Two new projects and four updates this week. MAX is coming up quickly, and I am excited about attending. I am also speaking at Ray's ColdFusion Unconference on "ColdFusion, Open Source, and Burnout Paradise Tips." I may know much about ColdFusion or Open-Source, but I gleaned a few pointers from my six year old son about how to beat Ray at Burnout Paradise.

One new project and four updates this week. I have been busily working this week getting Flex Camp Boston 2008 planned. We have already lined up a handful of top notch Flex and AIR speakers and registration should open very soon, so keep watching this blog if you are interested in attending. In the ColdFusion open-source world, we had a ton of extensive tutorials this week.

One (sorta) new project this week and one update. Obviously this is a light week for ColdFusion open source, nonetheless Russ Johnson's Skweegee (which existed previously under a different name with a different codebase but a similar concept) should be an interesting project to watch.

Cairngorm is a framework for rich Internet application (RIA) development. More specifically, Cairngorm is a package of Actionscript 3.0 classes that help implement a number of proven design patterns to create a generic starting point for your Flex application architecture. By adapting a number of proven J2EE solutions for the RIA world, Cairngorm helps you deal with the complexity of managing state and encapsulating your business logic into reusable components while taking into account the asynchronous nature of service requests within a Flex application.

By focusing on the Cairngorm workflow, this article is intended to illustrate the "how" of Cairngorm as opposed to focusing heavily on the "why." Building an application with Cairngorm tends to follow a repetitive sequence of steps that, once they are clear, make Flex development a fairly simple and organized process. The intent of this article is to walk you through these steps.

This is a reprint with permission of an article that was originally published in the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update Volume 2 Issue 3 in October 2007 (click here to subscribe). If you would like to download the source you can find it here. I have another Cairngorm sample appliction which you can get via Subversion at http://code.google.com/p/remotesynthesis/ where you will also find the same example built with the Mate Framework. If you are interested in the Mate Framework, you can find my article on that topic in Flex Authority Volume 1 Issue 1, which you can subscribe to here.

Three new projects and three updates this week. The question I have this afternoon, unrelated to ColdFusion, is, do we get to celebrate DOW 10,000 all over again when this eventually comes back around? As a follow up, how stupid do James Glassman and Kevin Hassett, authors of the now infamous DOW 36,000, seem in retrospect? They probably haven't skipped a beat and are rushing out a book called "DOW 1,000" to cash in on the recent decline. Anyway, back to the topic at hand...