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: ColdFusion BlogThe Week in ColdFusion: 5-11 March: BlueDragon steals the show
Without doubt the biggest news this week has been the announcement by New Atlanta that they are open-sourcing the J2EE edition of BlueDragon, one of their CFML server products. Other editions will remain as commercial products. The reactions from around the blogosphere have ranged from the enthusiastic gushing of SitePoint blogger Eric Jones in New Atlanta Does The Unthinkable!! to mild indifference in Terrence Ryan’s Yawn, Blue Dragon Goes Open Source; some see it as a great thing for ColdFusion the language, while others such as Adobe Engineer Damon Cooper, think it’s an admission of defeat by New Atlanta. For some good insight into the potential success and failure points of this move, check out Sean Corfield’s Open Source BlueDragon, Geoff Bowers’ BlueDragon is dead! Long live BlueDragon! and Charlie Griefer’s Here There Be Dragons! And if you’re wondering how this announcement might affect you personally as a CFML developer, Alan Williamson from New Atlanta has attempted to answer that question with Open Source BlueDragon, what does it mean for you?
The announcement has overshadowed what would otherwise have been pretty big news this time around: Adobe ColdFusion 8 has won a Jolt Award in the Web Development category. This is …
New Atlanta Does The Unthinkable!!
Wow! Vince I have to give you and the entire New Atlanta Team a big high five, raise my glass, slap on the butt, or whatever your favorite congratulatory “thing” may be. With this blog post you did something which Adobe couldn’t or didn’t know how to. You Open Sourced CF. Ok so you didn’t open source CF but you did Open Source a J2EE Enterprise Server which runs CF, and that in my book is awesome!
For years I’ve watched New Atlanta constantly innovate the CF market with new ideas and business practices. I’ve heard your entire team talk about “listening to the community” and then acting on it. I admit I’ve seen this a few times but never really got the feeling you were “really” listening to the entire community. Then you pull this out of your hat. You’ve done something we CFML developers have been asking Adobe / Macromedia to do for years.
It’s the opinion of this blogger that with this one announcement and “project” you have in essence single handedly ensured a LONG life for ColdFusion. Anyone who’s ever worried about Adobe selling CF off, or worse just shutting it down can rest easy. With an ENTERPRISE …
The Week in ColdFusion: 27 Feb-4 Mar: Fun with CFGRID
Something a bit different to start off this week: Daemon, the people behind the FarCry CMS/framework, the Fullasagoog RSS aggregator (where much of the material for this column is found) and the WebDU conference, are attempting to get the FarCry codebase into the Google Summer of Code program. If successful, it will be the first ColdFusion project sponsored by the program. The Daemonite team are asking for help to spread the word and find students who wish to participate.
The first ColdFusion 8 updater is in the final stages of testing, and one of the big features of the release is support for 64 bit platform support. This week Ben Forta revealed the platforms that will have full 64 bit support. While still in the official Adobe feeds, a new ColdFusion Developer Centre article has been published, on customising the Eclipse IDE for CF development. And while we’re talking about Eclipse, which is the IDE of choice for many CF developers, the MXUnit Eclipse plugin has been released, for users of the MXUnit unit testing framework.
Brian’s weekly ColdFusion Open-Source Update included three new projects. Particularly interesting is ColdFISH, a CFML syntax highlighting library. Joshua Cyr posted an example of applying ColdFISH …
The Week in ColdFusion: 20-26 Feb: it’s a little AIRy around here
The RSS tubes were clogged this week with news of the 1.0 release of Adobe AIR, the desktop client for rich internet applications, and Flex 3. It’s exciting news for sure, but I probably didn’t need to read about it 40-50 times over! Fortunately, I managed to find some ColdFusion news out there too…
Before I get to that though, it’s worth noting that with all the fuss and focus on AIR and Flex, some developers have voiced concern yet again over Adobe’s commitment to the ColdFusion language. Jared Rypka-Hauer got a chance to quiz Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, on that very topic, and was pleasantly surprised with the candour of the responses he received.
Want to know why Adobe evangelist Adam Lehman likes ColdFusion? Check out his “30onAIR” spots - then check out some of the others being showcased on the 30onAIR web site. If you feel moved to contribute your own 30 second video on why you love ColdFusion (or Flex, or AIR, or anything Adobe-related really), just post it on YouTube and tag it with “30onAIR” - and if all goes smoothly, it should appear on the site. Adobe have been sending little USB cameras out to user …
The Week in ColdFusion: 13-19 Feb: Hidden gems
The Software and Information Industry Association have announced the Codie Awards finalists for 2008 - and ColdFusion 8 is listed in the Best Web Services Solution category. The winners are revealed in May.
One for the Mac users: the built-in rich text editor in ColdFusion 8 uses FCKEditor - but at the time when CF8 was released, Safari was not supported by FCKEDitor. According to Ben Forta, the next CF updater, which is due out “shortly”, and includes support for Leopard and 64-bit Windows, will include an updated library which adds support for the WebKit rendering engine.
Charlie Arehart has done a round-up of all the ColdFusion podcasts - including those that started and have since disappeared. In fact, there’s more that have fallen by the wayside than are currently producing new episodes! Charlie has also has his chapter from CFWACK posted online in PDF format, on Using the CF8 Debugger.
Onto some technical stuff - Rupesh Kumar, from the ColdFusion engineering team, has posted code showing how to read meta data from swf files using ColdFusion (via Java). Handy for dynamically embedding Flash files - particularly to get the correct dimensions, as Rupesh points out. Anuj Gakhar has found another hidden …
The Week in ColdFusion: 6-12 Feb: Spreading the ColdFusion love
Fresh blogging blood: Adam Lehaman, previously Adobe’s “ColdFusion Specialist”, is now a full time ColdFusion Evangelist - and he’s also relaunched his blog, Adrocknaphobia. I had the pleasure of seeing Adam present during the CFCAMP event in Perth late last year, so I can tell you he’s really good at what he does. Also on the Adobe front, Kristen Schofield, ColdFusion marketing manager, is looking for ColdFusion case studies, so if you’ve done something cool, this could be your opportunity to tell the world about it.
Older podcasts from CFUnited, posted in January, somehow ended up in my feed this week, but it was a good reminder - there is some great content tucked away there. See the full list on the CFUnited site.
Ajax integration is proving to be one of the most talked-about features in ColdFusion 8, sparking lots of interest in JavaScript frameworks and particularly ExtJS. Justin Carter has released an alpha version of ColdExt, an ExtJS-based tag library for ColdFusion, to RIAForge. Justin has also posted some information about where he sees the project heading next.
And then for some code: Ben Nadel and Ray Camden have started an image manipulation project on RIAForge - ImageUtils.cfc - which …
The Week in ColdFusion: 30 Jan-5 Feb: a bit of everything
With January gone, the year is really starting to swing into gear, and ColdFusion blogs are busier than ever.
In the coding department, Steve Nelson continues his series on using the Google Calendar API with Google Calendar API - Creating a new Calendar with ColdFusion and Google Calendar API: Using ColdFusion to get a list of Calendars. With a Google calendar integration job on the horizon I’m looking forward to more of Steve’s articles in this area. Anuj Gakhar shows just how easily the Java underbelly of ColdFusion can be inspected with CFQuery and the underlying Java Objects, and Rick Osborne has launched a series of tutorials (currently numbering four) on generating scalable, stretchy, and smart graphics with ColdFusion without using CFIMAGE and in fact not requiring ColdFusion 8 at all. Ben Nadel is taking on the famous Matt’s Script Archive form handling script with a ColdFusion version (and has an amusing story about a client who insists they are switching to PERL).
If you’re after development best practices, Terrence Ryan has written an article on How to convince yourself to Unit Test. Need encouragement? Check it out!
For the last three weeks I’ve made some comment about how the "busy" the open …
The Week in ColdFusion: 23-29 Jan: Putting CF developers on the map
Want to know where all the ColdFusion developers are? CFMaps is a Yahoo! Maps mashup that allows ColdFusion developers to place themselves on the map, color-coded according to their level of experience. Right now, most registrations are in North America - so if you’re a CF guy or gal, why not add yourself to the map? There’s definitely a lot more of us than are currently registered - and I know for a fact there’s more than one ColdFusion developer in New Zealand!
Registration has opened for the WebManiacs conference, to be held in Washington DC in May. Speakers include ColdFusion Jedi Master Raymond Camden, Dave Watts, Doug Hughes, Jochem van Dieten and Joe Rinehart amongst many, many others. The CFUnited conference - also held in Washington DC, but in June - continues their podcast series with an interview with Kevin Roche on the Fusebox framework. So how about a conference that’s not in the US and not in DC? Scotch on the Rocks will be held in June in Edinburgh, and tickets are now available.
Also on podcasts, The Digital Media Dude interviewed CF guru Ben Forta as part of the “Meet the Experts” podcast series. Ben covers his background, why …
The week in ColdFusion: 16-22 Jan 08: exam time!
So what does the blogosphere have for hard-working ColdFusion developers this week?
Firstly, open source projects have been busy. More information about the upcoming version 5 of the FarCry CMS – “FarCry Fortress” – has been released, and it will now have a variety of deployment options which will mean that it can run more easily on shared hosting accounts, which has long been a bone of contention for many developers. Full details on the Daemonite blog: FarCry: Shared Hosting Made Easy.
On the frameworks front, Steve Nelson – one of the original developers of Fusebox – has written a “one year on” look at his simple CFC-based MVC framework. Apparently it hasn’t changed much, which makes perfect sense when you consider that it was meant to be super simple! Steve even goes so far as to explain how it works in one paragraph (and the final version is pretty short): Steve’s MVC Framework a year later.
Lots of developers are interested in the Ext JS Ajax framework, especially since Ext 1.0 is what does the heavy lifting behind the built in Ajax tags in CF8. Justin Carter has started on an Ext JS tag library for forms, and made some screenshots …
The week in ColdFusion: 9–15 Jan 08: Survey Mania
Big news this week: Obviously well into planning mode for ColdFusion 9, Adobe is seeking end user feedback through a series of surveys. From Adobe “Director of Engineering” Damon Cooper’s blog, there’s firstly the ColdFusion IDE survey:
The Adobe ColdFusion team would like to understand more about how you develop CFML code, what tools you currently use, what features you look for, use and would like in a IDE.
Next, there’s two surveys that ask what you think the ColdFusion team should focus on for ColdFusion 9 (codenamed “Centaur”): the Adobe ColdFusion Features Survey and the Adobe ColdFusion Platform and Vendor Support Survey.
On the ColdFusion frameworks front, things were busy in the Model-Glue world with new releases of Model-Glue 2.0 for ColdFusion and for Model-Glue for Flex.
Still on frameworks, Instalment 6.2 of Adrian Moreno’s Mach II Primer was released: Processing Data with Beans and DAOs using Event Filters. You can follow the Mach-II primer from the beginning with Moving From Procedural to Object Oriented Programming with Mach-II for ColdFusion. Adrian’s primers are a in-depth but still easy to follow - a really good read if you’re new to object-oriented ColdFusion, …
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