Rob Brooks-Bilson

Well, it looks like I'm a bit late on this one. I'm currently in Taiwan working on a project, so my news schedule is a little off ;-)

Mark Drew has Announced the release of CFEclipse 1.3. If you aren't currently using CFEclipse, all I can say is "why not"? It's a great IDE that only keeps getting better.

Cheers to Mark for a job well done, and for generating so much buzz around the release!

If you're a user of any of previous versions of the cf_stockGrabber custom tag, there's an important upgrade you need to note.

This morning, Yahoo changed the URL they use for the stock feed that the custom tag uses to get its information from finance.yahoo.com to download.finance.yahoo.com. You can either update the URL in the CFHTTP tag (within the custom tag), or download the latest version for ColdFusion MX:

cf_stockGrabber 3.0.2

Back in August, Tim Buntel posted a short presentation titled 5 Reasons to use ColdFusion for your next internet application project. The presentation was designed to give ColdFusion developers and evangelists something they could present to their management and/or clients to make the case for ColdFusion.

In the presentation, the top five reasons given are:

1. Increased Productivity
2. Standard J2EE Environment
3. Innovative Features
4. Integration with other Adobe products
5. Part of a world-class software company

What I'd like to know is how other developers/managers out there sell/position/defend ColdFusion within their organizations? Are you using these same reasons? How are you expanding on them, and what else are you including?

Beyond that, I'd like to know how many other corporate developers out there are using ColdFusion in a mixed environment with other languages such as Java, .Net, etc. If you are in a mixed environment, what % of your development is in ColdFusion vs. the other language(s).