A nice CFUN attendee inquired of me: "Can XMLValidate validate wddx packets ?" to which I did not have an authoritative answer.  My intuition told me that yes it can validate that the wddx is well formed, since WDDX is simply XML, but that it probably would not be "valid" since I don't know the DTD to validate against.  So here IS the answer.

Exactly as I had thought!

wddx strings validate using XMLValidate to be well formed, but not valid.  Here is some sample code to play with:

This year's CF United was great.  Lots of exciting news about CF8 and Flex 3.  I do have to say though, that I really would like to see some hands-on sessions.  At the final session tonite, some people suggested some great ideas for future CFUN events.  The couple that stand out to me (aka, the ones I remember) were: Have a coding contest amongst attendees, allow attendees to nominate products for a best of show type award, and a way for attendees from different geographic areas to connect.  (i.e. I'm from mytown, OH, who else here is from my area ??)

This morning I attended a session by John Ashelfelter called "Pragmatic ColdFusion: Build, Test, Deploy."  It was a great session about the necessity of having a completely automated build system.  he spoke about how to do this integrating Subversion (code versioning), and open source QA testing packages so you can have a completely hands-off way to generate builds of your product that go through a standard QA process on the server, resulting in reports that tell you how things ran.  Quite nice.

In that talk, an attendee contributed that there is a hidden tax in CF called <CFANT> -- this is a tremendously valuable tool, so I am trying spread the word about it, so hopefully we can get some help on how to use it.  It is an undocumented tag, so be careful using it -- it is not officially supported.

Anyway, I hope the participants who came to my talk enjoyed it.  I'd love some feedback if any of you are out there reading!

ciao

Here are the most updated files.  Enjoy.

cfun07_coding_with_xml.zip

So I'm here at CF United 2007, and the topics this year look very exciting.  Some great news is that Flex 3 (coming soon) appears to be moving toward open source.  This is great news, and means that the platform will get expanded on by the development community.  I'm hoping this also means that Flex Builder (based on Eclipse) will be brought into modern times, and more in line with the eclipse development roadmap.

The other great news is the new features in ColdFusion 8, codename scorpio.  Looks like a lot of new capability with PDF integration, and even more exciting is that CF8 will include server analytics tools built in, so developers and sys admins can have a better look at how our apps are running on CF Server.  Good stuff.

My talk is scheduled for thursday june 28th at 4:30pm, so around that time you can expect that I will post the powerpoint file and code samples we used in the presentation.