It turns out that doing so is not so hard. We’ve just published Kay Smoljak’s latest article Get Shorty: Trim the Fat with ColdFusion, which takes you step-by-step through the creation of a simple URL-shortening web app in ColdFusion 9. It also comes with a handy little quiz, sponsored by Adobe, to test your understanding of the tutorial.

Now hold your horses folks—we know ColdFusion isn’t for everyone. If ColdFusion isn’t your bag, or you reckon you can write this app in half the time in your favourite development platform, then that’s fantastic. But if you’re interested in reading about how to do it in a super elegant way using the ColdFusion Builder tool, then this is definitely the article for you. You might be surprised.

Check it out.

Some people think that IE6 is dead already. But only developers who have the luxury of a specialist audience, or who don’t have any business interest vested in their work, can think like that. For the rest of us, who have a real-world audience of ordinary, non-technical users to think about, IE6 is still very much a going concern.

But maybe not for much longer. Now that IE8 is out we’ll see a greater number of users finally upgrading; there’s no doubt that Microsoft wil be pushing for this, and pushing hard. Quite apart from that, we’re seeing a slow but steady progression of users moving away from Internet Explorer altogether, and turning to Firefox and other browsers; Arstechnica recently reported that Firefox usage is overtaking Internet Explorer in Europe for the first time. Inevitably, there will come a time when IE6 has a sufficiently minor audience that we can treat it like we did Netscape 4 a few years ago — as legacy technology that it no longer behoves us to support, and its remaining users as willfully stubborn individuals whom we’re not required to pander to any longer!

(It’s funny really. You wouldn’t go into your local mobile phone store and complain that the handset you bought in 2001 doesn’t work on a 3G network and you can’t get picture messaging on it. Yet for some reason, a minority of web users do behave exactly like that.)

Anyway, by my estimation, the day is approximately 12 months away when we’ll be able to kiss a fond goodbye to IE6 support forever. And when that day comes, here are some useful things we’ll be able to do that we couldn’t really do on mainstream sites before:

1. Use child selectors

   No more having to define endless descendent rules to cancel out other descendent rules. With CSS2 child selectors we can specify CSS rules that only apply to direct children, not to descendants in general.

2. Make full use of 24-bit PNGs

   No more blending images against different coloured backgrounds so that the edges have decent anti-aliasing. With PNG alpha-channel support we can use images with shadows, glows and other opacity effects, safe in the knowledge that all graphical browser users can see them.

3. Use attribute selectors

   No more having to define type classes for inputs — things like <input class="text" ... /> — when we can address them with CSS2 attribute selectors like input[type="text"]. We can even use CSS3 substring-matching attribute selectors (supported in all modern browsers including IE7), which can be very useful for defining selectors that apply to a range of different attribute values, thereby reducing significantly the amount of code it takes to address groups of elements with similar class names (for example).

4. Use a wider range of display properties

   Being able to use things like display:inline-block instead of float:left means no more endless float within float within float, or the slightly-dubious use of overflow:hidden, just to get blocks to clear properly. (Though I should point out, we had to wait until Firefox 3 for this one too!)

5. Use min-width and max-width

   Although IE6’s implementation of width is very similar to the correct implementation of min-width, it’s not the same, and it doesn’t serve every purpose; and it doesn’t do anything about max-width. With the end of IE6 can come a new renaissance in block-layout design, with the greater flexibility that designers have been crying out for for years.

6. Throw away 90% of CSS hacks (and 90% of the reasons for needing them!)

   No more worrying about bizarrely repeating characters, mysteriously invisible blocks, or frustrating double margins; with the end of IE6 comes the end of needing to be able to diagnose and cure such a large array of rendering bugs.

7. Add abbreviations that everyone can see

   Although personally, I only use the <abbr> element and never use <acronym>, still it does occasionally irk me to remember that IE6 users won’t see the expansion, and bugs me even more on the odd occasion that I need to script for them (and can’t).

8. Trust z-index again

   No more scratching our heads as we ponder why layer X is on top of layer Y when it should be beneath, wondering what we might have done wrong, only to remember that — d’oh — we haven’t done anything wrong, it’s a stacking context bug in IE6.

9. Save time and money

   Significantly less time spent hacking means shorter development time and lower development costs.

10. Enjoy ourselves again!

    Writing CSS will become the pleasure that it used to be. That is, until our expectations rise again, and IE7 becomes our nemesis …

But 3 Things We’ll Still Have To Wait For

Sadly, there are still plenty of things we won’t be able to do with impunity until IE7 is also just a memory!

1. Use CSS Counters

   So we still can’t let go of the unfortunately-deprecated start attribute, or do any of the interesting things we want with generated content.

2. Use the box-sizing property

   The CSS3 box-sizing property, implemented in IE8 and other modern browsers, means that we can finally choose for ourselves which box model we want for a particular situation, and end, once and for all, the tedious arguments over which one is “correct”.

3. Any improvements to JavaScript

   There are many things I’d like to see for day to day JavaScript programming — an end to event target forking, a single event-listening mechanism, reliable and consistent retrieval of computed style properties — but all of that will have to wait until IE7 has also gone the way of the fairies, because only in IE8 have any improvements to the scripting engine been made (although what those improvements actually amount to remains to be seen!).

So mark the day in your calendar, for early in 2010, when the fuller potential of CSS will finally begin to emerge!

Picture credit: Mike Rohde

The biggest news this week was that Adobe have finalized their educational licensing and ColdFusion 8 is now available to students and educators free of charge. Government agencies in the US can get a 20% discount on ColdFusion 8 at the moment as well.

Coding

A couple of security posts this week – hat tip to Steve Bryant’s CF_BlogPicks for these links:

• Joshua Cyr reminds us to make sure we’re not giving away too much information on our production servers
• Jason Dean continues his security series (9th installment) with Request Forgeries and ColdFusion

In more general code-related news, Stephen Withington has out together a big list of Java Servlet equivalents to CGI scoped variables – so instead of CGI.PATH_INFO for example, you can use getPageContext().getRequest().getPathInfo(). The comments on the post explain a little about why you might find the Java Servlet alternatives more useful.

Paul Marcotte explains his approach to test driven development in detail – part 1 (Application Structure and Apache) and part 2 (MXUnit, ColdSpring and ColdMock) are available.

Ben Nadel, always one to share his learning experiences, has posted about his first experiences using ColdFusion 8 secure CFFTP. Brad Wood explains what the de() function actually does. And Raymond Camden still hates CFFEED.

Frameworks

Mach-II news: Matt Woodward reports that the alpha of the Mach-II Dashboard has been released. According to Matt, the dashboard “gives you a ton of insight into and control over your Mach-II applications, letting you reload the application or individual modules, reload the base or child ColdSpring bean factories, manage logging, and manage caching.”

An on the Fusebox front: Sean Corfield reports that Jeff Peters’ book How to Drive Fusebox 5.5 is now available for purchase. Being a Fuseboxer myself, I’ve ordered my copy already – Jeff’s previous Fusebook books were great.

Community

Brian Rinaldi took a week off his Open Source Update last week – I don’t know if you missed him, but I certainly did. This week he’s back with four new projects, 12 updates, and a whole ton of announcements, tutorials, presentations and reviews.

After a bit of a hiatus, I’m getting back into the swing of my CF-TALK mailing list roundups. Last week’s summary included discussion threads on SQL Injection, Web Services, Academic Licensing and Career Advice.

A Wee Dram of Scotch – the mini Scotch On The Rocks conference being held in London on September 25 – now has a full program and is open for registration (hat tips to Andy Allan and Sean Corfield). With the stars in the lineup and at only £10, I dare say it’s going to sell out quickly.

Alternative CFML Engines

Gary Gilbert has posted his impressions of Railo 3, after meeting Gert Franz and Michi Streit at the Munich CFUG. Gary was impressed by the “strict” variable scoping setting in the Administrator, the Amazon S3 resource, and the extension framework.

Michael Sprague has released a beta of CFjqAjax, a library of custom tags to replicate ColdFusion 8’s Ajax UI controls CFGRID, CFWINDOW, and CFTOOLTIP with jQuery equivalents. This is great news, not only for people who prefer to work with the jQuery JavaScript than ExtJS or YUI… but also for those using alternative CFML engines like Railo and Open BlueDragon.

Okey dokes kids, that’s all for now. Got a tip? Email kay at smoljak dot com, leave a comment or tag at delicious.com with for:kay.smoljak. Til next time…

Code n’ Concepts

• Adobe have released a technote briefly demonstrating how images can be streamed. And if you’re working with CFIMAGE, Scott Pinkston reminds you to make sure you apply all the patches lest you find yourself pulling your hair out unnecessarily
• Ben Nadel’s OOPhoto project is still progressing – the latest installment is Encapsulating Form Processing In The Service / Facade Layer
• Raymond Camden answers a reader’s query about populating tooltips with a CFC and beats up on the CFFEED tag
• Following up from his ruminations on Business Logic, Doug Boude attempts to define just what is Application Logic
• Doug Hughes introduces the CFANT project, a toolkit for scripting remote CF deployments
• The MXUnit unit testing framework has been updated to 1.0.2

Are you a fan of nested sets to represent tree structures in your database? Nested Set Trees – a ColdFusion library for managing the various operations involved – has hit version 0.8.

SQL Injection attacks still bugging you? Simon Whatley has posted on how to fix an SQL Injection hack, and also how to protect against a malicious attack in the first place (hat tip to Steve Bryant). You know what they say about prevention being better than cure… Peter Boughton has released an Eclipse IDE plugin called QueryParam Scanner which looks through code to find and report on queries with unprotected input parameters. No excuses now – lock down that code!

Conferences

Some bad news UK developers: UK conference CFDevCon has been canned.

Some good news for UK developers: A Wee Dram of Scotch – a one day conference from the Scotch on the Rocks team – has been announced for September 25 in London (hat tip to Andy Jarrett).

While we’re on conferences, the four tracks for cf.Objective() 2009 have been announced (hat tip to Nic Tunney).

So that’s it? Really? Tell me people, did I miss something? Leave a comment, tag for:kay.smoljak on delicious.com or email kay at smoljak dot com with all the juicy goss.

See other framework interviews: Geoff Bowers on FarCry, John Farrar on COOP and Mark Mandel on Transfer ORM.

1. Hi Ike! Give us your elevator pitch: summarize the essence of onTap in a sentence or two.

Sales Pitchy Version: The onTap framework does for ColdFusion what ColdFusion did for the web: simplify a lot of powerful tools.

Not so Sales Pitchy Version: The onTap framework is an SOA approach to ColdFusion development.

2. Let’s dig a little deeper: tell us more about the main features.

Version 3.2 has converted all its config files from flat CFML includes now to CFCs and includes a new IoC Manager. The IoC Manager and the Plugin Manager provides a structure for developers to distribute or sell pluggable, smartly integrated applications and services that can be installed within a browser. In the not too distant future, the framework site will host a webservice which allows those “plugin” applications to be installed directly from within the framework in much the same way that add-ons can be installed in Eclipse or FireFox 3 without leaving the IDE.

If that sounds intimidating, don’t worry. None of that is actually necessary for developing applications with the onTap framework. The framework itself is agnostic about OO, the same way that the Fusebox framework is agnostic. You can choose to develop your application in an “extreme OO” manner, using an IoC framework, etc. or you can just build pages if that’s your preference. My preference is for the OO/SOA approach.

The framework includes a powerful XHTML library: a powerful and extensible templating engine which gives you access to a variety of form building and Ajax tools.

I use these XHTML tools in combination with a unique core architecture I’ve been calling “tiered inclusion”. Where Fusebox has circuits and fuseactions, the onTap framework has a “process”, which resembles and actually maps to both a URL and a file path. This tiered inclusion also provides some additional directory-based hooks for powerful branding/customization features as well as a host of very comprehensive internationalization (i18n) features for anyone who needs or wants them.

And that’s not even getting into a variety of other odds and ends you’ll find in the framework like content caching, section-508 compliant Ajax widgets, an XML-based rule-manager tool for providing powerfully configurable business logic that users can manage (not found in other frameworks), etc.

3. How did onTap come about and what was the reason for creating it? How are you involved?

I’m the original author. About the time I started working on the tiered inclusion technique, I had been doing a lot of work with Fusebox 3. Sure it was a decent framework, and initially I was a big fan of it… over time I found myself growing increasingly disenchanted by the amount of repetition involved in the switch files in Fusebox 3.

The tiered inclusion concept was something that just occurred to me spur of the moment one day and I worked on it for a long time to perfect it. For myself, it’s always provided an excellent way of reducing the amount of code I write. The rest of the framework came later and has always just been an endless pursuit of tools to make my own development work easier – if I found a way to create a generic tool that would be useful later, I included it in the distribution.

4. When should a developer seek out onTap? What has it got going for it?

The onTap framework’s biggest strength is in its ability to allow seamless branding and customization as well as seamless, automated integration between plugin applications (both using the same techniques).

I worked for a lot of ASP companies over the years and one thing that has been a consistent problem at every ASP I’ve worked for has been client customization requests. Clients invariably want tools the system wasn’t designed to provide and then finding a way to provide them is consistently problematic for the company providing the service, often actually hurting the company financially. The onTap framework provides a comprehensive set of tools that work very well for mitigating the problems caused by implementing client customization requests.

5. What are the pre-requisites for using onTap? Is there any prior knowledge that would help new users? Does it use any other frameworks that could simplify or complicate things?

Knowing some ColdFusion obviously would help! The only real requirement is ColdFusion 7 and it should run on both Windows and Unix operating systems. I haven’t tried with more recent versions of BlueDragon or with Railo yet. It doesn’t require any additional frameworks, although it does include built-in integration for ColdSpring or Lightwire if that’s your preference.

The core architecture behind the onTap framework is honestly not very complicated and is intentionally designed to be very simple to use, however it is unlike most other ColdFusion frameworks in its approach. So if you come to it expecting it to behave just like Mach-II, Model-Glue, ColdBox or even FuseBox you might have to unlearn some complexity to understand how simple and powerful the onTap framework is.

When I work on my own projects, I spend no more than a few minutes on things that normally, even with a good framework like ColdBox, would take several hours of my time. I spend those extra hours working on new problems instead of working on problems that I’ve already solved a bazillion times, like laying out or validating a form. And when I work on projects at my day job I essentially consider much of my time spent working as “time wasted” because I know how much faster things could be done.

6. What sets onTap apart from other frameworks?

Three things especially:
- Its SOA Approach to ColdFusion development
- Powerful tools for customization and branding (very useful for ASPs)
- Its simplicity

Actually something I find interesting is that several years ago I had done a comparison of several ColdFusion frameworks – there weren’t very many at the time, so I had just Fusebox 3 and 4, Mach-II and the onTap framework. At the time I was really disenchanted by the extra work required by the other frameworks, particularly the many, many lines of XML required for Mach-II.

In the intervening years, not just Mach-II and Fusebox have adopted my approaches, but other frameworks like ColdBox have cropped up in various places all touting as their advantages techniques that I’d been using for a long time. I’m not just saying this to pat myself on the back (in spite of the fact that I do take pride in it), but to point out that nearly everything that’s in the onTap framework has always been “ahead of its time”. I think that should speak to the longevity of the framework, which I know a few people have worried about.

In truth I like to think that the onTap framework functions in many ways a lot more like ColdFusion than most of the other ColdFusion frameworks that have been created in recent years.

7. Are there any great examples of onTap “in the wild”?

I have to be honest here and say nobody’s informed me of any yet. I really wish I could say “ahh yeah, XXX Bank is using it”, but I can’t.

Several years ago I implemented a solution using it for a defense contractor called Raytheon. I hesitate to say that’s an example of the framework in the wild because it was such an early version.

I’m excited to get the news though!

8. What about licensing, community, support and documentation?

It’s released with an OpenBSD style license, which is a little less restrictive than LGPL2 in that, not only are you allowed to create commercial software using it (lord knows I’ve had my own plans), but you can also encrypt your own software based on the onTap framework if you want to. It only requires that you include the notice that your distribution includes the onTap framework and that it’s not endorsed by the framework authors (which as of today is just me).

I’m currently working rather hard to try and grow the framework community. I’m trying to find better ways to encourage feedback and participation. I’m just not good at the marketing and people skills. I am however very interested in growing a more active community around this framework like the Fusebox or FarCry communities which have actual dev. teams and active forums and mailing lists. I’d like the framework to have a dev team at some point, not just me. I’d like for it to include code reviews / critiques and code contributions from other members of the community. I just recently published a blog about this specifically asking for people to write about their experiences with the framework, good bad or ugly.

Documentation for the framework has always been… well, verbose. I have actually removed some of the documentation in this latest release because I found that not only was a lot of it not read, but I’d had a number of developers over the years voice … well they weren’t complaints, but they would say things like Jeff Peters from the Fusebox community when I met him at cf.Objective had related an anecdote about having looked at the documentation a few days before and having a conversation with someone else in which the phrase “Do I have to read ALL this?!” was used.

The author of Model-Glue, Joe Rinehart once made a comment on the cf-talk list to the effect of “thanks for setting the bar so high for documentation” because he found my documentation to be so thorough (read LONG).

9. What’s coming up in the future for onTap?

Right now I’m working on getting it back onto its own domain. I just registered tapogee.com … Soon I hope it will be hosting the webservice I mentioned before for instantly finding and downloading plugin applications. My hope is that with a more active community there will be many plugin-based services and applications that can all work together to create a suite that truly leverages the collective talents of the ColdFusion community at large in a way that’s not been seen with other frameworks thus far (yes even FarCry, I’m that bold). Work less, accomplish more.

To that end I’m also considering self-publishing a small book on how to develop applications using the framework, and possibly t-shirts and other guerilla-marketing techniques.

10. Where can people find more information about onTap?

http://on.tapogee.com and check out the framework blog on RIAForge.

Community

It was quite a while ago now that Adobe announced that ColdFusion would become free for educational institutions. Brad Wood has posted a call to the community to help make that push successful by helping to develop curriculum for teaching ColdFusion. There’s some things already happening by the sound of it, so If you have an interest in the academic sphere check Brian’s post out.

Conferences

Although conference season seems to be slowing down, one of the biggest conferences – Adobe MAX US, to be held this year in San Francisco – is till on the horizon. Ben Forta warns that early bird pricing ends on August 31st.

Just because the big conferences are over doesn’t mean that conference-style learning can’t continue. I’m a big fan of BarCamp – user-generated “unconferences” – which are held in hundreds of locations around the world. Mike Henke attended his first ever BarCamp recently and wrote about the experience. If there’s a BarCamp on your area, it’s definitely worth getting along – and if there’s not one close to you, maybe that’s an opportunity to start one!

Resources

A new article has been published in Adobe’s ColdFusion Developer Center on High availability clustering in ColdFusion. Mike Brunt explains how enterprise developers need to consider clustering right from the start when planning applications.

One of the things that happened while I was on holiday was that US-based marketing services company Broadchoice expanded their engineering team, already overflowing with CF gurus such as Sean Corfield, Raymond Camden and Nicolas Lierman, to include both Brian Kotek and Joe Rinehart. This super star team has started a new collaborative blog called ArgumentCollection. There’s already a whole stack of posts including ones on Transfer, ColdSpring and Model-Glue, so I expect big things from this corner of the web.

Frameworks

The big news for Fusebox right now is that Sean Corfield has officially passed the reins over to Adam Haskell for development of the Fusebox core files. Thanks are due to Sean for the phenomenal job he has done with the Fusebox 5 releases thus far despite his no-doubt massive workload. I’ll look forward to seeing the core files develop further under Adam’s stewardship.

• Alex Lloyd has released a Fusebox lexicon for Transfer (hat tip to Nick Tong).
• ColdBox 2.6.1 (final release) is available for download (hat tip to Russ Johnson).
• ColdFusion on Wheels, the CF community’s response to Ruby on Rails, has been updated to 0.8, adding Oracle support amongst other features and bug fixes (hat tip to Ben Forta).
• On the FarCry CMS and framework: Brad Wood has posted about his first impressions of version 5, and Geoff Bowers writes an explanation of how meta-data is used to define configs in XML Configs Suck. Matt Woodward confirms that FarCry will run on Open BlueDragon, and Michael Sharman posts about the process he used to get FarCry running on Railo 3 (Michael also gets enthusiastic about Railo generally).

Code

Ben Nadel has been busy exploring the world of object-oriented ColdFusion. I’ve missed a whole stack of great posts but you can always view where the OOPhoto application is up to on Ben’s site. He doesn’t have a separate category just for OOPhoto posts (hey Ben, how about it?), but it’s not too hard to find them working back from the homepage. Also catching my eye on Ben’s blog is his tip on extending the functionality of encrypted Application.cfm files.

• Anuj Gakhar has updated his CRUD application using ColdFusion 8’s ExtJS-driven CFGRID. There are a number of enhancements based on reader feedback.
• Scott Stroz has demonstrated a cool use for CF8’s QueryConvertForGrid() function… a use that doesn’t involve grids at all.

Whew, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Posting will resume as normal now – and I have a new framework interview almost ready to post – so if you have any tips, please email me (kay at smoljak dot com), flag your bookmarks in Delicious (which has recently undergone a major and very cool redesign) with for:kay.smoljak or leave a comment here. Until next time!

This bumper roundup will be the last that I’ll be posting this month – I’m off to Europe for a three week holiday in Poland, Slovenia, Italy and Germany. It’s my first time away in nearly 7 years – but of course, I’ll be thinking of you all… and many thanks to Mike Henke for sending me something to read on the plane!

Code – objects ahoy

Ben Nadel continues his adventure into learning object oriented programming with More Thoughts On MVC, OOP, And Form Submissions In ColdFusion and then OOPhoto Prototype – Understanding The Interface Before Defining The Domain Model. If you’re interested in OO, you will probably want to look into an ORM or object relational mapper framework to take some of the tedium out of creating objects. Bob Silverberg has written a series of posts on how he uses Transfer ORM. There’s now six parts, and they make an excellent read (hat tip to Sean Corfield):

• How I Use Transfer – Part I – Introduction
• How I Use Transfer – Part II – Model Architecture
• How I Use Transfer – Part III – Abstract Objects
• How I Use Transfer – Part IV – My Abstract Service Object
• How I Use Transfer – Part V – A Concrete Service Object
• How I Use Transfer – Part V.1 – A Comment and Response

If you’re writing OO code already or are using a CFC-heavy framework, you may have been affected by the ColdFusion 8/Java 6 “classLoader” bug, which can affect startup times. Brian Ghidinelli did some experiments on a model-glue application and suggests that the bug is less prevalent on “cold” restarts (restart of CF completely) versus “warm” application reinitialization. Useful information for anyone having issues with this bug!

But wait, there’s more… a TON more:

• The cfSearching blog includes a handy code snippet for generating sample images of all the fonts available in your JVM – meaning fonts that are available for use in CFDOCUMENT, CFREPORT and in image generation functions. Good to know!
• Interested in Lucene, the open source Java search engine? Sami Hoda has written two posts on using the Seeker wrapper for Lucene – ColdFusion & Lucene: Installing Seeker, which slipped under the radar last week, and now ColdFusion & Lucene: Running the Demos. Lucene is an Apache project and makes a good alternative to Verity for powering CFML site search
• Doug Boude (rhymes with loud, ok?) explores basic security in Fusebox 5.5 – the flavor without XML controllers. As is often true of blogs posts, there are a couple of interesting comments on the post.
• Raymond Camden’s “Ask a Jedi” series this week includes answers to questions about sorting a multi-dimensional array, datefields and masks, and ColdFusion.Ajax.SubmitForm
• Nic Tunney and Mike Henke both posted lists last week of “under-utilized” features – this week Simon Horwith adds an extra two underutilised CFML functions: setVariable and structAppend
• Steve Bryant has posted an introduction to writing unit tests with CFUnit
• Kai Koenig often writes and presents about internationalization issues – this week he explains away the mystery behind some characters specific to the German language
• Michael Sharman reminds us Don’t forget the ColdFusion site-wide error handler
• Sami Hoda  posts information on new tools for session scope lovers – I didn’t realize people were so passionate about scopes!
• Sean Corfield explains StructCopy

Community

A heads-up from Kristin Schofield, Adobe ColdFusion product manager about the online eSeminars that Adobe run each week. As well as those run from the US office, Adobe also run eSeminars from the Asia Pacific office, which anyone can attend.

Raymond Camden has had a lot to say – and mostly not positive things – about the Adobe ColdFusion certification process in recent weeks. This week he has posted what he says is his last post on the topic: My last post on Adobe Certification. Andy Allan has also posted his views as an Adobe certified instructor.

CFConversations, the new podcast put together by Brian Meloche, has now hit episode 6, an interview with Michael Smith of Teratech.

And for something totally bad-ass: Critter Gewlas has gotten an old-school ColdFusion logo tattoo – now that’s commitment!

Alternative CFML engines

From Matt Woodward over at the Open BlueDragon camp comes a screencast on how to integrate BlazeDS into OpenBD to allow Flex remoting.

The licensing of open source projects is a huge topic, and one that has only recently become relevant to much of the CFML community. Sean Corfield points to two helpful summaries of open source licenses, one written by Pete Freitag some time ago and another more recent (and more in-depth) article by Grant Skinner. There’s been a bit of discussion about new licensing for the ExtJS libraries that are included in ColdFusion 8. Sami Hoda has posted about the issue – and there are some excellent explanations in the comments.

However, not everyone is jumping to open source alternatives: David Tucker has written an article for O’Reilly’s Inside RIA about why, after evaluating all the options available to him, he chose to purchase a license of Adobe ColdFusion (hat tip to Ben Forta). He makes some good points!

Finally, if news of my upcoming trip makes you envious, how about a ColdFusion cruise? RIA Adventure is billed as networking event – a cruise through the Bahamas with like-minded ColdFusion, Flex and RIA developers, but without speakers or sessions. Organised for February 2009 by Joshua Cyr, this cruise looks like a ton of geeky fun – and Jim Priest has even written a theme song.

That’s all for now, folks… keep coding and I’ll talk to you all in August.

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 CFML developer. In the same vein, Mike Henke posts his top 6 underused shortcuts for CFEclipse, and Nathan Mische announces the release of ColdFire 1.2, the ColdFusion extension for Firefox’s Firebux debugging extension. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t used ColdFire yet, but that’s something I intend to remedy this week.

Community

The Adobe MAX conference (US) web site has launched (hat tips to Ben Forta, Sean Corfield and Raymond Camden) with 28 ColdFusion sessions – as Sean points out, that’s a good amount compared to the coverage that some of the other Adobe products get.

Raymond Camden is asking for help in fleshing out the ColdFusion Cookbook web site. Do you have a question (preferably one with an answer)? Submit it and you could win a book. Ray also has posted some interesting comments on certification and memorization. And, always one with his fingers in multiple pies, Ray has also announced that he will be leading a ColdFusion ‘unconference’ at the Adobe MAX conference. That’s an interesting approach for Adobe to take and I think it could work out really well – we had a series of CFCAMP barcamp-style events with Adobe’s help in Australia last year, and they were a huge success.

• John Beynon thinks there should be a “staging” license of Adobe’s ColdFusion server. What do you think?
• Sammy Larbi has some more advice for the ambitious developer: if you want to be well known, release your code
• John Farrar’s ColdFusion 8 book is now shipping! It’s available straight from the publishers in paper or PDF format, or through Amazon

Open Source

Brian Rinaldi’s Open Source Update has been going out weekly now for over 2 years! Congratulations Brian and thanks for keeping us up to date with all the good open source stuff. This week, two new projects and four updates, as well as some useful articles on Transfer, varScoper, and ColdFire. Also this week, Brian has moved his blog to Mango, the fairly new open source blogging engine from Laura Arguello. I’m using Mango in some commercial jobs right now and it’s a very sophisticated piece of software.

ColdBox announced earlier this year that they were going to move to a Professional Open Source Software project. Rob Gonda has announced that as part of that transition, partnerships have been announced with several companies to offer ColdBox training and curriculum development.

• Railo 3.0 beta 2 has been released, with several improvements which Michael Streit explains on the offical Railo blog. Barney Boisvert talks about the significance of the array and struct improvements, and Raymond Camden points out the new variable scope handling options.
• Matt Woodward has posted a seven minute screencast which shows how to build an Open BlueDragon WAR from the source code on OSX.

That’s all for now. If you have a tip for me, email kay at smoljak dot com, leave a comment or tag your links in del.icio.us with for:kay.smoljak. And remember: a CFFUNCTION a day keeps the .NET away…

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 Adobe’s marketing department seems to be out of the ColdFusion loop, omitting it from marketing materials related to Flex where it really should be pushed (hat tip and sincere thanks to Mike Henke). From Adobe, Ben Forta (king of evangelists), Kristen Schofield (ColdFusion product manager) and Rachel Luxemburg (community manager) all responded in the comments.

Right, with that out the way, let’s get onto some information that’s actually useful!

Code

Feel like digging around in the internals of ColdFusion server? Inspired by Elliott Sprehn’s presentation at CFUnited (more on that conference is coming in a separate post), Dan Vega has been doing just that – check out what he found out about the implementation of structures, how to find the number of dimensions in an array, random number generation and how to dump all scopes.

ColdFusion Jedi Master Raymond Camden regularly posts answers to questions that readers ask him in his “Ask a Jedi” series. This week, he responds to a question about using ColdFusion Ajax with CFCALENDAR, as well as a question about a complex security scenario, a frequently asked question about browser support for ColdFusion Ajax components and gives a URL rewriting example. He also posts on clearing individual files/folders from ColdFusion’s template cache. Phew – Ray, you’re a blogging machine!

Also on code, briefly:

• Steve “Cutter” Blades discusses how to build applications that scale in a very interesting case study format
• Brian Ghidinelli shows us how to build reusable form views with Model-Glue
• Ben Nadel warns us to be careful when using # in DE() expressions
• Mark Kruger talks about writing portable ColdFusion code – for Windows and Linux/Mac servers
• Oscar Arevalo tries out HomePortals and ColdBox together with interesting results
• Madfella Justin Carter has released a preview of ColdExt Beta 2, the ExtJS library for ColdFusion
• Nick Tong has updated his Fusebox lexicon for Transfer ORM

Charlie Griefer has written an article for Pakt Publishing on lesser-known features in ColdFusion 8 (hat tip to Ben Forta). Pakt will be releasing John Farrar’s new book on ColdFusion this month – good to see another niche tech publisher supporting the ColdFusion community. If you didn’t see it before, read an interview with John Farrar about his COOP framework here on SitePoint.

Open Source

Brian Rinalidi is out there combing through RIAForge and other sources so we don’t have to – this week, his Open Source Update reports five new projects – including a Twitter client and a new event-driven model framework by Sean Corfield – and four updates as well as some announcements concerning frameworks and a ton of tutorials, presentations and reviews. Thanks Brian, and keep up the good work!

The FarCry Framework/CMS has a new web site – looking good, guys! If you didn’t see it the first time around, read an interview with Geoff Bowers about FarCry on SitePoint – hey, you didn’t mention then that a new site was in the works, Geoff…

ColdFusion 9 Discussion

After the CFUnited “sneak peak” of what the Adobe team are working on for ColdFusion 9, there’s been some discussion of one of the proposed new features: hibernate integration. Mark Mandel, author of the popular Transfer ORM framework (read 10 questions with Mark about his product here) has written a pre-emptive post addressing concerns that CF9+Hibernate signals the end of Transfer. After thinking on the topic, Todd Sharp suggests that a CFVALIDATE tag could be a useful enhancement to Hibernate integration.

Community

The new CFConversations podcast is flying along – already, Brian Meloche has posted episodes 2, 3 and now 4, recorded on day 3 of CFUnited. The main issue discussed is how to promote CFML outside of the ColdFusion community – and Brian has also posted the results of his CFUnited ‘Community session’ on this topic. Some good ideas there!

Related to last week’s outcry about code commenting practices, Sam Larbi posts about Common Excuses Used To Comment Code and What To Do About Them.

Thanks for reading and keep coding CFML – it makes your hair curly! If you have a tip for me, email kay at smoljak dot com, leave a comment or tag the link in del.icio.us with for:kay.smoljak.

• 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 all, collect the set! Josh Curtiss points to some of his favourite episodes.

Then some good news – a new podcast called CFConversations has been started by Brian Meloche. At the moment there are two roundtable episodes: the first a discussion of conference news, jobs, CF9 rumours, and open source, amongst other topics; and the second a summary of Day 1 at CFUnited. I’ve only listened to the first one so far, but it was worth the time invested and I’ll definitely be checking out future episodes.

With the Railo announcement, there has been a lot of discussion about the future of ColdFusion. Peter Bell has written a series of four articles (plus a couple of bonuses) on where he thinks the language might be heading.

• Part 1 – The Changing Landscape
• Part 2 – Adobe
• Part 3 – Railo’s Release
• Part 4 – Whither ColdFusion
• What about BlueDragon?
• Adobe’s CFUnited Keynote

Sammy Larbi posts an interesting philosophical piece on why Making Mistakes Is Fundamental To Understanding.

Code

There have been lots of juicy code posts this week:

• Mark Kruger discusses issues with scoping of variables in CFCs when using tags, such as CFHTTP, that create their own scope.
• Steve Bryant talks about Components and CFTHREAD
• Raymond Camden answers a question from a reader having a problem with using onMissingMethod inside a CFC
• Ben Nadel presents his partial entry to Steve Levithan’s regular expression contest and posts about some of the intricacies of CFCATCH
• Brian Kotek answers reader questions on Handling Custom Object Behavior and How to Handle Object Composition
• Peter J Farrell points out that CreateUUID is slow, and tells us to use a Hash instead
• Anuj Gakhar posts his thoughts about giving Transfer a try
• Kevan Stannard posts about Nested Set Trees in ColdFusion
• SitePoint have published a tutorial on ColdFusion Components by Ben Davies

Finally, a copy of the latest Fusion Authority Quarterly Update landed on my desk this week. Subtitled “Do More – Code Less!” this issue is dedicated to best practises and development environment tips. I’m only partway through but there’s a series of three articles on setting up and using Subversion that look very, very good.

I’m still recovering from WebDU – a wrap of the second day will be coming soon, as well as a summary of the very interesting final “speaker panel” session – interesting particularly because almost all of the questions asked were about ColdFusion, which only made up one quarter of the conference program.

Got a tip for me? Leave a comment, tag for:kay.smoljak in del.icio.us or send an email or carrier pigeon to kay at smoljak dot com. Otherwise, I’ll see you all next week – same time (approximately), but definitely same location!