased one of these players yet because I did not want to get Betamaxed. I will probably buy a Blu-Ray player now, I am even thinking about getting a Play Station 3.
My software update feature on my older Mac showed that I had downloaded Java release 6 for Mac OS X 10.4. I got really exited until I read the release notes;
It looks like this is a series of security updates. Before Leopard was released Apple had a prerelease version of Java SE 6 on their developer site, which they took down earlier in the year. I had hoped that Apple would release Java SE 6 with Mac OS 10.5, but I was let down when it was released to find it only had Java SE 5.
Apple is known for its secrecy when it comes to releasing new products. I can understand that when it comes to certain products and software. The problem comes when you are trying to develop for a platform. Developers have to have SDKs, APIs and the other tools so they can start to develop for the platform before it is released.
Right now the silence coming from Cupertino is deafening. Apple should come out and say if they are going to continue to develop Java on the Mac so developers can start planning what technology they need to use in their future products.
I have liked Java because I could write applications that can run on any platform, whether it was Linux, Mac or Windows. If Apple is not going to develop Java on the Mac anymore, Sun needs to start developing future versions for the Mac like they do for Windows.
In the mean time I am going to start taking a harder look at Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight as alternatives.
About five months back I started working as consultant for a company called Idea Integration based here in Jacksonville. I have been doing SQL Server consulting since I arrived. The group I work in specializes in Microsoft technologies, including SQL Server, ASP .NET, BizTalk and Sharepoint. We also do consulting in legacy systems, network infrastructure and Java.
I just finished up a project, and I am available for consulting work. If you would like to contact me for consulting work, you can reach me be going to this link.
I read on Scott Guthrie's blog today about how Microsoft will be showing off a version of IronRuby at the next Mix. There is already a version of Python that runs on .NET through their DLR implementation. He has code samples of IronRuby in his post.
One of the exciting things to see is that Microsoft is embracing dynamic scripting languages like Ruby and Python. They are also adding Lambda expressions and dynamic features to C# and VB.NET.
I bought one of the new MacBook Pros last week. I absolutely love it. I have used a couple of different database engines on the Mac in the past such as MySQL, Sybase, Oracle and more recently Derby. Because the processors in my Mac where based on PowerPC processors, I was never able to run SQL Server with out some type of emulation. Anyone who ever ran Virtual PC on the Mac knows what I am talking about.
Tonight we are having the first JaxFusion meeting at the new location at the Modis building in downtown Jacksonville. The meeting will be on the second floor in conference room A.
Tonights meeting will be on how to use ColdFusion with .NET and other Microsoft technologies including Exchange server. Some of these features are new to ColdFusion 8, but others can be used in the current versions of ColdFusion. I have a lot of swag to giveaway at tonights meeting as well.
One of the problems in the past with ColdFusion has been that you could not load CFCs into the session scope of your server in clustered environments, and have those CFCs replicate to the memory of the other app servers in your cluster. The issue was that session scope memory stayed resident in the memory of the application server. You could replicate simple data such as strings, but complex objects would not. In the Java world you can serialize java objects across servers.
There are a number of dynamic languages that are already supported by .NET, such as Iron Python and JavaScript, but according to this article at eWeek, Microsoft has made this easier to do with a dynamic language runtime. The article inteviews Jim Hugunin and John Lam of Microsoft about the language support.
Adobe is Open Sourcing Flex and the Flex SDK. This includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers. It also includes the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript Libraries from the SDK.
Here is the link to the Labs page.
