Two new releases and seven ColdFusion open-source updates this week. Another late night as this was a very busy week of posts. MAX is right around the corner and I am expecting some exciting announcements...and could there be a product or two released? How about nine? Just making an educated guess...

This is the first in a series of posts that will hopefully offer some solid skill-building for using selectors and traversing through the DOM with jQuery. Most examples I end up seeing use a lot of id-based (i.e. $("#mydiv")) or class-based (i.e. $(".myClass")) selectors. While there is nothing wrong with this, jQuery offers a lot of power for traversing the DOM beyond this. Also, it removes the useless classes or ID's you might litter your page with simply to work within jQuery.

The first part of this series will cover some slightly advanced selector and traversing options such as combining selectors, adding filters and using selectors in conjunction with traversing methods. We'll move on to more advanced techniques (and a really neat sample application) in future posts in this series.

This post is covering a little experiment of sorts of mine that I built using some jQuery and straight JavaScript to add a very basic scheduler application to the RIA Unleashed agenda page (plug: coming to Boston November 13th) which lives within a Mango blog implementation. While most of you won't find the need to duplicate the exact functionality of this application, I do think it presents an opportunity to cover some really worthwhile techniques with jQuery. The interesting points to me is that jQuery/JavaScript made it easy for me to use existing content on the site to build this mini-application without the need for any server side calls or database data. Plus, as any of you familiar with jQuery might expect, it was really quick and easy to write.

No new projects but six updates to existing ColdFusion open source projects this week. MAX is just weeks away now and I am sure there are tons of exiting announcements coming soon (Since I can't be at MAX, I hope to learn more about them at RIA Unleashed). It's going to be exiting to see what's coming! Now for this week's update.

As you probably heard (and Sean Corfield recently reiterated), CFUnited this year was outstanding (by far the best one I have attended). The ColdFusion sessions varied in skill levels better than I can recall, with a great selection of advanced topics, and the Flex content was serious, given by well-known experts in Flex. To top it all off, the venue was fabulous - the food was plentiful and great, the rooms were nice, the bar was fun and the outside area (where each night seemed to end up) was perfect. Anyway, my point is, if you went to this year's, I know you want to go back next year...and if you didn't, you really can't miss again. This is especially true when you can pick up a 3 day conference pass at the low, low rate of $499 by buying them before September 25th (see details here). Stellr (aka the company behind CFUnited) is also helping out to promote RIA Unleashed : Boston, for which I am grateful. So, don't miss this deal - register today!