On September 16th, Adobe and Motorola are hosting a mobile Flash meetup. They're looking for designers and developers, student or otherwise to come and maybe show off some of their work.

There will be networking, pizza, beer, and froyo. (As well as Froyo.)

I've been working on a little proof of concept idea and wanted to see if other people liked it and perhaps wanted to see it go further.

I've heard a couple of calls for command line ColdFusion. I wanted to see if it could be done. My first experiment was trying to use AIR new native processes to make a command line client for ColdFusion. It didn't pan out. But the api I used to make it was easily adaptable. I combined it with a socket listener event gateway to make a ColdFusion telnet server.

The video shows it in action.

CFConsole from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.

Like it? Want more. Let me know.

In the meantime the project is available on RIAForge.com and github, please feel free to fork it and play with it.

One of the best ways to get a jump start on paying off those student loans is getting a good paying job after college. (Duh, you all know that.) One of the best ways to get a head start into that good paying job is to find fields or subfields where demand for spots outweighs available workers. (Duh, again.) If you can display knowledge in one of these fields right out of school, you can usually beat out the starting salaries for your classmates. (Duh... oh wait, that would be awesome.)

Good news, right now one of those fields is Flash according to the Wall Street Journal. Flash developers are in demand, especially in the subfield of Flash Gaming. Also of interest is Flash for mobile and AIR for Android.

So how do you get in on it?

For a broad overview, check out the Adobe Developer Center.
Then check out the Gaming Technology Center.
Also get yourself some Flash Builder for Students. (It's Free.)

Greg Wilson announced yesterday the release of Adobe AIR Launchpad.

Adobe awards students who do cool stuff with art and technology. Those awards are called the Adobe Design Achievement Awards. From the site:

The Adobe ® Design Achievement Awards celebrate student achievement reflecting the powerful convergence of technology and the creative arts. The competition - which showcases individual and group projects created with industry-leading Adobe creative software - honors the most talented and promising student graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, animators, digital filmmakers, developers and computer artists from the world's top institutions of higher education.

The long and short of it, the ADAA's show off some of the coolest uses of our tools around by some of the most innovative people in our community: students.

There's now a gallery showcasing former winners. Check out stuff of their stuff, you won't be disappointed.

A question came up on Twitter today:

hard to do "JavaScript at the bottom" in CFML with MVC frameworks... wish we have a tag. Thought? #coldfusion

A great question, this is the answer in Adobe ColdFusion.

Use the request scope.

This is one of those random places where request scope is actually very helpful.  It breaks encapsulation, but you're going to have to do that anyway.

So first you write a page wrapper, that displays the content of a variable named request.footer.

Then you write your view and pump your javascript to inject.

Then you write your page with those components in it.

This will ultimately yield this:

In the future, I'd like to see us solve this problem natively, like but until then here's a solution.

Apptacular is great at aggressively mapping out relationships.  This is good, when trying to build a quick admin interface for your applications. However when you get working on "real" applications, this aggressive relationship building can bite you.

This video will take you through, not just the problem, but how to use Apptacular to fix it.

Apptacular ColdFusion Builder Extension - Taking it down a notch from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.

BFusion and BFlex are right around the corner.

I'll be there to give the BFusion keynote and talk about superfast application building using Apptacular.

I believe my colleague Paul Trani will also be there, and is giving the BFlex keynote.

And with such a killer lineup, Bloomington, Indiana will be the place to be this September 11 and 12th.

I'm happy to say I'll be at the Heartland Developers Conference in Omaha Nebraska this year.

I'll be talking about ColdFusion, and how it can power truly rapid RIAs. In order to explain the whole workflow, I'll be touching on ORM, scripting, Flash Catalyst, Flex 4 and Flash Builder.

Additionally, two other Adobeans will be making the trip, Paul Trani and Kevin Hoyt. Here's our lineup:

• Closing Keynote Day 2: Developing for Android with Flash (Kevin Hoyt)
• Blowing Minds in a Flash (Kevin Hoyt)
• Design Fundamentals for Developers (Paul Trani)
• ColdFusion as a Backend for RAD RIA (Terry Ryan)

So hope to see everyone in Omaha this September 8-10.

A couple people have reported an issue that happens when you use Apptacular with "Enable Request Debugging Output" checked in the ColdFusion Administrator. Basically, the XML that is supposed to go to ColdFusion Builder has the debugging tacked on to the end of it rendering the XML invalid, and Apptacular dies.

I thought I had a fix for it, but I was wrong.

So I added a new fix for it.

You can go to http://bit.ly/Apptacular and download it...

or you can use Automatic Updates. To do that:

1. Launch ColdFusion Builder.
2. Right-click and bring up the Apptacular context menu.
3. Select Check For Updates.
4. Click the big ole "Yes, I want to update!" button.

That's it; if you don't choose to run the update you'll get a subtle indicator that an update is available until you do update.