I know I'm a little late with this, but I just wanted to mention that Luis Majano's book "The Definitive Guide to the ColdBox Platform" is now available. I'm also honored that Luis asked me to write the forward, so look out for me just after the contents page :-)

I know that there has been a fair bit of discussion about whether business objects should ever exist in an invalid state a while back. I strongly believe that in most cases you *should* allow invalid data in business objects. Here's why.

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Validation. Client side, server side, it's one of these things we all have to deal with on our projects. I finally got a chance to sit down with Bob Silverberg to check out his ValidateThis fromework at cf.Objective() and I liked what I saw. You describe your validation rules in XML, it supports multiple contexts so the same object can have different validation rules depending on (for example) the form being used, security permissions or state of the object. It seems to have a clean interface, it does a great job of handing client and server side validations and it seems to be a pretty elegant solution to a really common problem.

I know we've all got our own little validation libraries and approaches, but I'd strongly recommend anyone to check out what Bob's been working on. I haven't had a chance to work with it on a project yet, but I'm hoping to use it on my next project and to get quite involved with the framework as I think it would be great for us to have a nice, elegant validation library that we could then put into larger frameworks for building full stack solutions more quickly while still being able to use it on its own for projects that don't need the other bells and whistles.

Expect to see more about ValidateThis on my blog as I get a chance to play with it. In the meantime, check it out and join the Google group to become part of the conversation.

Mark Drew will be presenting at the New York CFUG on Tuesday of next week. He'll be presenting on "How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The ORM (Object-Relational Mapping)". Should be a great presentation!

Joshua Cyr (of Savvy and the organizer of the RIAdventure) will be in New York on Monday May 4th.

A bunch of us will be getting together for drinks at Slainte at 304 Bowery (between Bleecker & Houston) at 6.30pm. No formal presentation, just a chance to get together and meet some other local CF programmers and to catch up with Joshua.

So, who's coming?!

I just wanted to say that (perhaps not surprisingly given my recent announcement) I am stepping down (effective immediately) from the Adobe Community Expert program. I just wanted to thank Rachel Luxemburg and the entire team at Adobe for selecting me for the program and for all the great help and support that they provided while I was involved with the program.

I've been posting quite a bit this week about why I chose to head up Railo US, but I want to sum up some of the key points. Next week I'll be looking at some of the awesome features that Railo provides.

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I'd like to see more adoption of CFML for scripting on the JVM. Here is how I think the jboss.org announcement *might* facilitate that goal . . .

Disclaimer, this is my vision - not necessarily that of Railo or JBoss

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There has been a lot of discussion within Railo as to what we *shouldn't* do as a business. The answer (for me) is "nothing". Here is why . . .

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There are two ways Railo can expand the community. One is by attraction of new developers. The other is by cutting down on the attrition of CFML developers . . .

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