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: ColdFusion BlogThe Week in ColdFusion: 30 April-6 May: Is ColdFusion a programming language? blah blah blah…
There were a couple of big news items in the blogosphere this week, but making the most noise was the cf.Objective() conference. I’m not going to link to those blog posts here - I’m going to wait a few days for the dust to settle, and for everyone to get home and write up their thoughts, and do a big round-up early next week. From what I’ve seen so far it the people who were fortunate enough to attend had a great time and learnt a lot.
TIOBE Malarkey
Controversy abounds: the TIOBE Programming Community Index decided to remove ColdFusion from it’s list of most popular programming languages, on the basis that it was not a programming language, but a framework like .NET and Ruby on Rails. Obviously, much outrage ensued on blogs and mailing lists - far too many outpourings of disgust to link to them all! After reconsidering, TIOBE updated their FAQ to note that CFML - the ColdFusion Markup Language, as distinct from Adobe ColdFusion the application server product - was in fact, a Turing complete programming language and would be included in future lists.
What is interesting about this incident is that it has got the community talking about …
Frameworks, frameworks everywhere
Frameworks are a favorite topic of mine. Just to get everyone on the same page, Wikipedia says a framework is “a basic conceptual structure used to solve or address complex issues”. Put more simply in application development terms, a framework is a set of files (code), conventions and best practices designed to help structure code for ease of programming, collaboration and future maintenance, and to stop developers from reinventing the wheel on every project.
When I started using ColdFusion, frameworks were largely unknown to the developer community, with one or two fledgling offerings available for the really adventurous. As the web has grown, ColdFusion has become more sophisticated to meet its expanding needs, and the choice of frameworks available has absolutely exploded.
A few weeks ago, SitePoint ran an interview I did with Geoff Bowers, the “benevolent dictator” of the FarCry community. While FarCry is better known as a content management system, the FarCry building blocks act as a framework, allowing developers to build complex applications. Just last week, this was followed up with an interview with John Farrar on his COOP framework, which is designed for rapid prototyping and easy collaboration between front end developers and back end developers. I …
The Week in ColdFusion: 23-29 April: sharpen your skills
Resources
Because that’s just the kind of guy he is, Charlie Arehart keeps a massive list of tools and resource of interest to ColdFusion developers - over 700 resources in over 100 categories. This week Charlie highlights the categories in his mammoth link collection. Come back when you’re through all that!
Subscribers to MXNA, the RSS feed aggregator for Adobe-related technologies, may have noticed that the site has been down quite a bit lately. Mike Chambers, one of the originators of the project, has posted an update to his blog on what is happening with MXNA. Looks like it will be back sometime soon.
In the only BlueDragon news I saw this week, the final instalment of the BlueDragon Open Source interview series - with Andy Wu - was released. That wraps up the introductions to the steering committee - they’re a smart and well-qualified bunch of people for sure.
Ben Forta has blogged his response to an enquiry from a ColdFusion developer from the CF3-CF5 era, who was wondering what he needed to learn to get up to speed with the current state of ColdFusion. Ben’s advice is interesting and applies equally well to any developer looking to improve their skills.
Code
Simon Horwith clears …
The Week in ColdFusion: 16-22 April: Community best practices
Welcome to the 15th “Week in ColdFusion” wrap-up! I hope that I’m saving people time, or at least pointing out some handy posts you might have missed. If you have any feedback, please leave a comment. Too long? Too short? Not enough of X? Too much Y? I’d love to hear it!
Best Practices
Onto the posts: Peter Bell has started a series of articles on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development (TDD). He’s kicked the set off with Why Test? and followed up with Books on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development and then an article on Getting Test Infected - pairing up with another developer to pick the unit testing habit up from them. Food for thought if you’re curious about Unit testing or TDD.
Speaking of deep thinking, Barney Boisvert has posted on how far the ColdFusion community has come in the past few years, with ColdSpring, ORM solutions like Reactor and Transfer, and frameworks like Fusebox, Mach-ii and Model-Glue now so widely adopted. If you’re using these tools, learning them or even just thinking about these topics, Barney would like you to congratulate yourself!
Community
The first round of results from Jim Priest’s CFML IDE survey are in. Check …
The Week in ColdFusion: 9-15 April: Code crazy
For some reason, the blogosphere absolutely exploded this week. Even if you subscribe to MXNA, Fullasagoog or one of the other CF blog aggregators, check this list out to see if you missed anything…
The hype over the ColdFusion 8.0.1 release has died down a little, and there were a handful of items this week discussing what’s new. Raymond Camden discusses the changes to the CFEXECUTE tag in CF 8.0.1. With the changes to the CF licensing, John Beynon has put together a little ColdFusion license calculator in Flex to work out how many licenses are required (and their cost) based on the CF edition, number of CPUs and number of virtual machines.
Not to be outdone, the alternative CFML engine Railo also released an updater, to version 2.0.1. The new release contains an ton of bug fixes and new features.
In the Open BlueDragon camp, the members of the new steering committee have been announced. Alan Williamson has posted interviews with committee members Andy Allan, Mike Brunt, and Sean Corfield, with more sure to follow.
Speaking of open source, Greg Cerveny has posted an interview with Raymond Camden on developing open source ColdFusion applications. It’s interesting because it seems Greg has some strong …
The Week in ColdFusion: 2-8 April: updater overload
Obviously the big news this week was that the first ColdFusion updater, 8.0.1, was released - and was subsequently re-announced by seemingly every blog in MXNA and Fullasagoog! In between all the announcements were some posts exploring the new features:
- Ray Camden shows how it’s now easier to add PDF watermarks
- Brian Rinaldi and Barney Boisvert debate the best way to create dummy recordsets
- John Beynon discusses EULA changes, which will be of particular interest to those interested in virtualisation, and Vince Bonfanti of New Atlanta responds with the differences between ColdFusion and BloueDragon’s licensing models
- Adobe’s Manjukiran Pacchhipulusu writes about taking advantage of the new 64-bit support
Fortunately, I also managed to find some more material NOT related to the update. There’s new features at Fusion Authority, home of the print journal FAQU. The first of a number of CFUnited video interviews has been posted, where Paul Vernon interviews New Atlanta’s Vince Bonfanti about - guess what! - BlueDragon open source. And I attempt to highlight some of the best CF-Talk mailing list threads from the previous week in my new ColdFusion-Talk Roundup #1.
Short and sweet code cuts:
- Seth Duffey shows how to work with multi-page TIFF images in ColdFusion 8
- Michael …
ColdFusion 8 Updater 1 released
After a long beta cycle, ColdFusion 8.0.1 is now available!
The updater incorporates a heap of fixes and enhancements which you can read about in the release notes (PDF) and FAQ. Notably, 64-bit support has been added to almost every platform - a feature that many organisations were waiting for - and JDK support has been upgraded to Sun Java SE JDK 6 Update 3, version 1.6.0_03.
The third party libraries from Yahoo, ExtJS and FCKEditor have been updated, so the built in Ajax components now support the Webkit/Safari browser. In terms of the core language, the AttributeCollection attribute has been extended, as has structure and array creation syntax, and there are numerous updates to cfdocument, cfexchangecalendar, cfexecute, cfftp, cfimage, cfmail, and cfpdf as well as over 100 bug fixes, including quite a few to ColdFusion Report Builder.
So what are you waiting for - go get it already :)
The Week in ColdFusion: 26 March-1st April: No fooling here
On BlueDragon Open Source: Vince Bonfanti, President of New Atlanta, has announced that BlueDragon Open Source will be unveiled at the cf.Objective() conference in May. Vince also speaks his mind on the latest instalment of the ColdFusion Weekly podcast, and is interviewed by Dan Wilson in this dzone article.
From the Adobe camp:
- CF Product Manger Kristen Schofield wants your feedback on the idea of a ColdFusion evangelism kit for potential customers. Do you think this would be useful? Let Kristen know your thoughts!
- Last week the Adobe MAX locations were announced. Now, they’re looking for your thoughts on sessions and presenters
Brian Rinaldi talks to Peter Bell in his CFUnited interview series. Peter will be presenting three sessions at the CFUnited conference, on CFCs, code generation, and OO. Brian’s Open Source Update also had lots of interesting announcements on the frameworks front (ColdBox, FarCry, Mach-ii and Transfer related).
Code and techniques, short and sweet:
- Brian Ghidinelli shares a technique to minimize memory usage by bots in applications using session management
- Justin Carter has started a documentation wiki for ColdExt, the ExtJS tag library for CF, with a Getting Started tutorial
- Ever wanted to use CFPOP over a secure connection? It’s not supported in CF, but Jake …
The Week in ColdFusion: 19-25 March: Adobe have been busy
Lots of Adobe news: First, this week has been Adobe Developer Week, with three ColdFusion sessions being run by Adam Lehman. Don’t worry if you’ve missed them - Adam assures us that they will be recorded, and he will post the locations once they are available.
Still from Adobe: the web site for the 2008 Adobe MAX Conferences is now live. MAX 2008 North America will be held in San Francisco, MAX 2008 Europe will be in Milan, and MAX 2008 Japan will be held in Tokyo (oddly, sometime in 2009).
But-wait-there’s-still-more: ColdFusion product manager Kristen Schofield has announced that ColdFusion 8 certification is now available. Time to crack out those books!
Onto some code. Ray Camden shares a helpful reminder: when diagnosing odd code problems, make sure your framework is up to date, as it might not be your own bug you’re chasing. Ray is the ColdFusion Jedi Master, but I can’t help thinking Dan Vega deserves some kind of title for his awesome posts about CFGrid. If you can think of something cool, leave a comment! This week, Dan talks about extending CFGrid by tapping into event listeners, then asks for some input: what are your ColdFusion 9 …
The Week in ColdFusion: 12-18 March: Beyond the New Atlanta announcement
More fallout from the BlueDragon open source announcement of last week: New Atlanta President Vince Bonfanti attempts to clear up some misconceptions; Allan Williamson gives an example of how the new open source version can be used by developers in conjuction with Amazon Web Services, and calls for community involvement in BlueDragon’s future; Michael Sharman covers a little about the other CFML engines available; and the ColdFusion Weekly podcast hosts a roundtable to discuss the move.
Fortunately, there is other news this week as well: in the tools category, Nathan Mische announced that ColdFire, the Firebug extension to allow ColdFusion debugging with Firefox, is now compatible with the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3; and CFEclipse, the IDE of choice for many CF developers, has a spiffy new web site.
One of the new features in ColdFusion 8 that doesn’t get a lot of press is the .NET integration. Anuj Gakhar demonstrates a potential use for the feature in his Coldfusion 8, .NET and Excel Example. When playing around with new features, you’ll want to be able to access the documentation - so Michael Sharman runs through some of the options available. Steve Bryant shows how to copy a directory using CFZIP; Ben Forta highlights …
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