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: ColdFusion BlogThe Week In ColdFusion: June 25-July 1: An unconference, a new book and a boatload of code
Last week there were lots of announcements and the odd bit of controversy in the ‘ol CFML blogosphere… this week, not so much. However, I do have some tasty code posts for you and some even tastier open source news – bon appetit!
Code
- Interested in learning object-oriented programming? Join Ben Nadel as he builds a photo gallery application using OO techniques – and knowing Ben’s hands-on learn-as-you-go blogging style, this will be comprehensive!
- Nick Tong shares a code snippet to export the contents of a table into a CSV file, using the Java StringBuffer
- Rupesh Kumar from Adobe’s engineering team in India discusses the “EvalAtPrint’ attribute in the CFDocumentItem tag, new in CF 8.0.1
- Troy Pullis shares some helpful checks to test your code’s vulnerability to XSS (cross site scripting) attacks (hat tip to Steve Bryant)
- Nic Tunney posts his top 6 underused ColdFusion functions (hat tip to Mike Henke) – ListQualify() anyone?
Coding, debugging and testing tools is an important topic that all too often gets overlooked. The latest Fusion Authority Quarterly Report is all about development environments, and has an excellent set of articles on setting up and using Subversion, as well as the various development platform and IDE options available to the …
The Week in ColdFusion: 18-24 June: CFML, Fast and Furious
One of the big topics this week has been the announcement of the CFML Advisory Committee at CFUnited. This group, headed up by Sean Corfield, includes members of the Adobe ColdFusion community and the Railo community, but notably no one from the Open BlueDragon camp. Ben Forta has posted his thoughts on the committee, and a dialogue of sorts between Ben and Alan Williamson from Open BlueDragon resulted in the comments. Alan decided to introduce himself to the ColdFusion community as well as address some of the controversy, prompting a response from Rey Bango (again with involved discussions in the comments). The soap opera will no doubt continue and I’m hesitant to devote any more column space to it, but I think the committee itself is a step in the right direction to ensure the CFML language stays consistent amongst multiple implementations, and hopefully whatever the outcome of the drama, it will be for the benefit of the CFML community.
In fact, there’s already good signs that the community is serious about interoperability: Barney Boisvert reports that Railo has implemented the same underlying mechanisms for arrays and structs as Adobe ColdFusion and Open BlueDragon.
On the flip side, David Shuck questions why …
The Week in ColdFusion: 11–17 June: ColdFusion 9 sneak peak leaks
Scotch on the Rocks and WebDU were last week (see my WebDU Day 1 post here) and CFUnited is now underway. It looks like CFUnited will generate heaps of blog posts, so I’ll probably have a separate conference round up after it’s over – but for now, a few advance details for ColdFusion 9 (coming sometime in 2009) were slipped out in the keynote address. Among these:
- Hibernate ORM will be “baked in”
- AIR integration will allow online and offline applications
- ColdFusion will be free for educational institutions
- Language updates will include a LOCAL variables scope
- a CFML Advisory Committee headed up by Sean Corfield will guide the development of the language
I’ve said it before, and so have many others – it’s an exciting time to be a ColdFusion developer. I don’t think there’s been a period of growth and change like we’ve seen in the last six months in the entire 11 year history of the platform.
Back our regularly scheduled program!
Community
First some sad news - the ColdFusion Weekly podcast has called it a day. Co-host Peter J. Farrell explains that the team simply didn’t have time to devote to the show. The archives will remain available, so if you don’t have them …
The Week in ColdFusion: 4 - 10 June: More details on Railo open source and just a little bit of controversy
Lots of news in open source this week! I sneaked in news last week of the Railo open source announcement. There’s been a lot of discussion and it seems that the move is seen, in general, as a very positive one.
- Gert Franz has posted an official announcement on the Railo blog, as well as some followup comments about standardisation of the CFML language, which seems to be an emerging theme (see Jim Priest’s comments on the topic)
- Ben Forta has posted a very positive open message to Gert and Railo
- Adam Lehman from Adobe is supportive of the move, stating that it has been done for “all the right reasons” (the comments on this post are also worth reading)
- Alan Williamson from the Open BlueDragon project has welcomed the news
- Kai Koenig, who was in Edinburgh the initial announcement at Scotch on the Rocks, has posted some more thoughts
There has also been some controversy. Vince Bonfanti posted an announcement for New Atlanta’s CFML to Java and CFML to .NET migration services, which referred to ColdFusion applications as “legacy”. Sean Corfield posted a scathing attack titled “New Atlanta calls you legacy”, a title which was later changed to “New Atlanta …
10 Questions for Mark Mandel on Transfer ORM
Ahead of the WebDU conference next week, Mark Mandel just yesterday released version 1.0 of Transfer ORM. If you’re wondering what the hell Transfer ORM is and why you should care, I asked Mark to answer a few questions to explain it all to us.
This post is in the same series (and uses the same questions) as the Geoff Bowers on FarCry and John Farrar on COOP.
Hi Mark! Give us your elevator pitch: summarize the essence of Transfer in a sentence or two.
Transfer is an Object Relational Mapper for ColdFusion.
It generates and populates CFCs that are Objects that represent the data in your application based on an XML configuration file. From there, it is able to automatically insert, update, delete that data into, and out of your database, without you having to write any of the SQL or CFML to do it.
OK, that sounds pretty cool. Let’s dig a little deeper: tell us more about the main features.
At the top level, Transfer generates what is commonly referred to as Business Objects for you, without you having to write any CFML or build a CFC. By Business Object, I mean an Object that represents an entity within your …
The Week in ColdFusion: 28 May – 3 June: Another CFML engine goes open source
Strictly, this falls outside the 28 May – 3 June timeframe for this weekly roundup, but it’s news too big to hold off on: Railo, the alternative CFML engine, is going open source. Hat tips to Kai “Agent K” Koenig, currently kicking his heels up at Scotch on the Rocks in Edinburgh, and also to AJ Mercer who has been dropping hints on the CFUGWA mailing list all afternoon.
According to reports from Scotch, Railo 3.1 running on JBoss wlll be released sometime around October on JBoss.org, under the LGPL license. Although coming only a couple of months after the Open BlueDragon announcement, this move is generating a lot of excitement. No doubt the coming weeks will see a lot of blog commentry – once again, it’s an exciting time to be a ColdFusion developer.
Right, back to our regular programme!
Code
News flash! ColdFusion Jedi Master makes a mistake! That’s right, Raymond Camden has posted about a “bonehead” custom tag mistake that had him scratching his head for quite a while - showing us that he IS actually human after all, and not just a coding machine. The machine did do some other helpful posts this week, however, including Be careful with returnFormat …
The leadup to WebDU: web conference with a difference
The time for WebDU, Australia’s only web conference with a dedicated ColdFusion track, is just around the corner. The fun starts next week with workshops on the 11th of June followed by the conference itself on the 12th and 13th, at the Sydney Convention Centre. I’ll be there to cover all the action for SitePoint.
First up, the workshops. You can signup for a full day of Flash, Flex, or FarCry - but I hear the one NOT to miss is Mark Mandel’s session on the Transfer ORM framework. Mark will take participants through building a sample application with Transfer, including Eclipse setup, Transfer installation and configuration, basic usage and some of the more advanced stuff too - to “drastically cut down the amount of SQL and ColdFusion you need to write”. In actual fact I’m very sorry that I can’t manage to get there in time for this one - Mark keeps hassling me to try out Transfer and it’s something I definitely want to do.
On the evening of the 11th, Robin Hilliard is going to be running CODE WAR at the Connections Bar at Crowne Plaza Darling Harbour. Eight teams of 2-4 members will be competing in “head-to-head sudden …
The Week in ColdFusion: 21-27 May: Better late than never
ColdFusion 8 is an award-winner once again - this time it’s the SIIA’s Codie Awards (hat tip to Ben Forta). Ben also points out that UK based Software Editorial magazine has published a detailed review on ColdFusion 8 and they’re encouraging businesses to try ColdFusion out.
Open Source
Two posts from Alan Williamson this week about the official Open BlueDragon Plugin API - firstly an overview of the API itself, and secondly a step by step overview of how to develop a tag.
Brian Rinaldi’s open source update highlights five new projects, including AnythingToXML, the Open BlueDragon Web Admin, and an interesting-sounding project called templateListener to help streamline use of the trusted cache. Brian also asks Does ColdFusion’s Cost Inhibit Its Development? - and he’s got a ton of comments expressing a variety of viewpoints, from some very well-respected members of the community. Well worth a read!
A new open-source ColdFusion content management system called Sava has been released. Gary Gilbert discusses the plethora of open source content management systems built in ColdFusion, and ponders the lack of widespread support for internationalisation in Not Yet Another CF CMS (citing FarCry as the only open source CMS with build in internationalisation). Ironically, yet another CF …
The Week In ColdFusion: 14-20 May: Keep on growing the community
Conference season update
The WebManiacs conference is on in Washington DC at the moment, so I’ll do a full report on that next week. The week after will be Scotch on the Rocks in Edinburgh (June 4-6) before CFUnited (June 18-21). Excitement is building - part 2 of Speakers getting ready for CFUnited has been posted.
At last week’s Adobe Community Summit, much of the interesting information was under NDA - and annoyingly, none of those user group managers or community experts are leaking anything! Aaron West posted some wrap-ups of the stuff he was allowed to tell us: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.
It’s all about the code
Some quick nuggets of coding gold this week:
- Raymond Camden shows us how to shrink an image, but not the canvas, using CF8’s image processing functions
- There’s been no new CFGRID tricks for a while (Dan Vega, where are you?) but this week Ray also has instructions for how to add an edit button to a grid
- Jason Dean continues his series of posts on security with a simple password strength function (hat tip to Steve Bryant’s CF_BlogPicks)
- Steve Bryant has posted instructions for integrating SpamFilter.cfc with Raymond Camden’s BlogCFC
- Adam Howitt talks about how to handle undeliverable CFMAIL …
The Week in ColdFusion: 7-13 May: Community and Open Source are where it’s at
From the Adobe camp
This week saw the beginning of the Adobe Community Summit, a briefing event for Adobe Community Experts and user group managers. According to Aaron West’s Day 1 summary post, there are over 150 attendees this year, catching up on the latest in Adobe tech and giving feedback on the various community programs they are involved in. Aaron also revealed that Rachel Luxemburg was introduced as the new user group manager, replacing Ed Sullivan who many people involved in their local user groups would have had contact with over the past few years.
Adam Lehman, Platform Evangelist at Adobe, released his set of demo ColdFusion applications, covering the Ajax, Flex, PDF and presentation features of ColdFusion 8 (amongst others). The quick and dirty demos are designed to work with the standard cfartgallery sample database, an Apache Derby embedded database that gets installed with CF if you choose to include the samples, so if you’ve got a development server handy and you haven’t had a chance to try all the new features, check Adam’s demos out.
Also from the Adobe camp, briefly:
- Russell Brown has a controversial request for ColdFusion 9: drop the built-in Ajax and JavaScript libraries. Although it’s unlikely that …
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