Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Now, the bad news for some is that it's not free, but $50. Still, it seems very much worth the price if you really need what it solves.

Check out info, demos, an eval download, and more at http://www.cftagstore.com/tags/flashmultipleupload.cfm. Besides a flash progress bar, it also offers options for handling callbacks and much more.

For those who really want a free tool, I just saw today that Dave Shuck pointed to one as well:

http://www.daveshuck.com/index.cfm?commentID=112

Update: In case you come along and find this entry after it was written in July 2006, note that I now have a long list of alternative file upload tools, in a category of my CF411 list, File Upload Tools . Please check there for other alternatives in this and 125+ other categories.

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Because he's using Ray's awesome BlogCFC tool and is marking the entries in a category (blog-round-up), you can easily keep an eye on all future posts.

Here's the RSS feed URL for just the blog-round-up category:

http://www.creative-restraint.co.uk/blog/rss.cfm?mode=full&mode2=cat&catid=93661280-C6C5-1A2A-16D86B1A3ADA948E

And here's the URL to view just the blog-round-up category in a browser:

http://www.creative-restraint.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/Blog-Round-Up

Finally, here is this week, his first post:

http://www.creative-restraint.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/2006/7/22/Blog-Round-Up

Awesome stuff, Andy! Thanks so much, on behalf of the entire CFML community.

Of course, let's recognize that this is really a substantial undertaking for him. There could be times when he misses publishing it, or perhaps misses some entry you feel is vital. I'm sure he'll welcome comments there, but let's also cut him some slack.

If it becomes a more vital resource that proves too much for him to handle alone, perhaps it could become a community contributed resource. Maybe there's even some alternative approach where desirable blog entries are marked and rated by the community (without being lost in world-volume services like Digg, Technorati, Delicious, etc.) I don't use them to know, but perhaps others can comment (here or at Andy's entry).

But for now, let's just all sit back, relax, and gratefully enjoy Andy's editorial efforts. Thanks, dude!

PS If you don't use an RSS reader, note that you can also subscribe to his entire blog (you'll get an email of all new posts) using the subscribe form on the page. Or, you can use a cool tool like Squeet to have IT watch the RSS feed and send you emails for new posts in that feed. I've blogged about that elsewhere:

http://www.tipicalcharlie.com/blog_email_notification_by_squeet.htm (Update: tipicalcharlie domain is no more, but page recovered using Archive.org.)

(Update: Sadly, squeet (a tool to send RSS feeds by email) is no more. But there are other alternatives, that I track in a category of my CF411 site: http://www.cf411.com/rss_email.)

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Thanks to Steven Erat for pointing this out.

For those who have seen my presentation on CFML web services (at CFUNited and over the past few years in other venues), this has long been a sore spot for me. So glad to see it fixed.

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

IBATIS, at http://ibatis.apache.org/ is an alternative ORM approach based on a concept of SQL Maps, which in essence are simply SQL statements stored in XML files with a well-defined API for mapping and manipulating those in your app. The approach does not generate SQL for you, but rather is intended to serve as a means to segregate to XML files--and manage via an API--the SQL that may already exist substantially for existing apps or for new apps that may simply require some hand-coding of SQL. (The last sentence added after some comments suggest that this point made later in the post was missed.)

The benefit is that since CFML folks are already knee deep in SQL, it brings a measure of architecture without completely detaching them from the SQL they know and love (or at least tolerate).

If that sounds counter to other ORM approaches, which often generate the SQL automatically and/or intentionally hide it from you, that's because it is quite different. I'll grant that there are many who would benefit from having an architecture remove SQL from their control. It's just that this seems an alternative worth considering.

I certainly don't mean to knock at all the other CFML-based ORM implementations that exist already (such as Arf, ObjectBreeze, Transfer, and Reactor). Each approach has its place and pros/cons. As the other CFML-based ORM frameworks tend to be based on existing approaches from other platforms, I'm merely pointing out this alternative as a possibly useful model.

I'm also not offering here my own new CFML-based implementation based on IBATIS. But note that there are currently implementations for Java and .NET at the Apache site, so it shouldn't be tough for someone to leverage the Java implementation in CFML.

It strikes me that the IBATIS approach may be closer to the way fuseboxers and others segregate their queries into their own CFML file. Perhaps this approach of storing them in an XML file instead and using an API to access the results would offer a better though still somewhat familiar approach to abstracting queries.

I was sharing the idea with Sean Corfield at CFUnited last night, and he was intrigued. After I sat in on his excellent presentation on objects and persistence, we discussed it again and he had started looking into it overnight. Perhaps it could make it into FB 6? :-)

I'm hoping someone may want to take the ball and run with it. If you're intrigued, considering discussing it with Sean or take it on yourself, or just continue the conversation. Hope it proves helpful.