Pintley finally leaves private beta

I’m happy to announce that earlier this month Pintley finally left private beta!

Pintley is like Pandora, but for beer… You sign up, rate beer you like/don’t like, and it provides recommendations for more beer to try. Since most of the people reading this blog are techies, you’ll be happy to know that the back-end is CF9 with Solr, Hibernate & Ehcache, which has really made scaling a breeze.

Sign up, give it a whirl, and let me know what you think.

More conference speaking engagements!

My blog has been sorely neglected. Work had taken over pretty much all free time, but I’m starting to get a handle on things again. That being said, I’m diving deep in to Flex 4 development, and I should have my first iPhone application finished this summer. Oh, and I’m speaking at a couple conferences.

cf.Objective() – April 22-24, Minneapolis
I’ll be presenting “Build a Better Search with Apache Solr”. I will not be covering CFSEARCH in ColdFusion 9. We’ll be looking at the real Solr engine, and everything it has to offer. If all you’re doing is sticking a few flat files into Verity, and you’re happy with the results, this isn’t for you. If you’ve ever hit Verity’s custom field limit, if you need to search structured data, or if you ditched using Verity for expensive database queries, then you need to see what Solr can do for you. You do NOT need to be running CF9 to implement Solr.

CFUnited – July 28-31, Lansdowne, VA
I’ll be presenting two topics, the same Solr talk as cf.Objective (scroll up just a little bit if you forgot), and “Getting the Most Development out of your Mac”. This is a fast-paced session in which I’ll be covering some of the best free and commercial tools to get your job done, along with plenty of tips & tricks, shortcuts, and things you probably didn’t know your Mac could do.

cf-flex-user-auth Released

I’m happy to announce the immediate availibility of cf-flex-user-auth, a starter application for developers building Flex applications with ColdFusion on the backend. I’ve been working on this for a while now, and it’s gone through two complete rewrites.

The idea behind this is for developers to be able to download this source code, and have a running start at building Flex applications. On the Flex side, we’re using the Mate framework. On the ColdFusion end, we’re not using any framework, since we’re really only exposing the database via CFC’s.

This application covers the basics of a user application, because I was tired of rewriting the wheel every few months:

  • User registration
  • Email confirmation
  • Login
  • Logout

So, go get it now via the Google Code SVN repository. If you need help, read the wonderful documentation.

Special thanks to Laura Arguello for the crash-course on Mate, and Dan Wilson for writing the installation docs.

Welcome to my new site, again

I’ve finished moving everything over to WordPress now. I ditched the Flex site I was building because since I started it, I’ve decided to make my site less of a personal site and more of my portal to the Flex/AIR/CF community. Also, since I had started that site, I’ve started to focus on open-source projects, some my own, some that I contribute to.

I also have switched back to the design that everyone seemed to like so much. We’ll see how long this lasts, now that I have the vast library of WordPress templates at my fingertips.

I should have some neat announcements this month, so stay tuned.