The Week in ColdFusion: 28 May – 3 June: Another CFML engine goes open source
Strictly, this falls outside the 28 May – 3 June timeframe for this weekly roundup, but it’s news too big to hold off on: Railo, the alternative CFML engine, is going open source. Hat tips to Kai “Agent K” Koenig, currently kicking his heels up at Scotch on the Rocks in Edinburgh, and also to AJ Mercer who has been dropping hints on the CFUGWA mailing list all afternoon.
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.
