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 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!
Kay Smoljak
