Lots of news in open source this week! I sneaked in news last week of the Railo open source announcement. There’s been a lot of discussion and it seems that the move is seen, in general, as a very positive one.
- Gert Franz has posted an official announcement on the Railo blog, as well as some followup comments about standardisation of the CFML language, which seems to be an emerging theme (see Jim Priest’s comments on the topic)
- Ben Forta has posted a very positive open message to Gert and Railo
- Adam Lehman from Adobe is supportive of the move, stating that it has been done for “all the right reasons” (the comments on this post are also worth reading)
- Alan Williamson from the Open BlueDragon project has welcomed the news
- Kai Koenig, who was in Edinburgh the initial announcement at Scotch on the Rocks, has posted some more thoughts
There has also been some controversy. Vince Bonfanti posted an announcement for New Atlanta’s CFML to Java and CFML to .NET migration services, which referred to ColdFusion applications as “legacy”. Sean Corfield posted a scathing attack titled “New Atlanta calls you legacy”, a title which was later changed to “New Atlanta offers ColdFusion to .NET/Java migration assistance” after Vince changed his wording to be more neutral. It seems this incident sparked some debate on the Open Blue Dragon steering committee mailing list, leading to Sean stepping down from his position on that committee. Mark Drew has also stepped down, although that appears to be an earlier decision and he states that it’s because of a lack of resources. It would seem that the initial skepticism about New Atlanta and Open BlueDragon’s motivations from some sectors of the CF community was not unfounded.
Code
Brian Kotek stirred up a bit of a debate with his post Don’t Comment Your Code – calling for developers to refactor code to be clearer and simpler, rather than slapping explanatory comments on complicated sections. Ben Nadel responded with Not Commenting And The Tipping Point Of Poor Programming – positing that it’s dangerous for “thought leaders” or advanced programmers like Brian to make such sweeping claims, when most developers are not able to code to a high enough standard to follow his advice. Both posts make excellent points, and both have sparked long debates in their respective comments!
- In a belated contribution to Regular Expression Day, Steve Bryant has shared an example of a regular expression that solves a particular problem in Lists, Email Addresses, Regular Expressions
- Brian Kotek has posted More on Extending ColdSpring: A Custom BeanFactory
- Paul Marcotte shares Model Glue Event Security Using Broadcasts and Results
- Jason Dean wraps up his exploration of password security in ColdFusion
Other Bits and Pieces
- Raymond Camden has relaunched an all-new cflib.org – with a new visual look and simpler structure designed to let you get the user defined functions you need and get out quick. Ray used Model-Glue 3, ColdSpring and Transfer for the new version, although he strongly cautions against using alpha software in production for anyone else (Model-Glue 3 is still in alpha release stages). Check out the new CFLIB for yourself – it looks great, so kudos to Ray.
- Todd Sharp has released a new open source learning managment system called iLearn
- Nick Tong tips us off that CFDevCon has extended their early bird registration pricing
- I have posted the third interview in my series on ColdFusion framework developers – Mark Mandel on Tranfer ORM. If you haven’t already seen them, check out the first two installments: Geoff Bowers on FarCry and John Farrar on COOP.
I’m writing this post on the plane back from WebDU 2008 in Sydney. The conference was very interesting as well as exhausting and a lot of fun, and I’ll have Day 1 and Day 2 reports up soon.
As always, if you have any tips for me, email kay at smoljak dot com, tag your del.icio.us links with for:kay.smoljak or leave a comment.
Kay Smoljak
