Because AJAX moves so much application logic from the server to the client, it forces many developers to master a wider range of web technologies than ever before. To work effectively on AJAX projects, front-end developers have to concern themselves with database performance, business logic and other server-side concerns. Back-end and middleware developers, meanwhile, have to make friends with XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and a wide range of browsers.

Release of BlazeDS is a great help from the Flex enterprise adoption perspective. On the technical side, BlazeDS provides a lightweight replacement for LiveCycle Data Services ES. The remoting part seems to be identical to the LCDS offering. But how the LCDS implementation is different from BlazeDS? What's under the hood?

It's hard to overestimate the importance of having a good logging facility when you develop distributed applications. Did the client's request reached the server-side component? What did the server send back? Add to this inability of using debuggers while processing GUI events like focus change, and you may need to spend hours if not days trying to spot some sophisticated errors. That's why a commercial-grade logger is a must if you work with an application that is spread over the network and is written in different languages such as Adobe Flex and Java.

Web development is a changing industry. Technologies are born, thrive, and then die, while web developers experience a great stress helping their clients get an Internet presence. Nowadays, the buzz word in web development is 'dynamic.' Not 'dynamic' as in DHTML, but as in 'using a database.'

It may only be a point release but that doesn't mean that Electric Rain, makers of the #1 3D modeling software tool for Flash animators hasn't come out swinging. What you'll find with this new release is a tight focus on the rendering options in Swift 3D.

'The new version of ColdFusion extends the Internet to mobile devices and delivers groundbreaking rich forms support, reporting, and printing solutions,' says Gruber, ColdFusion product manager at Macromedia on his SYS-CON.TV interview today with MX Developer's Journal chief-editor Charles Brown.

One thing was abundantly clear at the 2004 MAX conference in New Orleans: the third-party Flash market is growing rapidly. This is due to Macromedia's decision to provide APIs and open standards. The result of this decision is that the Flash developer will now have a virtual cornucopia of exciting new tools that will increase productivity and flexibility.

As an educator with a post-secondary institution I have had something of a ringside seat watching the evolution of e-Learning. My biggest complaint was that, in general, most institutions getting into the game just 'didn't get it.' Their approach to the process was to create what I called 'digital in-baskets' where the student completed the work and sent it in as an e-mail attachment. How they could regard this process as 'distance learning' or the 'digital classroom' was a mystery to me.

Massaging user input is one of those tedious jobs most Web developers would rather do without. But if someone leaves out important data while filling out a Web form, your Web application might not work - after all, how can you e-mail a user his weekly newsletter if he forgot to enter his e-mail address in the sign-up form? Even worse, bad data can bring a Web application to its knees.

As a developer who often finds myself with less time to develop projects than I would perhaps like, the lure of purchasing a plug-in that saves time on database creation is more than a little tempting. This is what the NeXTensio2 plug-in offers for PHP-driven systems that use Dreamweaver.