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!

• 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 offers ColdFusion to .NET/Java migration assistance”  after Vince changed his wording to be more neutral. It seems this incident sparked some debate on the Open Blue Dragon steering committee mailing list, leading to Sean stepping down from his position on that committee. Mark Drew has also stepped down, although that appears to be an earlier decision and he states that it’s because of a lack of resources. It would seem that the initial skepticism about New Atlanta and Open BlueDragon’s motivations from some sectors of the CF community was not unfounded.

Code

Brian Kotek stirred up a bit of a debate with his post Don’t Comment Your Code - calling for developers to refactor code to be clearer and simpler, rather than slapping explanatory comments on complicated sections. Ben Nadel responded with Not Commenting And The Tipping Point Of Poor Programming - positing that it’s dangerous for “thought leaders” or advanced programmers like Brian to make such sweeping claims, when most developers are not able to code to a high enough standard to follow his advice. Both posts make excellent points, and both have sparked long debates in their respective comments!

• In a belated contribution to Regular Expression Day, Steve Bryant has shared an example of a regular expression that solves a particular problem in Lists, Email Addresses, Regular Expressions
• Brian Kotek has posted More on Extending ColdSpring: A Custom BeanFactory
• Paul Marcotte shares Model Glue Event Security Using Broadcasts and Results
• Jason Dean wraps up his exploration of password security in ColdFusion

Other Bits and Pieces

• Raymond Camden has relaunched an all-new cflib.org - with a new visual look and simpler structure designed to let you get the user defined functions you need and get out quick.  Ray used Model-Glue 3, ColdSpring and Transfer for the new version, although he strongly cautions against using alpha software in production for anyone else (Model-Glue 3 is still in alpha release stages). Check out the new CFLIB for yourself - it looks great, so kudos to Ray.
• Todd Sharp has released a new open source learning managment system called iLearn 
• Nick Tong tips us off that CFDevCon has extended their early bird registration pricing
• I have posted the third interview in my series on ColdFusion framework developers - Mark Mandel on Tranfer ORM. If you haven’t already seen them, check out the first two installments: Geoff Bowers on FarCry and John Farrar on COOP.

I’m writing this post on the plane back from WebDU 2008 in Sydney. The conference was very interesting as well as exhausting and a lot of fun, and I’ll have Day 1 and Day 2 reports up soon.

As always, if you have any tips for me, email kay at smoljak dot com, tag your del.icio.us links with for:kay.smoljak or leave a comment.

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 system, such as a User or a Product, or an Order.

These generated Business Objects (often referred to as TransferObjects, after the framework), can also be extended and enhanced to allow you to write any extra custom functionality that you may need.

Being an Object Relational Mapper, Transfer is then able to take these TransferObjects and automatically generate all the create, read, update and delete SQL for you.

For example, if I want Transfer to retrieve a particular user from the database, and return to me a User object, all I would need to do is:

And I would have a User object that had the all the relevant data for the User record, with a primary key of ‘1′, which can then be retrieved from the User object, e.g.

It is then possible to edit the information on the User object, and pass it back to Transfer to save it back to the database, e.g.

And now, the user record in the database has had it’s ‘FirstName’ and ‘LastName’ columns set to ‘Mark’ and ‘Mandel’ respectively.

If I then wanted to delete that particular User object from the database, it is a simple operation of,

And the User record has been deleted from the database, without having to write a line of SQL.

Transfer does a lot more than just this, including handling Object composition, generating list queries, and providing a highly configurable caching layer.

If that is not enough information, here is a more complete overview of Transfer.

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

Well over 3 years ago, when I wrote my first blog post about Transfer, I was actually looking at just creating an automated way to generate my CFCs on the fly. It really was just a response to not wanting to explicitly write getters and setters all day!

Once I started getting that happening, I started thinking about how I could use this in conjunction with being able to automate the process of persisting the data that I had in these objects into, and out of the database.

At the time, there weren’t any other persistence frameworks in the ColdFusion space, so I started researching ORM techniques in other technologies, and started rebuilding my blog, Compound Theory, with the very first version of Transfer. In fact, Compound Theory was the very first site developed with Transfer!

As to how I am involved, as mentioned, I’m the creator and lead developer of Transfer. I also tend to manage much of the community aspect as well, but as the Transfer community has gotten larger, I’ve not needed to be as involved as we have quite a few very active members, who do a great job of helping out where needed.

When should a developer seek out Transfer? What has it got going for it?

A developer starts seeking out Transfer when they have had a taste of developing an Object Oriented, Database Driven application by hand.

They get sick of the monotony and the time it takes to write all the CFCs that represent their Business Objects, all the SQL to do all their create, read, update and delete statements, and the ColdFusion code to move the information to and from their Objects to and from their SQL statements.

When they discover Transfer, they quickly realise they don’t have to worry about these mundane details, and can focus more closely on how to design and model their application data layer, as Transfer takes care of it all for you, while also providing a slew of tools and generated code that can immediately be taken advantage of.

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

It is very useful to have a general understanding of Object Oriented Programming before starting with Transfer, as it does take a very OO perspective on development.

Transfer itself doesn’t use any other frameworks, but it integrates with many other frameworks, such as MVC frameworks like Model Glue, Mach II, Fusebox or ColdBox, and Inversion of Control frameworks like ColdSpring or Lightwire.

This enables you to very easily build some very mature and sophisticated application foundations simply by combining several ColdFusion community projects together, which can cut down development time on projects considerably.

What sets Transfer apart from other frameworks?

While Transfer does do a lot of things for you, it also attempts to ‘get out of your way’ in a lot of ways as well. It doesn’t set a prescribed methodology to your development, so you have a lot of freedom in the way you want to build your applications.

There are several key extension mechanisms that Transfer has that gives you a very large amount of flexibility with your implementations and means that you aren’t tied into a single way of developing your applications. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of places I’ve actually said on the mailing list or within the documentation ‘This is the only way to do X with Transfer!’.

Are there any great examples of Transfer “in the wild”?

The two largest commercial Transfer implementations that I am aware of are:

• NGA.NET, Australia’s leading e-recruitment company. Since 2000 NGA.NET’s has been building its e-recruitment product and delivering solutions to Top 500 companies and federal government, where NGA.NET have 100% market share. Their application has gone through many evolutionary steps, with a brand new version built on Mach-ii, ColdSpring and Transfer architecture in beta for 2008.
• Broadchoice is a provider of on-demand, integrated Web marketing solutions that uniquely combine social networking, content management, marketing campaigns, and analytics to deliver business intelligence based on actual customer, partner, and prospect behavior. Broadchoice eliminates waste and guesswork from marketing by enabling companies to engage their corporate community to increase marketing effectiveness.

Luis Majano and I recently also announced an open source wiki called CodexWiki, based on Transfer, ColdBox and ColdSpring. It is currently in private beta, but keep an eye on www.codexwiki.org for more details.

What about licensing, community, support and documentation?

Transfer is released under the Common Public Licence 1.0, which allows a great degree of freedom when utilising Transfer, both from a commercial, and open source perspective.

The two major Transfer support and community avenues, are the Transfer mailing list which has approximately 340 members, and is very active, and the #transfer IRC chat room on the Dalnet IRC network.

Compound Theory also recently announced commercial support programs, so the full gamut of both community and commercial support is available for Transfer.

Documentation can be found on the Transfer Wiki, which includes links to presentations, example applications and a variety of blog posts on Transfer.

Bug and Enhancement Ticket Tracking can be found on the Transfer Tracker.

All these details and more can be found at the Transfer website.

What’s coming up in the future for Transfer?

Transfer has just yesterday hit version 1.0, which is very exciting and has been a long time coming!

A brand new website for Transfer is in the works, which will integrate the already implemented wiki and tracker, to give the community even more ways to learn and develop with Transfer.

I’ve also finished entering all the possible enhancements for Transfer into the Tracker, and there will be a process to allow the community to help decide which of those features will make it into Transfer 1.1

The professional side of Transfer is also being expanded, with training modules currently being written to provide both onsite and online training options, starting with a full day of training at webDU!

It’s a very exciting time for Transfer!

Where can people find more information about Transfer?

The Transfer mailing list and documentation are some of the best places to get more information about Transfer.

There is a full listing of Transfer Presentations also available on the Wiki, which cover both introductory and advanced Transfer concepts, and a series of example applications, which are a great way to get your feet wet.

Great, thanks for playing along Mark!

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 and JSON and Changing the size of a footer in CFDOCUMENT.

• Interested in ColdSpring? Brian Kotek has posted about extending ColdSpring through custom factory beans
• Ben Nadel experiments with downloading email attachments with CFPOP and CFTHREAD and also uploading files via Ajax
• Todd Sharp shows us how to add attachments to a CFPRESENTATION

Conferences and Community

Not only is it conference season, it also seems to be the season for long philosophical discussions (which some may call rants) on a vaiety of topics relating to ColdFusion:

• Steve “Cutter” Blades has posted some thoughts on ColdFusion conferences following his experiences at WebManiacs – very timely considering that conference season is in full swing!
• Supreme ColdFusion Guru Ben Forta has posted his thoughts on the ever-present ColdFusion pricing debate – and generated a lot of comments in the process – also very timely, considering the Railo announcement
• Oscar Arevalo rants about frameworks, libraries and shells, and where the ColdFusion community is going with them (and where they should be going!)
• Never one to mince words, Adam Lehman has posted a long response to Brian Rinaldi’s post last week Does ColdFusion’s Cost Inhibit Its Development? entitled Management, Operations, Developers and Open Source

Whew – get through all that? Here’s some lighter weight material on the conference and community front:

• Issue #7 of my CF-Talk mailing list roundup covers Performance and installation issues, JRun, CFLOCK and the ever present issue of avoiding use of the Evaluate() function
• Registration is now open for Max 2008 – San Francisco - in November (hat tip to Scott Fegette)
• Ben announced the good news that the long-neglected ColdFusion Exchange is going to be “reinvigorated” by ColdFusion team member Ahamad Paran – go Ahamad!

Open Source

• Trying to work out just what each CFML product supports? Peter Boughton has started a wiki comparing the features of all the various CFML engines (hat tip to Nick Tong)
• Brian Rinaldi’s open source update lists two new projects this week: the very exciting CodexWiki from Luis Majano (of ColdBox fame) and Mark Mandel (author of Transfer ORM) and an intriguing-sounding project from Kevan Stannard for managing nested set trees
• cfCommerce, the ColdFusion open source ecommerce project, now has a blog

In Summary

That’s all for this week. Next week I’ll be posting from the WebDU conference in Sydney – looking forward to that one! If you have any tips, email kay at smoljak dot com, tag your links in del.icio.us as for:kay.smoljak, leave a comment here or give me a yoo-hoo in person at WebDU.