Wow, what a hectic yet amazing couple of months. As some of you may know, I recently packed up all my stuff back home in Australia and put it into storage to embark on a working holiday around Europe and the UK for a year or more. So far, though, it has been all holiday and no work. It's kind of fun being homeless and unemployed :)

Progress on ColdExt has been a little bit slower than I had hoped, but it's going well just the same. I've been able to fit in some coding on lazy mornings in the Netherlands, on the trains through Italy, on cheap Ryanair flights (though it's difficult with a 15" notebook and no elbow room), and even managed to tinker with a few demos in between sessions at Scotch on the Rocks (what a superb conference - I want to attend again next year!).

So what has changed since my last blog post and the Beta 1 release? Well, quite a lot actually. I'm calling this the Beta 2 "Preview" release because the documentation and demos haven't been finished but the majority of the tag support is there.

• Most ColdExt tags can now create stand-alone Ext components (where appropriate). This means that tags don't always have to be nested which makes reusing some components much easier. This is done with the "var" attribute, previously only supported on a small number of the tags.
• All tags now support listeners (where appropriate) to allow for event handling.
• All tags can now be nested inside any ColdFusion tags as appropriate for flow control.
• All tags can now be used in templates included by <cfinclude>.
• Ext JS 2.1 is now supported, and as a result the license has also changed to GPL. Basically this means that if you were to use Ext JS in a product that you want to distribute and you don't want to be bound by the terms of the GPL then you would need to purchase an Ext JS commercial license. As far as ColdExt is concerned, I would offer it under a "do whatever you like with it" license if I could :)
• There is a new documentation and demos application in which the demos are hosted, though they can also run stand-alone. You can easily view the source code of the demos right on the page too.
• The ColdExt Wiki is now hosted on my own site to allow others to sign up and contribute to it. Unfortunately on RIAForge I was the only one that could modify the pages :(
• Plus many more small fixes that have been reported on the ColdExt Forums on RIAForge...

Download ColdExt Beta 2 "Preview" from RIAForge

I'd like to thank the people that have been using ColdExt, reporting issues and assisting with new ideas and tag implementations. I know I haven't got around to implementing all of them yet but rest assured they are on my Todo lists in Basecamp. I particularly want to get to some of the Ext JS User Extensions (such as Paged Row Numberer, Grid Filters and Radio Groups) before releasing Beta 2 "proper". Until then, have a look at the ColdExt Beta 2 "Preview" Demos to get a taste of Ext goodness :)