'Others have already commented on Adobe.com's new look,' writes Ben Forta in his latest blog. 'It's clean,' he continues, 'The menus are intuitive. Downloads are all listed in one place. Shortcut URLs. Products listed on the homepage is great. And there's more...'

A few months ago I stumbled on an IDE named Aptana and I instantly recognized that it was the perfect IDE for developers who have found it difficult to convert to CFEclipse. And why is it such a great replacement? For starters Aptana is actually based on Eclipse. That means it has all the great features that you've heard of about Eclipse, including the ability to use the CFEclipse plug-in with it.

It's become very popular lately, even though it's not exactly new. It's been possible to use the concept behind AJAX since browsers introduced the XMLHttpRequest function in 1999. AJAX isn't a technology, or a language, and there's no recipe to implement it; it's just a combination of various components to achieve something you otherwise couldn't: asynchronous http requests. However, since early 2005, when Google and Flickr popularized the concept, its use has grown rapidly.

Have you ever come up with something clever and thought 'Wow that should be on a T-shirt or something'? In the summer before my senior year of high school, my friend Graham Stevenson and I had that thought many times. So many in fact that we decided we should start a T-shirt company to address the growing demand for trendy yet original clothing.

With the announcement of ColdFusion MX 7 in February, we introduced event gateways that turn the ColdFusion web application server into a bona fide Internet application server. The gateways are a great new feature for developers. You can now build applications for a variety of protocols and devices, not just HTTP. Because it's ColdFusion, we made it easy to develop and deploy outside the browser, and you can let your imagination run wild.

We have always thought that one of the best-kept secrets amongst the ColdFusion 'universe' is its tremendous potential and success within select educational institutions. Those that work with or for public educational institutions are very familiar with the staffing and budget issues that often cut resources, making it difficult to provide services to the communities that support them. However, as East Carolina University found, all that is needed is a little funding, some talent, and a willingness to learn.

Most people are familiar with Microsoft Project - project management software that allows you to manage many aspects of projects including tasks, due dates, progress, and people assigned to specific tasks.

This is not a piece full of technical anything. It's a story about a boy and his dog...ok, not that. It is a story about how a Web-dabbling engineer created some highly useful apps for his co-workers and himself.