Recent Blog Posts
Blogs » ColdFusion
InFused
: ColdFusion BlogThe release of ColdFusion 9…
CF9 the shirt, that is. If you’re eagerly anticipating ColdFusion 9 – codenamed Centaur – you can now get the unofficial tshirt. As well as looking after your fashion woes, Kay wraps up the latest developments in the ColdFusion community from this week.
All’s Quiet on the CF Front…
This week was strangely quiet. Nothing much on the frameworks front; Open BlueDragon and Railo kept to themselves. Hmmm, looks like everyone is heads down coding… let’s see what they’ve got for us.
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 …
10 Questions for Isaac Dealey on the OnTap Framework
Isaac Dealey is the author of two ColdFusion frameworks: onTap and an object relational mapper called DataFaucet. SitePoint recently had the privilege of sitting down with him for a discussion about his frameworks.
The Week In ColdFusion: 13-19 Aug: And amongst the Gurus, an ArgumentCollection did break out
So… did ya miss me? I had an awesome holiday, and have come back to an overflowing feed reader. Although I may touch on some of the big things that happened while I was away, I’m going to concentrate on the current week – otherwise this post would take you an hour to read and me all day to write!
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 …
The Week in ColdFusion, 2-8 July: Object-oriented CFML for fun and profit
In the last few weeks, the number of code-related blog posts in the ‘ole CFBlogosphere has skyrocketed – which is just the way I like it. This week I found lots of good material on writing object oriented code.
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): …
The 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Sponsored Links
Download sample chapters of any of our popular books.
