An Architect's View

Opera Compatibility

With all the talk of browser / standards compatibility, I couldn't help but be amused by this story in The Register about their trials and tribulations with Opera...

Is XML Too Hard?

Someone recently asked me, via cf-talk, what I thought about Tim Bray's article that XML is too hard for programmers. I was sitting on the reply, in my drafts folder, thinking about what to say because, well, I think XML is pretty good really and I'd been a bit puzzled by Tim's original article. I no longer need to sit on my reply because Tim's published a great follow-up article saying that XML doesn't suck. I'll just refer folks to that I think since it confirms what I think about XML.

Depressed Press: Variables

Jim Davis just published a very useful and very thorough guide to variables in CFML. It explains all the different data types and different scopes so, no matter how much experience you have with ColdFusion, you'll learn something new. Depressed Press also has an equally excellent guide to locking which talks about race conditions and when and why you need to use cflock. Highly recommended!

Under the Hood

The first of a series of Under the Hood articles is now up on macromedia.com - these will show you what's going on behind the scenes on the new site. In this report, I talk about the architectural evolution of the ColdFusion applications on the site, moving from 'traditional' CF5 applications through to Rich Internet Applications. Hope you enjoy it!

Unplugged

Macromedia Central. Flash Unplugged. Way cool. And useful.
I was extremely excited the first time I saw an internal demo of this new product. As a Mac user, I've become dependent on Watson for TV listings, phone number lookup, weather, movies... To have similar functionality in a desktop Flash application that can also be easily extended and also work offline is pretty much a dream come true for (and, I hope, many others)!
Macromedia Central was just one of many exciting announcements made at FlashForward 2003 - read Christian Cantrell's report for more details!

Meet the Makers

In October last year, I went to a one day event organized by Brian Alvey, called Meet the Makers. It was a fascinating event about standards in web development. I just received a newsletter from Brian, highlighting the first of a series of "conversations" on the newly designed Meet the Makers website. The conversation is with John Lenker and it makes interesting reading. Be sure to check out John's company website (linked at the end of the article) for a very engaging - if rather complex - interactive Flash experience.

Adam Osborne

I was sad to read of the death of Adam Osborne. I remember working with an Osborne 1 computer over twenty years ago...

Safari Tidbits

First up, some information from the horse's mouth about rendering issues with Safari and macromedia.com. I'm glad that Dave and his team have fixes in the pipeline for Safari users. Hopefully the Safari team will get Flash Remoting working as well and then macromedia.com can become Safari-friendly at last!
Second, on the subject of Safari beta builds, Apple have pulled the seed program due to the number of leaks about features in unofficial builds. As I noted back in February, I was a little surprised to see posts about the non-public builds. I'm not surprised that Apple has pulled the program. If you sign an NDA, you're supposed to keep the information confidential.

Right-Click!

As promised, I allowed a week of voting in comments and have now implemented the most requested result... which was difficult since people were so split between wanting me to keep target="_blank" and wanting me to drop it! So I added a link in the left nav that allows you to force links in the blog to open in the same window. It doesn't use cookies or anything fancy: you click the link, it replaces _blank with _self. If you reload the page, or go to a new page in the blog, it'll reset to _blank. That should be enough to satisfy both camps.

Context Root Neutral

When you're writing CF code that may have to run on both ColdFusion MX Server as well as CFMX for J2EE, you need to think about context roots. With CFMX Server, your URL paths are always something like /path/to/file.cfm. However, CFMX for J2EE inherits the underlying J2EE application server concept of context roots for applications - a unique prefix for each web application deployed on the server. You can choose to deploy CFMX for J2EE in the default - or empty - context root in which case your URL paths will be the same as for CFMX Server. If you are creating code that your customers are going to deploy on their own servers, they might well choose to use a different context root. In the examples in this blog, I usually refer to a context root of /cfusion so your URL paths are something /cfusion/path/to/file.cfm.
CFMX applications can be written to work regardless of the actual context root because the context root can be determined dynamically.
For example, you could add this line to your Application.cfm:

<cfparam name="request.contextRoot"
	default="#getPageContext().getRequest().getContextPath()#">

Then you can use #request.contextRoot# wherever you need to construct a root-relative URL:

<a href="#request.contextRoot#/path/to/myfile.cfm">link</a>

C++ Templates: The Complete Guide

SlashDot has a great review of the new book by David Vandevoorde and Nicolai Josuttis about templates in C++. This always my favorite language feature when I was on the C++ Standards Committee and I can claim responsibility for some small pieces of template semantics. I haven't seen the book myself but David and Nicolai really know their stuff so I'd highly recommend this book sight unseen if you do any C++ programming.

ColdFusion MX Updater 3

Reported everywhere already, but I was waiting until I'd installed it myself before blogging anything about it. I downloaded the CFMX for J2EE version yesterday morning (using the AIX download to get the JAR file) and installed it on JRun on my PowerBook G4. It went very smoothly and the whole process took only about ten minutes before I was up and running again. I'm going to install it on Tomcat later today (alongside my existing three instances!). The nice thing about the J2EE version is that you can easily upgrade one instance of CFMX without upgrading others so that you can run your applications side-by-side on both the original and the updated CFMX for J2EE for regression testing.
First off, make sure you read the release notes for details of all the fixes in this update - it's a long list!
Second, read the Updater FAQ, in particular What's required to use the Updater?. You need a Macromedia Membership ID. That means you need to login to get the Updater, which means you need the latest Macromedia Flash Player.
My favorite fixes in Updater 3 are probably:

• The Web Service proxy in Flash Remoting can now be disabled (and is disabled by default). I talked about this issue in January. It's good for security.
• Web Services have been enhanced by upgrading the Axis engine to the 1.0 release. Furthermore, CFMX Web Services can now be consumed by .NET clients.
• All the web connector fixes! Lots of them, including the failure under load with Apache 1.3.x with I reported back in September.
• Search Engine Safe URLs are now correctly supported.

Let me know what your favorites are by commenting on this post!

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3.26.2003 By way of clarification: the Web Services Proxy change is purely to block the ability to use the Flash Remoting gateway as a proxy to call other Web Services (e.g., on other servers) - it does not affect the primary Flash Remoting functionality.

Fusebox & CFCs

There's an interesting thread on the Fusebox forums about how CFCs may or may not play into forthcoming versions of Fusebox. We seem to be drawing nearer to an early release of a CFC-centric 'experimental version' of Fusebox MX although development of a more conventional Fusebox 4 is also in the works. I'm reproducing one of my (longer) responses to the thread here.
I'm excited to hear that we only have about a month to wait before an early cut of FBMX is made available!
I share Hal's enthusiasm for OO - both he and I have a long history of working in the OO field and so we both understand the benefits (and pitfalls!) and how much of a paradigm shift it can be for many folks (which is somewhat ironic since OO thinking is really much more in line with how we think about everything in the world *except* software!).
Hal's point about scalability is interesting. I'd assumed he meant performance scalability because one of the most common concerns I've heard expressed about CFCs is the 'performance overhead' of OO code.
Changing requirements are normally the bane of our lives. One of the much-vaunted benefits of OO is the ability to create systems that are much more adaptive and therefore easier to 'grow' as requirements change. I assert that a well-designed OO system will usually accommodate change more easily than a procedural system, even a well-designed procedural system. The emphasis is on "well-designed", a point Hal makes here when he talks about 'being rigorous in the design and implementation of an application'. I've always said that OO punishes poor design much more harshly (than a non-OO system) - if you get your core object structure wrong, it can be very hard to correct that problem later on without rewriting a lot of code. As Hal says 'rigor isn't something you can add in after the fact'.
Do we have the full arsenal of OO features available in ColdFusion, compared to Java, Smalltalk or C++? Not yet. Do we have enough features to build effective implementations of good OO designs? I think so, yes, but you have to remember to abide by your own design rules - CF doesn't (yet) provide the same level of protection against breaking encapsulation, for example, that some other languages provide. You can create a good OO implementation of a good OO design in CF but then have some future consumer (developer, client etc), break things horribly by not following the 'contracts' in your design.
That poses a particularly interesting dilemma for folks like Hal, trying to build clean OO frameworks that other developers can use. The framework can be great, but the protection is not there yet to prevent abuse - intentional or otherwise - of the OO design inherent in the framework.
Will Macromedia add the features that Hal finds lacking? Hal's had encouraging discussions with Macromedians about that and I'd also hazard a guess that as CF users become more sophisticated in their use of OO features, requests for more robust protection against design abuse will increase and that will drive the evolution of CF. Ray Camden canvassed the community for their 'top ten' CFC enhancements and submitted that list to the CF team so I know that many of these things are under consideration.
My top enhancements would be:

• tidy up the scope / access machinery so we have a private scope and a protected scope (we currently have a public scope and a sort of protected scope)
• add machinery to make it easier to call overridden methods (the 'super' issue)
• add a better constructor notation
• add interfaces

Those were all on the list Ray sent in but none of these actually prevent good OO implementations.

Ben Forta's Tags

Ben Forta's website lists all the ColdFusion Tags he has on the ColdFusion Exchange. Ben rather cryptically mentions "the magic of Web Services" on that page so I thought I'd take this opportunity to provide a little bit more detail. Since the new Exchange is a Rich Internet Application, the Flash user interface relies on CFC methods with access="remote" in order to perform all dynamic queries. This means that the CFCs are also available as Web Services (with a caveat I'll mention below). Ben is able to dynamically retrieve his published extensions by using cfinvoke webservice="..." and getting back a query object containing the relevant data. As I've previously explained in my DevNet article about design patterns, we use a façade CFC for each of the major parts of our applications. Each of those CFCs is essentially a Web Service, theoretically exposing all of the functionality on macromedia.com through a variety of remote methods (suitably secured via membership authentication where appropriate).
As you can imagine from the functionality of the various Rich Internet Applications, there's a lot of potential for third-party interaction with macromedia.com that will take things like the DevNet XML resource feed to a new level.
The caveat: we aren't publishing the URLs for these CFCs at the moment because they are currently optimized for use with our Flash user interfaces rather than being general Web Services. We are, however, considering what sort of Web Services would be useful - please feel free to provide your thoughts here as comments or send me email.

Beyond the ARM

Many years ago, when I was involved with the ISO C++ Standards Committee, I created a set of web pages called C++ - Beyond the ARM. They've always gotten quite a bit of traffic and, although I haven't had cause to update them for several years - I dropped out of the C++ committee at the end of '99 - I still get emails from people asking me C++ questions. This is a good thing... It reminds me that not everyone in IT is working on the Internet and it helps keep my memory refreshed about C++.
The latest question was from a developer in Israel, working on an embedded system, who wanted to verify a compiler bug regarding virtual inheritance and templates (somewhat similar to a bug I encountered and wrote about in my compiler-writing articles, in the C++ section of this site, some years back). In a way it's good to know that C++ compilers are still finding it hard to correctly compile certain constructs!

CFMX for J2EE Clustering

Quite a few people have been asking me for more information on setting up CFMX for J2EE for clustering (after my earlier blog posts on that subject). Before I could find time to write a lengthy post on that subject, Brandon Purcell has just published a terrific article on the subject on Macromedia DevNet! Brandon explains the process in great detail, showing several possible options for creating clusters. Required reading!

Right-click?

After all the talk about right-click (to open a link in a new window) and Flash (not supporting that), I thought I'd ask my readers a question: I currently use target="_blank" for all my offsite links - would you prefer I removed that so that you could choose to open in the same window or to right-click and open in a new window/tab? A week of comments and I'll go with the majority vote.

ColdFusion Advocacy

If you think ColdFusion is wonderful, surf to cfAdvocacy.org and contribute some articles and resources. Creator Jim Davis wants this to become the reasoned mouthpiece that answers the question "Why ColdFusion?" but he needs your help. Even if all you do is send him links to existing articles that advocate using ColdFusion, I think that will be helpful.
p.s. I think the "click stream" review feature on the site is pretty neat!

Remember Me?

I've seen some feedback about the "Remember Me" functionality being 'broken' on macromedia.com so I figured it would be worth writing something to clarify what exactly it is supposed to do.
First, let's look at how many membership-based sites work today: they provide cookie-based identification of users but require you to prove your identity in order to access or update personal information. I'm sure we've all seen "Hello Sean! If you're not Sean, click here!" and we're fairly comfortable with that on sites like "Yahoo!".
Now let's turn to macromedia.com's "Remember Me" check box on the membership login page. If you check that box when you login, it will do two things: it will set a cookie to 'remember' you (of the "Welcome Sean" variety) and it will pre-populate your membership ID the next time you are required to prove your identity. You are asked to prove your identity (enter your password to login) whenever you are about to access or update your personal information. "Remember Me" does not keep you logged in from visit to visit (which would be a security risk on a shared computer!).
When are you logged out? Whenever you close your browser, you are logged out immediately. If you are 'idle' for 20 minutes, you are logged out. Browsing static pages on the website counts as 'idle' time because you are not interacting with one of the Rich Internet Applications. If you have been logged out and you try to access or update personal information, you will be prompted for your membership ID (which will be pre-populated if you checked "Remember Me") and password - even if the navigation bar still shows "Welcome Sean". This is just like "Yahoo!" which challenges you to login from time to time, even tho' it 'remembers' you ("Hello seancorfield! If you're not seancorfield, click here!").

Beta 2

In this multi-page article, Al Ramadan talks about what Macromedia has done in response to user feedback about the Beta 1 version of the macromedia.com home page. Naturally, I'm a little disappointed with the change after my comments about how cool the Beta 1 home page was but that's democracy in action. You wanted a faster, more information-rich home page - you got it! Macromedia takes its customers very seriously... that sometimes means the super-cool, leading edge stuff doesn't always make the cut but, even when you're trying to showcase your technology, there are realistic limits on how far out on a limb people are willing to go.
Mind you, I was pleased to see a fragment of one of my architecture diagrams on page 4 of Al's report. I'm a big proponent of UML as a lingua franca, allowing architects, designers, developers and business users to discuss and understand systems using a common notation.

I Can't Believe It's Flash

Interesting article about the rise of Flash advertising. I didn't realize New York cabs were sporting ad systems powered by Flash! It's even more ubiquitous than I thought. The article talks about Flash moving to devices and tracking user behavior in a Flash movie. Even if you hate Flash, it's an interesting read.

Macromedia DevNet XML Feed

If you've been using the XML feed of DevNet articles, the recent website redesign may have broken it for you. We moved the XML feed and put a server-side redirect in place. If your cfhttp tag has redirect="true" then you'll be OK. If you omitted that attribute, you'll be getting a blank result or an exception depending on how you wrote your code. Todd Rafferty laments his lack of error checking... Sorry Todd!
Read more about the XML feed.

Your macromedia.com

Did you know you can personal the home page on macromedia.com? The selections you make in the "Products" and "Solutions" drop-down menus are remembered from one visit to the next. I use this to provide me with short cuts on the home page to CFMX pages (product page, support center, application development center and exchange) and the Rich Internet Application pages.
The drop-down navigation tray (activated by the small triangular button on the left of the main navigation bar) also remembers your selection from visit to visit. I leave it pointing to the DevNet > Topics area so that I can get to any topic area with just two clicks (less than the alternative route of clicking DevNet in the navigation bar, then choosing a topic from the drop-down - either click-drag or click, click - then clicking the [>] 'go' button).
These selections are all remembered using Local Shared Objects from the Flash user interface to save information locally. LSOs are something like cookies only more flexible - they allow Flash movies to store & retrieve structured data directly where as cookies only handles strings. The Flash Player stores each domain's LSOs separately, respectively the sandbox security model of the Flash Player, and allows users to control how much disk space can be used to store LSOs.
Oh, and before you say it, yes, the drop-down navigation tray is a little slow at the moment - it has to download and parse an XML document that describes most of the site structure and then dynamically create the necessary Flash Components to render the menu - but we're working on speeding it up and we'll probably use LSOs to cache some of that information.

Flash Remoting MX SP1

As noted elsewhere, there is an updater available for Flash Remoting MX to update the Flash MX Components (for authoring) as well as the Java and .NET versions of of 'standalone' Flash Remoting MX Server. If you develop applications with Flash MX and use Flash Remoting MX, you should download the updater to get the fixes for the Components.
The server-side fixes for Flash Remoting for ColdFusion MX will be included in the next CFMX Updater (Updater 3), coming soon.

The Web Moves In Mysterious Ways

I maintain a C++ Standards-related area of my website called "C++ - Beyond the ARM". It dates back to when I was actively involved in the C++ Standardization process and it got quite a bit of traffic. About three years ago, I set up this new domain and moved the site over. I left redirects in place with big notices to get folks to correct their bookmarks and links. I searched the web and emailed every webmaster I could find who had a link to the old site. It was time-consuming but I felt it was worth doing since the site got so much traffic.
Fast forward three years and the C++ section on corfield.org gets plenty of traffic and I still get emails about it (although I haven't been involved with the Standardization process now since '99). This morning I get an email via this site, pointing out that my old domain name is now a porn site (and there are, of course, still some active links to it on some C++ sites!). I posted a notice to some C++ newsgroups but there's nothing I can do about the old domain name usage. I gave it up three years ago. But the question remains as to why a porn site would want to use such a cryptic name? Presumably, they just pick up random domain names that already have (dead) links to them out there on the 'net. An interesting marketing ploy... Reminds me I ought to check my links section for dead links again!

iTerm

I'm always interested in something that makes me a more efficient developer. I recently discovered iTerm which is a replacement for Apple's Terminal application that provides tabs for managing sessions. Since I typically have more than half a dozen shell sessions open at any one time, being able to collapse down several related sessions into one window, organized by tabs is very convenient. It's an early release and it does have some bugs: it doesn't seem to support colors as used by vim although colorls seems to be fine, it has (once) forgotten the 'address book' of new sessions. Overall, it's a winner.

Netscape 4 Browsers

After my comments about Opera and Safari browsers and macromedia.com, I realized I hadn't mentioned Netscape 4.x. I like this blog entry about Netscape 4.x and I'm inclined to agree. I dumped Netscape 4.x back in June, 2002 because it couldn't handle blogger.com. I remember having problems viewing other sites too. I would've upgraded earlier I suspect if I hadn't been using Internet Explorer as my primary browser at the time. I'm a little surprised that about 5% of visitors to my website use browsers that identify as Netscape 4.x or Netscape 3.x - they're not really old Netscape versions are they... but why would a modern browser identify itself as such?
Note: Netscape 4.x is not a supported browser for macromedia.com.

Safari & Tabbed Browsing

Catching up on various blogs, I enjoyed this fascinating post on Dave Hyatt's "Surfin' Safari" about the thought process behind UI design, focusing on what makes a good user experience for tabbed browsing. He references an interesting "thumbnail" approach as well as variants in many different browsers, comparing and contrasting their usability and their intended audience. A thought-provoking piece of insight.

Opera, Safari & macromedia.com

If your favorite browser is Opera or Safari, you're probably not very happy with the new macromedia.com right now. As a die-hard Safari user, I sympathize. Let's be realistic, however. Safari is in (early) beta and has many problems (it can't even render my wife's cattery website correctly) and is steadily improving. Safari renders my blog beautifully. Windows Internet Explorer 5.5 cannot render my blog properly (the left nav bleeds under the main content and the text size is enormous). Opera also cannot render my blog properly - Mac Opera 6 has almost exactly the same problem as Win IE 5.5. I do no browser detection and have just a single, simple W3C-compliant CSS in a W3C-compliant XHTML 1.0 page. Furthermore, neither browser currently supports Flash Remoting.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise then that macromedia.com does not currently support Opera or Safari. We're working with both browser vendors to help them improve their browsers and we'll implement workarounds in the meantime to provide a better user experience where we can. One workaround we have implemented for Opera and Flash movies is making the flashVars parameter non-XHTML-compliant so that Opera will pass it correctly into the movie (by using & instead of &).

macromedia.com feedback

There's been two main negative issues about the new website: performance and browser compatibility. Tony Lopez, our Executive Producer, has some interesting things to say about the perceived performance on the new site in a guest post to mesh's blog.
If you were able to compare the old Exchanges - either the BroadVision-powered ones on dynamic.macromedia.com or the CF-powered ones on devex.macromedia.com - to the new RIA Exchanges side-by-side, you would see a longer initial load time but then subsequent interactions would be faster and you would find you have more information available to interact with on each 'view' in the application.
If you are a Mac user, you've seen the Sherlock and Watson applications so you'll understand how a desktop application interface can present web-based information in a convenient, fast, easy-to-navigate format. I find the new Exchanges operate in a similar way. You can browse categories with a single click in next to no time. You can sort results with a single click, again in next to no time. Click, descending order. Click, ascending order. It feels like a desktop application. You cannot do this in HTML with this sort of responsiveness because HTML requires you download the entire page every time. With an RIA, you only have to download the data itself without all of the markup.
As the initial shock dies down on the forums and lists, we're starting to see some very thoughtful and reasoned posts about the new site. Several people are picking up on the application-like aspects of the new Exchanges and saying how much of an improvement they are over the previous version.
I'll be posting more about browser compatibility later - I'm a Safari user so I'm in the "unsupported" camp but I'm not too upset by that...

macromedia.com a.k.a. Dylan65

Well, yes, it's finally here and everyone's very excited. After many months of work, both on the design & production side (kudos to Tony Lopez for steering that ship) and the engineering side (kudos to my boss, Robin Ducot, for same), we launched the brand new site on Tuesday evening. The deployment went smoothly - amazingly so considering the complexity of rolling out such a vast rewrite.
We've received a lot of feedback about it, via the feedback form on the site and the survey, as well as via the many community mailing lists and forums. We're reading it all and it'll help us decide what to address and how. Thanks to everyone who has provided direct feedback so far.
As Christian points out, one of the key things to remember is that this is a dog food site now using ColdFusion MX on the back end for all dynamic content, powering the Rich Internet Applications and other parts of the site. When you look at the numbers, you'll see that no one can tell you that ColdFusion "doesn't scale" - during morning peak times, we see in excess of 15,000 concurrent active sessions. There's about 80,000 lines of in-house developed CFML code in production, just over half of which is in CFCs. There's about the same amount of code again behind our automated test harness and regression suites. About 10,000 lines of that production code represents CFC façades that are called via Flash Remoting as part of our Rich Internet Applications: Exchanges, Membership, Trial Downloads and Product Registration.
There's also about 75,000 lines of ActionScript in about 300 movie files that make up the user interface of those four Rich Internet Applications and the home page navigation system. Finally, there's about 30,000 lines of Java code behind the site, mostly dealing with encryption, data security and search engine integration.
Sure, there are some issues with the current site. I think we know about most of them (thanks to all the valuable feedback we're getting) and we'll be addressing them as we move forward. We still have a long way to go and we'll be deploying new and improved Rich Internet Applications over the coming months.

Flash Player Versions & macromedia.com

Andrew Muller commented on the new Flash Player release, asking about the website project (Dylan65). It's a complex story and it'll get told in due course but, as he correctly observes, for some parts of the new site, you need a fairly up to date player. The December release (6,0,65,0 on Windows, 6,0,67,0 on Mac) is, in fact, sufficient to view all of the new macromedia.com site but it's a good idea to upgrade to the latest player anyway as we continue to make all sorts of improvements, including performance, security, compatibility...
That's why some people visiting the site, who already have an earlier version of Flash Player 6 installed, are being told that they need to install (the new version of) Flash Player 6.
You can go get the Flash Player at this URL: http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer.

New Flash Player

Also reported elsewhere but important enough to repeat: an update of the Macromedia Flash Player is now available.

Flash Remoting & PHP: MyPhoto

Already reported elsewhere but worth another mention, Robert Hall has ported the MyPhoto application from DRK2 to use PHP as the back end. This shows a couple of things, one of which is that the amfphp project on sourceforge has been improving steadily since it now has a PHP gateway for auto-discovering services. Seeing MyPhoto running puts my earlier example to shame so I'll have to do something about that!

Unix is Dead

Much as I hate to admit I read /. I must confess to chuckling at their reference to Randy Mott's "Unix is Dead" presentation. Randy is the CIO of Dell Corporation and was talking about moving his company's Oracle databases from Solaris to Red Hat Linux. What struck me as amusing was the delineation between "Unix" and "Linux" since I've always thought of them as much the same - Linux is just another (set of) flavor(s) of Unix. There's a lot of Unixes... some free, some not. I think some of the issues in the CF vs. PHP (or ASP) argument apply equally to the insert-brand-name Unix vs. insert-favorite-freeware Linux debate. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Dali AWOL

As a big fan of Dali's art and also the "Law & Order" TV show which regularly mentions Rikers Island prison, my eye was caught by this BBC News story. Who did it and how? When will the movie come out?

More on Fusebox

Fusebox Open Source is a project designed to move Fusebox forward using the much more collaborative approach of Open Source. I was notified of this by Rick Mason, manager of the Mid-Michigan CFUG, whose group hosted a presentation from John Farrar about Fusebox Open Source in February. You can download his presentation from the MMCFUG's Downloads page. There's also an embryonic Fusebox Open Source website which has an online version of the presentation.
As Rick said in his email to me "The powerpoint doesn't do it justice. He's added the concept of skins to Fusebox. He showed a login that brought up a standard html page. Then he logged out and logged back in with the site changing to Flash. Lots of potential for multi-lingual sites.".
It'll be interesting to see where this Open Source effort goes, especially with work on Fusebox MX / Fusebox 4 seeming to progress so slowly.

Rates

It's been a while since I paid any attention to contracting rates. Before I moved to the US in August '99, I was a contractor in the UK. Shortly after I left, tax changes came in and contracting became slightly less attractive. Recently, rates have fallen further as this article on The Register about British Telecom makes clear. I suppose it's not unexpected with tough markets. The interesting thing is that it still means permanent salary rates in the US, in California at least, are about the same level as UK contracting rates. That was true when I moved here and still seems to be true today. Then compare the cost of living and you'll see it's about double in the UK, compared to the US (in general)...