From community member Stephen Moretti, manager of the Scottish ColdFusion User Group:

http://nil.checksite.co.uk/post.cfm/coldfusion-8

A notable quote:

"Everyone I've spoken to says that ColdFusion 8 is probably the most significant upgrade for ColdFusion yet. If you don't upgrade for anything else, then you must upgrade for the performance increase you will get for your cfcs and your application in general."

Damon

Adobe Feeds is now live as a replacement for the old "weblogs.macromedia.com" Weblog aggregator, and it's much, much, MUCH faster! In addition to the Adobe ColdFusion 8 upgrade, there were also a few code and query optimizations I understand as well.

But wow, what a difference!

Check it out here:
http://feeds.adobe.com

Damon

Yep, we're at it again. I blogged previously about Adobe's sponsorship of the Tour of California bike race, and this week Adobe LiveCycle Data Services 2.6 (Beta) and Flex is powering the Tour of Georgia bike race, running on clustered servers at Media Temple.

Again, special thanks go to Allan Padgett, who is deeply involved at all levels, Ed Solovey, Alex Glosband, Seth Hodgson and Jeff Vroom from my team (LiveCycle Data Services Engineering) for their hard work on this, tweaking the site, and finding a few issues of additional "bulletproofing" that will make it into the final LC Data Service 2.6 product as a result of the experience of powering the two Tour race events.

Briefly, the Tour Tracker is a Flex application written in Flex 3 connected to a cluster of 12 LiveCycle Data Services servers and a network of servers provided by Akamai. GPS data comes from units on the cars and on the bikes, using the cellular network to send GPS via UDP back to one of our LCDS servers. Chat is via LCDS messaging. Play by play is via LCDS Data Management. Photos are using the Flickr API.

Check it out live here:
http://www.tourdegeorgiatracker.com/

Damon

Hot off the press, a new version of the Data Services Stress Testing Framework has been posted to Adobe Labs.

The Data Services Stress Testing Framework helps developers using LiveCycle Data Services ES 2.6 load test their applications. This tool was formerly known as the Flex Stress Testing Framework. It has been updated for LiveCycle Data Services ES 2.6 and has many new features and bug fixes.

Grab it here!

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Data_Services_Stress_Testing_Framework

Damon

A great little post on the step-by-step instructions to get BlazeDS up and running on Amazon's EC2 service for Flex RIA apps:

http://weblog.cahlan.com/2008/04/easy-setup-guide-for-blazeds-zero-to.html

Damon

Below is a list of Adobe LiveCycle Data Services and BlazeDS product info, demos, doc and customer reference links that you may find helpful.

PRODUCT INFO

LiveCycle Data Services Community Edition
LiveCycle Data Services ES
LiveCycle Data Services ES In-Depth
LiveCycle Data Services ES Features & Benefits
BlazeDS
BlazeDS Features
LiveCycle Data Services ES 2.6 Public Beta

DOCUMENTATION

BlazeDS Product Documentation: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/blazeds/Developer+Documentation

Dev Center:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices2_6

Capacity Planning Guide:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/livecycle/es/sdkHelp/programmer/lcds/flex2wp_fdscapacityplanning.pdf

DEMOS

Universal Minds GeoLayer Demo:
http://www.universalmind.com/demo/launchpad/GeoLayer.html

Adobe SalesBuilder Demo:
http://coenraets.org/blog/2008/04/yahoo-maps-collaboration-using-flex-and-blazeds and
http://coenraets.org/blog/2008/02/salesbuilder-beta-3-air-file-flex-source-code

A simple mortgage application collaboration demo:
http://coenraets.org/blog/2008/04/collaborative-data-entry-with-flex-and-blazeds

A simple Yahoo! MAPS collaboration demo:
http://coenraets.org/blog/2008/04/yahoo-maps-collaboration-using-flex-and-blazeds

Also note that default LCDS turnkey install includes some nice samples with code to unveil the magic:
http://localhost:8700/samples/

CUSTOMER EXAMPLES

MFG.com
Cegedim
SkyGrid
Optimal Payments
Pikeo
Acesis
eTrade Germany

Damon

Just posted to Adobe Labs, we've made available a public Beta of Adobe® LiveCycle® Data Services ES 2.6, the Adobe server-based technology that streamlines the integration of rich Internet applications (RIAs) with LiveCycle Services, J2EE applications, and business logic.

Check it out here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices2_6

This release aligns with the releases of Adobe Flex® 3 and Adobe Flex Builder™ 3. It provides new and enhanced capabilities for enterprise developers building application utilizing Flex and LiveCycle. A complete list of new features is contained in the documentation. Below are some highlights.

New and enhanced features include:

- Alignment with Flex 3
- Improved LiveCycle Foundation Integration Features
- Improved RTMP Performance and Scalability
- Scalable HTTP Based Channel
- Data Management Paging Improvements
- Data Management Offline Improvements
- Data Management Improved Subtype Support
- Data Management and Hibernate Improvements

Nota that the complete list of new features and enhancements and fixes is located in the documentation. We sincerely appreciate your participation in the public Beta release, and as always, look forward to your feedback!

Damon