Coldfusion Guru and all around super geek Pete Freitag was nice enough to let me check out his new "Web Application Firewall" (see this link for more info). This product serves as a Coldfusion based security filter for all requests coming to an application. I was impressed with the approach Pete takes. After the Init the code ran smoothly and did not appreciably increase my page load time (always a concern when you are "wrapping" your application in something). If you use Pete's system you will pretty much guarantee that your site will be protected from a high percentage of known attacks. Overall I give the application an A for innovation and organization, a B+ for installation and a C- on the price. If you want to know more read on.
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You probably already know about BlueDragon. It's a fine ap server from the folks over at New Atlanta (the makers of Jturbo and ServletExec). BlueDragon is an interpretive engine for CFML that is a direct competitor to Coldfusion. Last night I was privileged to see a presentations by Josh Adams from New Atlanta at the Nebraska CFUG on the upcoming release of Blue Dragon 7. I have always thought that one of the knocks on BlueDragon is that BD is forced to play "catch up". The folks at New Atlanta have to wait and see what features appear in Coldfusion and then hurry to implement them in the next version of BD. I was pleasantly pleased and surprised to see that the next version of BlueDragon may force Adobe to play a bit of catch up on their own. It has a number of quite innovative features and I was duly impressed. Here are some of the more impressive things I saw or heard about.
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I'd like to take a moment to recommend a product. If you need a CMS system that is full featured, scales well, has a great community and cost nothing - then do not hesitate to try Farcry from daemon. We are in the midst of a project using Farcry to support a major medical center. To put it mildly, Farcry is the best Coldfusion product available. I have tested or used other CMS systems like Red Dot, Paper Thin, Hot-Banana something (singularly unappealing), but Farcry makes them all eat dust. If you want to know more - both pros and cons - read on.
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I know it's a pipe dream but I'm still waiting for Macromedia to create a flash IDE that caters to programmers. For once I'd like to see an equal number of enhancements for those of us writing functional "UI" flash as opposed to those writing pretty flash. There are so many weaknesses to the programming interface of Flash that's it's hard to know where to start. The "actionscript panel" is still practically unusable. I am compelled to use a mouse almost constantly, and the help panel has only a tiny improvement (the search box stays put in the upper left). There are few if any enhancements for folks like me. Here's the list from the "what's new" panel.
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