This weekend I stumbled upon a link on CNN for \"Sphere: Related Content\".\r\nIntrigued I clicked the link to check it out and found the results\r\ninteresting. After some investigation I found that the service was free\r\nand not too hard to impliment. To help keep me from working on things I\r\nshould be, I wrote it as a plugin for Mango Blog. A blurb from their\r\nmarketing information:

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• Enhance your readers' experience by offering related content and connecting on-line conversations
\r\n
• Enhance site interaction by establishing your site as an information hub for readers
\r\n
• Acquire new readers by adding your content to the Sphere network of content
\r\n

Screen shots after the jump
Download the ZIP file or view my SVN repository

Yes, I said it. Going forward I do not think that Adobe should waste time on implementing JS Code libraries. Ext, YUI and others exist so you can easily integrate them into your code already. In the last few months alone I believe there have been 2 or 3 version upgrades alone of the Yahoo YUI tool and a 1 major version upgrade for Ext.

If you want to have an AJAX driven drop down, write it yourself or download a custom tag, or better yet; write the custom tag yourself and distribute it freely. I would much rather see the time spent by engineers working on ColdFusion spent working on the server side portion of ColdFusion vs. doing these seemingly 'cool' integrations. Don't custom tags exist for this purpose alone? Why build it into a server side product?

I'm tired of seeing posts and emails and requests to implement further feature sets, upgrade versions or change libraries all together. ColdFusion does not need to be my meeting ground of technology. If you had spent 2 more minutes writing your code you could have implemented the Ext library yourself, probably done a better job and you won't be beholden to a server side technology for your client side code...

Flame on