One new project and five updates this week. I am sure by now you all have heard today's big news. I am referring, of course, to the unofficial release Vista performance and reliability pack (if you do actually care about that, go here). More importantly, I am now featured on a video on the Adobe site. The fat dude who immediately follows Ben Forta on the new customers video - that's me: Brian Rinaldi...Web Developer!

My buddy Glenn Gervais has posted a very useful post covering ten ColdFusion hosts under $10. I know for a fact that Glenn has spent a good deal of time researching this topic, and it shows in the post. I think his article also directly addresses a complaint you hear from people who are used to PHP hosting prices (sure you pay only pay $5 a month...but then you are forced to use PHP ;).

Personally, I have had so many issues with shared hosting in the past (even with the big names) that I am not a fan of the whole concept. However I do recognize though that it is often necessary and sometimes the budgetary concerns are worth the trade-offs. It would be great to have people comment on Glenn's blog and share experiences with the hosts he lists (both good and bad would be helpful) or post other hosts within the price range that are not listed. Perhaps he will keep this list up-to-date going forward because it is a great reference. Thanks Glenn.

Six new projects and two updates this week. More importantly, I am considering (at the insistence of Paul Hastings) adding a new category to the OS list covering a hot category in open-source (actually make that cool), open-source beer. Now, someone just needs to get me an ice-Cold(Fusion) open-source beer so that I can better evaluate its worthiness for addition to the list!

So, let's review for a second. In this series, we have gone from doing basic objects with composition and no framework and on to using ColdSpring and finally using both ColdSpring and Transfer, all the while utilizing code generated by my Illudium PU-36 Code Generator. In this example we are going to take a step back, of sorts, to our ColdSpring example. We will examine how, using the same back-end code we created in step 2, we can connect our application to a Flex user-interface with only a simple change to our ColdSpring configuration. As you will see this is much easier than it may sound.

So, as I mentioned on my Pownce account, I am working on a curriculum for teaching some basic object-oriented development in ColdFusion as well as introducing frameworks like Mach ii, ColdSpring and Transfer. I have outlined the basics of what is an object and the data access object (DAO) pattern so far, and then I hit the commonly used (including by me) "gateway" component. Now with most patterns in ColdFusion object-oriented development you can find a direct correlation in common J2EE design patterns. However, in this case, though I am not an expert on J2EE design patterns, the typical ColdFusion gateway seems to bear little resemblance to relevant design patterns in Java. So, the question becomes, what is the "gateway" in ColdFusion?