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Last week I speant a good portion of my days thinking about the best approach for the RESTful API in Slatwall.  As of right now the primary usage of the API is for Ajax requests, and all of the functions really fall into two categories.

1) Action API: Perform some action like "Add To Cart" or "Update Shipping Method Options".
2) Entity API: Get a list of entities, get a single entity, update an entity, delete entities, ect.

I wrapped up friday afternoon with a single CFC that is 200 lines, it handles any action you could ever want to perform, and maps proper RESTful URI's to every entity in our database.  This is all made possible by making the entire API convention based.

A couple of weeks ago I was working with Sumit Verma on securing the Taffy REST API that we have implemented for Slatwall eCommerce.  While there are tons of resources online about different methodologies for REST authentication, we were having a hard time finding a deffinitive "best practice".  Most of the time when people talk about REST authentication they talk about 3rd party services using the API over HTTP in some form or another.  However there is an additional ussage for our Taffy API, and that is to provide a solid backbone for all of our AJAX requests.  With that in mind here is the solution that I came up with for our REST authentication.

Back in May at cf.objective() I was sitting around after one of the BOF's with Steve Bryant & Tony Garcia.  We had just finished a lengthy debate over CFML Apps and how they can help to get new developers involved with CF.  One of the things that was coming up in the debate was this notion of "Well if we just had more instruction, or training, people would become CF developers instead of PHP developers".  However Steve, Tony & I all agreed that we didn't get involved with CF by sitting down one day and objectively analyzing the different server-side options and selecting the one that meet all of the criteria... no most of us were tossed into it for one reason or another and we fell in love.

I am very excited to announce the initial release of Slatwall, a free and open source enterprise level eCommerce platform.  While it isn't the first open source Coldfusion eCommerce application, and sure not to be the last... I am very confident that it will answer the needs of businesses small and large in a wide variety of markets.

Over the course of the past couple of months there have been a number of questions that popped up on the mura forums regarding URL masking and redirects.  I found myself copying & pasting the same snipit of code for a handful of different users and finally decided that I would take a couple extra minutes to turn it into a plugin and add it to the mura app store.

Over the course of the past 6 months I have gotten a full start to finish crash course on Adobe Coldusion & Railo's implimentation of Hibernate more commonly know as Coldfusion ORM.  During this time I have run into "oh no's", "gotcha's", and "what the hell whas that?".  While all of these things took countless hours of racking my brain... at then end of the day I have not only grown to love Hibernate, but also learned a few tips that I'm very excited to share.

So I have been working with FW/1 for a while now, and I love it.  However, in the projects that I had been working on, I kept building a lot of one off AJAX enabled forms.  The problem was that my JavaScript files were getting large & complicated, and my application was getting a lot less organized.  That led me to the development of my FW/1 Ajax Adapter.