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The Week in ColdFusion: 30 April-6 May: Is ColdFusion a programming language? blah blah blah…

Kay Smoljak
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There were a couple of big news items in the blogosphere this week, but making the most noise was the cf.Objective() conference. I’m not going to link to those blog posts here – I’m going to wait a few days for the dust to settle, and for everyone to get home and write up their thoughts, and do a big round-up early next week. From what I’ve seen so far it the people who were fortunate enough to attend had a great time and learnt a lot.

TIOBE Malarkey

Controversy abounds: the TIOBE Programming Community Index decided to remove ColdFusion from it’s list of most popular programming languages, on the basis that it was not a programming language, but a framework like .NET and Ruby on Rails. Obviously, much outrage ensued on blogs and mailing lists – far too many outpourings of disgust to link to them all! After reconsidering, TIOBE updated their FAQ to note that CFML – the ColdFusion Markup Language, as distinct from Adobe ColdFusion the application server product – was in fact, a Turing complete programming language and would be included in future lists.

What is interesting about this incident is that it has got the community talking about the terminology that we use. CFML is the language itself, implemented not only by Adobe for their ColdFusion server product, but also by New Atlanta in BlueDragon and Railo and the Smith project in their respective products. Perhaps I need to change the title of my weekly round up to “The Week in CFML”!

Frameworks

Doug Boude has posted an interesting rant on why he doesn’t like ORM (object relational mapping) frameworks, based on his experiences with Reactor. A couple of other people have pointed out that it’s unfair to damn all ORMs based on one experience with one product. I guess, as with everything in web application development, your mileage may vary!

Earlier this week I posted a poll – do you use a framework? I’m going to leave it open for a few more days so if you haven’t already voted, go have your say.

Community

MXNA, Macromedia’s ancient blog aggregation service that had been showing it’s age recently, was put out to pasture and the new Adobe Feeds was launched. In actual fact, the code base is the same, but according to Ben Forta some optimizations were made and the the new servers are now running ColdFusion 8.0.1 for an extra speed injection.

Charlie Arehart continues his series of posts exposing his massive lists of resources with Blogging Tools, CFML Certification Preparation Resources, and Bug/Defect Tracking Tools.

Open Source

After much anticipation, Open BlueDragon has been released into the wild in time for the cf.Objective() conference – so if you want to see what all the fuss is about, download it and give it a go.

Brian Rinaldi’s open source update includes two new releases and four updates, including a new project which filters against SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks, and a number of updates to Raymond Camden’s many projects. Brian also links to lots of new articles and tutorials on frameworks.

If you weren’t able to catch it live, you can now watch a recording of Jedi Master Raymond Camden’s presentation on open source and ColdFusion.

Code

Some CFML quickies:

That’s enough for one week, I think. As always, if you have any tips, email me (kay at smoljak dot com), leave a comment or tag something in delicious with for:kay.smoljak (no one ever does that!). ‘Til next time!