Four new projects and one update this week. Relatively speaking, this was a another quiet week. Granted, it's not as quiet as, say, the Dolphins' end zone, but few things are (except perhaps a Notre Dame end-zone).

Recent news has announced that not only is Nintendo's Wii still dominating hardware sales but has recently surpassed the Xbox 360's install base. I have owned both since shortly after each of their respective launch dates, so over one and a half years for my 360 and about about 9 months for the Wii. At this point, having purchased quite a good number of games for both systems, I consider my Wii purchase a source of continuing disappointment despite my initial excitement. In fact, I am continually astounded at how the Wii can maintain its dominance, but my feeling at the moment is that it will become the ubiquitous device in people's living rooms that no one uses unless some issues are sorted out. Let me explain my feelings on this topic.

One thing to keep in mind while you read my opinion, however, is that my Wii was primarily purchased for my five year old son (who has played video games since he was three) and my wife, who rarely plays any video games. However, I think this is actually closer to Nintendo's intended audience for the Wii than myself, who leans more towards the "hardcore gamer" label (if I had more time to actually play). This means that I have not purchased the more "gamer" oriented games like Zelda and Metroid, though I have a number of the "casual" games. At this point, neither my son nor my wife, nore I use the Wii with much frequency.

One new release and two updates this week. Kind of quiet I suppose - probably since this is a short week as last week's update was a day late. Either that, or everybody was too busy dancing on the grave of CFDJ to work on open-source. The whole pronouncing CFDJ dead seems almost humorous when we are talking about a journal that was catatonic for well over a year now. It reminds me of a scene from Top Secret: Judge answers the phone call from hospital, "Yes...ok...well, let me know if his condition changes." Judge hangs up the phone and proclaims, "He's dead!" Ok, so the scene is funnier than my explanation of it...on to the topic at hand...

Let us be clear, the ColdFusion Developers Journal (CFDJ) has been a piece of crap for a long time. Most of the articles went up without any editing whatsoever, which was bad for the journal and bad for the authors. That is, however, when they actually had articles and not blog reprints or other types of reprints. I was a part of the unfortunate CFDJ Editorial Board, which was kept both uninformed and ignored (so much so that none of the members I am in contact with had any idea this was happening). Therefore, I feel that I know firsthand that Sys-Con as a company could care less about improving CFDJ for quite some time now.

In fact, I had been planning to resign from CFDJ's board in disgust but had been in discussion with my other board colleagues on how best to approach that. I guess Sys-Con beat us to the punch. Oh well, the result is the same, as I had hoped Adobe would pull support for the journal nonetheless. Yes, losing the first CF focused journal does seem to reflect badly on the language, but no worse than a really bad CF journal, which is what we had (nevermind the site, which was a complete embarrassment).

So, let Silverlight have its Sys-Con journal. I think Sys-Con will do as awful a job representing Silverlight as they did ColdFusion.

For those of you interested in reading the announcements and discussion on this...

• SYS-CON to Relaunch CFDJ as Silverlight Developer's Journal
• Sys-Con Drops ColdFusion for Silverlight
• Hurrah! CFDJ is dead!
• Sys-Con announces end of CFDJ
• Show Your Support for the ColdFusion Community

I caught this link on DZone this morning. A site called DevX has posted an interesting tutorial showing how to make the same basic sample application using first Silverlight, then AIR and then JavaFX. I admit to not actually walking through the code in great detail, however each section summarizes the experience briefly listing the benefits and drawbacks of each platform.

While giving AIR a definite edge in terms of ease of use and adoption (with extra credit for the badge install process), the article seems to imply that Microsoft is in a very strong position longer term to push adoption of Silverlight using Windows Update. Overall, it gives very positive reviews of both Silverlight and AIR, while the review of JavaFX was less than flattering saying that it is so slow that "this might spoil all its potential advantages" ...not good.

Anyway, this is a good read even if all you want is a basic comparison of the platforms and don't need the code walkthrough. You can find the tutorial at http://www.devx.com/RichInternetApps/Article/35208.