The LiveCycle turnkey installer keeps making things easier for a developer to get started. Since the beta of the next version of LiveCycle is available to download for review I thought i’d share some advice on the install process.

LiveCycle is enterprise software, so you need to give it the same respect that you would if you were installing Seibel, SAP, Oracle or other large systems. What I mean by this is dont skimp on hardware.. give it a decent CPU and decent amount of ram (more on that in a moment) and heed the system requirements. Continue Reading

Adobe recently announced that you can sign up to access the public beta of the next version of LiveCycle ES, and within that is the newest version of LiveCycle Designer. Here is a look at what is new for form designers;

Default Scripting Language for all forms
Ok, so you could sort of do this by making your own templates, but its a nice start.

Form Validation control
This one is cool, you can now specify at a form level how validation messages are displayed to the user, controlling things like how message boxes appear, colouring madatory fields, colour the border or background of fields that fail validation and set focus to the first item that fails. Continue Reading

In case you haven’t yet heard, this week Adobe announced the beta availabily for the next version of LiveCycle ES. If you haven’t had time to download and test the new beta but are still curious about what changes are being worked on for the next release? Here is a quick look at some areas of this release;

Installer

The installation experience is mostly the same, except for a few tweaks. First off you will notice that you are no longer prompted for a serial number during the install. LiveCycle will now always install in evaluation mode and remain that way until you enter a serial number via the admin screens. This will be welcome news to many users! Another great thing is that the turnkey installs the Java JDK, which is still a challenge for some trial customers who are unfamiliar with Java. There is also a “flexible turnkey” which I haven’t yet tried but it looks like you will be able to change some of the default turnkey paths & more which will be very welcome. The final thing about the new installer is that you can elect to have it configure SSL encryption for your turnkey installation, making it easier for you to test out components. Continue Reading

Thought ColdFusion was dead? No way! As of today you can now access both the public beta of ColdFusion 9 and the new tool called ColdFusion Builder.

Since I’m still a ColdFusion newbie, I’m not going to go into a full writeup here, but some of things that continue to impress me about ColdFusion, and now added to in this release are;

1. ColdFusion is Java..it runs just as fast as JSPs & EJBs on your favourite app server

2. It offers very high productivity as a result of being a mature language

3. Adoption of ColdFusion has accelerated since Adobe took over and released CF8.

4. ColdFusion 9 offers a massive array of enterprise services, including Hibernate based ORM, Reporting & Charts, PDF document / forms support, full text search as well as Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint & Office integration

To help ColdFusion developers be more productive Adobe have also released ColdFusion Builder, an Eclipse based IDE, purpose built for the needs of CF developers, that includes code completion for CFML, JavaScript, HTML & CSS, Debugging, Server Management and is extensible using CFML!

Read the full press release here:

The ColdFusion 9 public beta is available for download at http://adobe.com/go/coldfusion_beta_download. The ColdFusion Builder public beta is available for download at http://adobe.com/go/coldfusion_builder_beta_download.