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The Week in ColdFusion: 21-27 May: Better late than never

Kay Smoljak
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ColdFusion 8 is an award-winner once again – this time it’s the SIIA’s Codie Awards (hat tip to  Ben Forta). Ben also points out that UK based Software Editorial magazine has published a detailed review on ColdFusion 8 and they’re encouraging businesses to try ColdFusion out.

Open Source

Two posts from Alan Williamson this week about the official Open BlueDragon Plugin API – firstly an overview of the API itself, and secondly a step by step overview of how to develop a tag.

Brian Rinaldi’s open source update highlights five new projects, including AnythingToXML, the Open BlueDragon Web Admin, and an interesting-sounding project called templateListener to help streamline use of the trusted cache. Brian also asks Does ColdFusion’s Cost Inhibit Its Development? – and he’s got a ton of comments expressing a variety of viewpoints, from some very well-respected members of the community. Well worth a read!

A new open-source ColdFusion content management system called Sava has been released. Gary Gilbert discusses the plethora of open source content management systems built in ColdFusion, and ponders the lack of widespread support for internationalisation in Not Yet Another CF CMS (citing FarCry as the only open source CMS with build in internationalisation). Ironically, yet another CF CMS is announced in the comments.

Andy Jarrett hints that the cfCommerce project is picking up again. I’ll be interested to see the outcomes of this one.

Code

Which is faster – array or structure iteration? Ben Nadel thought structures were faster – but Eric Stevens proved it was actually the other way around. Good info to keep in mind! Ben also has some helpful pointers for working with XML documents: Deleting XML Node Arrays From A ColdFusion XML Document.

Scott Bennett asks Do I Suck Because I Don’t Use Frameworks? Interesting comments on that post… essentially, it sounds to me as though Scott does use a framework – one of his own creation. He states that “anyone who understands MVC concepts would have very little trouble figuring out my code”, which to me, clearly signals that he has a system and one that sounds well-thought out. While there are many benefits to using a wide-spread, popular, public framework, any system that is adopted for organising code will offer benefits to the developer, albeit on a smaller scale.

Scott Stroz busts a few myths about the open source embedded Derby database engine that is included with ColdFusion 8. I’d like to see some more work being done with Derby – it’s a great alternative to Access in that it’s light-weight in size and being embedded, it’s easily portable – but in no way is it light on features.

Also on code:

Conferences

Scotch on the Rocks is coming up next week, and Judith Dinowitz talks to organizer Kev McCabe about what’s in store for attendees.

WebManiacs was last week. While the official list of downloads is quite large, a whole bunch of posts and presentations on the blogs of presenters and attendees have also now surfaced:

That’s the week that was. Apologies for this roundup being a few days later than the usual schedule – sometimes real life gets in the way. This is the 20th weekly roundup I’ve done – I hope it’s useful to someone out there.

Send tips to kay at smoljak dot com or tag links in del.icio.us with for:kay.smoljak. I’ll have a post about the upcoming WebDU conference in Sydney in the next few days, so watch out for that one.