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Just an announcement that the Early Bird Pricing for ColdBox Training ends tomorrow at 5pm Pacific. After that, you will get the standard training price. I would recommend you register this week so you can take advantage in over $250 in savings.

This course is 2 Days of intense ColdBox and Enterprise Application Development Training, that will help you not only get ColdBox Trained but also help you plan and architect enterprise ColdFusion applications.

I just saw that EXT JS is having their first conference in Orlando, Florida and the sessions seem action packed.

My friend Aaron Conran will be presenting various topics and it sure seems like it will be a great conference.

I did an interview for CFConversations back in October and it is now released.  Please check it out by visiting the cfconversations website.

It was a true pleasure to talk to Brian Meloche and Adam Haskell.  I had a great time talking to those guys. We talked from everything about El Salvador, Salvadorean food, the Salvadorean Civil War, coming to the US, the roots of ColdBox and the future of ColdBox.

So if you have time, please check it out and don't forget about ColdBox Training is now available for March 14-15th in Ontario, CA.

I am pleased to announce our third ColdBox Training seminar to be held in sunny Southern California on March 14-15th, 2009. We have a great venue at the Hyatt Ontario Mills in Ontario, California (ONT). Just 30 minutes from Disney and super close to Los Angeles and surrounding beaches. This seminar will cover our flagship course: CBOX-101 - Core ColdBox and it will include everything ColdBox up to version 2.6.3. Wait a minute, 2.6.3 is still not out, well it soon will be, but the docs are ready!!

The early bird pricing has been announced and it is an INCREDIBLE early bird price. So head over to the ColdBox Training site and register now as occupancy is limited.

I am sick and tired of MySQL Query crashing on me every 10 minutes. What other Mac software would you recommend for dealing with MySQL. I really like MySQL Query's simplicity, but I just hate its instability. What do you recommend?

I just got back from vacation and had great news that my topic was accepted for CFUnited 2009.. CFUnited is one of the premier ColdFusion conferences around the world and I definitely recommend that you register for it NOW!

See you in D.C. in August!

In full X-Mas spirit, here is my X-Mas Gift to the ColdFusion Community: ColdBox 2.6.2 Final Release codename series "FAITH". 

This is a major maintenance release that is full of joy and goodies.  There have been over 33 critical fixes to the core, over 4 major sample applications added, over 5 more documentation guides and about 30 nice little additions that will make you giggle with joy!! So what are you waiting for, download it now!

Enjoy it and don't bother me as I leave for vacation tomorrow to El Salvador, to enjoy lots of sun, beach, good food and family!!

This is a tip and reminder (I just spent like 10 minutes shouting why why why!!), of a very subtle difference when creating structures in CF. AT first glance creating something like the following will produce what you expect:

mappings = structnew();

mappings.FirstName = "Luis";

mappings.LastName = "Majano";

You would say that the keys for this structure would be "FirstName" and "LastName" would you? Well, the answer is NO!! The keys would be "FIRSTNAME" and "LASTNAME" because the are uppercased by CF. If you really want to keep case, then don't use dot notation but array notation:

mappings = structnew();

mappings["FirstName"] = "Luis";

mappings["LastName"] = "Majano";

By using array notation you are explicitly setting the key with the correct case. I re-discovered this gem by yes, UNIT TESTING, the ColdBox caching engine and some tests where failing because the keys could not be found. Well, DUUHHHH!!! You where assigning them wrong. Anyways, I thought I would share my stupidity on the matter and hopefully save someone or even myself in the future, the few minutes of "WHY WHY WHY!!"

I have been developing more and more on Railo and I am really liking some of its unique features due to its simplicity and total awesomeness. Here is a small tip on how to serialize complex objects such as queries, structures, arrays, and a whole gammut of all those types NESTED!!. All you need to do is call the serialize() method to convert the entire complex object into its string represenation. Then call evaluate() and Railo will evaluate the text back to its original object. EASY!!

At least much easier than trying to do serialization and deserialization with java. Anyways, I thought I would share this little tip:

myStruct = {fname:'Luis',lname:'Majano',great:'You Know it!!',

dates:[now(),now()+1,now()+2],

TodayIs:'#now()#'};

dump(myStruct);

//Serialize the struct

MySerialization = serialize(myStruct);

writeOutput("MySerialized Structure: #MySerialization#");

//Reinflate it back.

NewStruct = evaluate(MySerialization);

dump(newStruct);