This excerpt describes the process of creating a complete Flex-Java distributed application. Upgrading Flex applications to Java Enterprise Edition applications is done with Flex Data Services. FDS provides transparent access to POJO, EJBs, and JMS and comes with adapters for frameworks like Spring and Hibernate.

Now that Scorpio is here (at least in beta), it is time to start figuring out all the new tricks of the trade, right? However, as most of your clients will not be switching immediately, you will still have to be doing ColdFusion 7 work for some time.

Finally, ColdFusion 8 has incorporated image manipulation directly into the ColdFusion tag and scripting language. No more are we, as developers, chained to third-party products. These products, while excellent in quality, just mean adding one more level of complexity to any application that requires server-side image manipulation. Now, with CFImage and an abundance of image-related functions, ColdFusion has done to image manipulation what it has done to almost every other aspect of Web applications development - it has made it simple.

2005 has been the year of streaming video and the birth of Internet TV, the long-awaited convergence of television and the Internet. Now that broadband is available to more than 100 million households worldwide, every corporate website and every media company must now provide video content to remain competitive, not to mention live and interactive video webinars and on-demand webcasts.

'We are thrilled to get both the backing of such a strong group of strategic investors and a major distribution agreement with AOL,' said the 'Father of ColdFusion,' Jeremy Allaire, now Chairman and CEO of Internet TV start-up Brightcove. Allaire was referring to the announcement yesterday that Brightcove had completed a major strategic financing round, forged a groundbreaking video content distribution partnership with AOL, and appointed Barry Diller, Chairman and CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp and Chairman of Expedia, Inc., to the Brightcove Board of Directors.

SYS-CON Media's new Website, currently serving readers in its beta version, becomes the fastest growing i-technology media Website in the world, according to independent Alexa ratings, an Amazon.com company. Two year comparison of SYS-CON.com 'page views' statistics against TechTarget, eWeek, and Information Week.

Since our last issue, several events have transpired that have significant impact for ColdFusion developers. I have been keeping my eye on several trends and have been evaluating whether or not they deserve focus in ColdFusion Developer's Journal. I've begun blogging about these trends and about my observations and ideas regarding these trends and the future of CFDJ.

'Layers of abstraction are fundamental to software,' writes Sim Simeonov, 'but there's a limit to how high we can raise a level of abstraction through tools and frameworks alone. At some point, a new programming model is the best way forward.'

Wouldn't it be nice to get all the high-availability and scalability benefits of a cluster of multiple servers without the need to purchase multiple machines? How about being able to manage a number of isolated, performance tuned applications on one piece of hardware instead of taking up many machines in your server room?

One of the most powerful new features available in ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise that many ColdFusion developers might not yet be using is event gateways. Event gateways open up entirely new possibilities for ColdFusion and allow our ColdFusion applications to communicate with more or less any other Internet-enabled system even if the system doesn't communicate via the 'traditional' HTTP protocol.