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 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!
Kay Smoljak
