I’ve been on a roll for the past three days adding a lot of improvements to System Manager. People seem to be liking the time it saves them during development, so I decided to make its operation even easier. Here’s a quick rundown of changes.

1. Consolidated service and group management into one screen
2. Added a more attractive and intuitive UI
3. Added keyboard shortcuts to every menu item. Services are prefixed by letters and groups by numbers.
4. People who wanted to control many services complained that the menu got too large, so I compressed the services into the main menu with their corresponding actions into sub-menus.

I updated the screenshot and directions page where you can download the new version.

I haven’t done any Flex development to date. None of my clients have the money to spend on it and I haven’t had enough free time to play around with it for my own education. However, I have seen many demo applications done in it and read multiple white papers on the Flash Platform and Flex.

Now comes news of Zorn, an RIA development tool for producing Flex applications. It was also announced that Zorn will be built as a plug-in for the Eclipse platform – a huge bonus – and will also leverage MXML and Actionscript.

Another fantastic piece of news released yesterday by Mike Chambers is that developers will now be able to code, test and compile Flex applications without the need for a Flex server. Now, he also made it clear that this would not be the case for Enterprise level applications, but for applications that make up about 95% of the Internet that we use, this is great. To put it into perspective, imagine being able to compile and deploy a simple ColdFusion web site or content management application to the web without the need to test or deploy on the ColdFusion Server!

I have worked on several large, Enterprise level applications that utilized Flash and ColdFusion to make some amazing presentations to large audiences, but when I think back to the hurdles that needed to be jumped and the amount of effort required to get ColdFusion and Flash talking fluently, I become more excited about Macromedia’s Flash Platform initiative.

I also recommend anyone who develops rich internet application to read the Flash Platform white paper. Macromedia has this going in the right direction, IMHO.

Listen to developers, create seamless experiences for end-users, provide the right tools, and support integration with other technologies.

What a concept!

While working recently with a client who has Entreprise DevNet licenses for their development team, I was maddeningly boggled by the Javascript error messages I was seeing being thrown on some new dynamically generated Javascipt code. The error was always on line 1 and dropping into a JS debugger showed nothing. Then after the 50th time of this happening, I noticed it… the Macromedia watermark META tag at the top of the page.

After some quick searching, I found a post on Stephen Erat’s blog regarding this issue. Some of the comments showed me how to get around this. Quite simple.

Additional note: This is not intended for people to use this technique to violate the terms of your license agreement with Macromedia by placing DevNet servers into a production environment. This is simply for those who are running the DevNet version for development purposes only and having problems with the watermark.

1. Uncompress cfusion.ear and/or cfusion.war
2. Expand the resultant WEB-INF\cfusion\lib directory and find cfusion.jar file
3. Uncompress cfusion.jar to some temporary directory
4. Look in the resulting file coldfusion\runtime\resource.properties
5. Eliminate the watermark text on line 8
6. Recompress the directories into a new cfusion.jar and copy over the old one

Obviously the watermark was put in place by Macromedia to protect their DevNet licenses from being abused by unscrupulous merchants who would use them in production. However, it is an inadequate safety precaution that ends up causing more problems than it should.