The Week in ColdFusion: 9-15 April: Code crazy
For some reason, the blogosphere absolutely exploded this week. Even if you subscribe to MXNA, Fullasagoog or one of the other CF blog aggregators, check this list out to see if you missed anything…
The hype over the ColdFusion 8.0.1 release has died down a little, and there were a handful of items this week discussing what’s new. Raymond Camden discusses the changes to the CFEXECUTE tag in CF 8.0.1. With the changes to the CF licensing, John Beynon has put together a little ColdFusion license calculator in Flex to work out how many licenses are required (and their cost) based on the CF edition, number of CPUs and number of virtual machines.
Not to be outdone, the alternative CFML engine Railo also released an updater, to version 2.0.1. The new release contains an ton of bug fixes and new features.
In the Open BlueDragon camp, the members of the new steering committee have been announced. Alan Williamson has posted interviews with committee members Andy Allan, Mike Brunt, and Sean Corfield, with more sure to follow.
Speaking of open source, Greg Cerveny has posted an interview with Raymond Camden on developing open source ColdFusion applications. It’s interesting because it seems Greg has some strong opinions on what open source should and shouldn’t be. And from Brian Rinaldi’s open source round up, lots of new stuff has been released, including an OpenID integration component, a portal framework, a logging application, Robin Hilliard’s unit testing project, a file manager, and more. Whew!
Short and sweet code cuts:
- Raymond Camden has started working on a new version of his YouTubeCFC wrapper, which now uses the updated YouTube API.
- Brian Rinaldi has released a new build of the wickedly-named Illudium PU-36 Code Generator.
- Brian Love shares a user defined function to easily manage image uploads.
If you’re after something a little more heavy duty, here some’s topics to stretch the grey matter:
- Raymond Camden discusses best practises for handling session and cgi variables inside CFCs, from both a real world and theoretical perspective.
- Mike Brunt discusses Vertical and Horizontal Clustering in his continuing post series on the topic.
- Peter Bell discusses treating an object as a struct – both how you would do it and why you might want to.
- Nathan Strutz tells us that ColdFusion is a Domain Specific Language, designed to solve one problem really well: “ColdFusion is meant to be the dream language for web applications. Its original goals were to make your HTML web site database-enabled and dynamic. That goal was basically perfected with version 1.0 and the cfquery tag.”
One of the things that makes ColdFusion great is the community. Jim Priest has posted a community-driven CFML IDE survey… where he’s making the results publicly available. Already there are over 300 responses, so fill it out and have your say. Kristen Schofield, ColdFusion product manager, has posted some ColdFusion 8 customer case studies that have been posted to the Adobe web site. And over at Fusion Authority, I’ve picked out five interesting threads from discussions this week on the CF-Talk mailing list: Database schema comparison tools, ordering numeric query columns alphabetically, advanced pagination, open source shopping cart systems and Application.cfm versus Application.cfc.
ColdFusion conferences are spread nicely over the year, it seems. On the CFUnited conference blog, they’ve posted the top 10 reasons to attend the upcoming CFUnited. However, these same reasons could apply to almost any conference – it’s just great to get out and meet like-minded CF developers while learning new skills! I’m probably going to miss out on WebDU this year (Geoff has posted some OSX Dashboard widgets to countdown the days until the southern hemisphere’s CF conference), but I have high hopes for next year. Nick Tong has announced that there will be a new ColdFusion conference in the UK in September, under the old moniker CFDevCon. More details coming soon!
Finally, some framework-related announcements:
- Geoff Bowers presented an Adobe eSeminar on FarCry 5.0 several weeks ago, and has announced that the recording of the hour-long session is now available. If you miss a live sessions, recordings of previous eSeminars are available “on demand” from Adobe’s site. And Jeff Coughlin has released the jcFarcryFlvPlayer plugin for the FarCry CMS/framework, which embeds a Flash-based video player into a FarCry site.
- Nathan Strutz has updated his Fusebox XML cheat sheet for Fusebox 5.5.
- Matt Quackenbush talks about how to use mapped views – view files common to multiple applications – in ColdBox.
- Sean Corfield explains how to use Transfer ORM in a cluster. And speaking of Transfer, Dan Wilson has let on that Mark Mandel is hard at work finishing up documentation for the release of Transfer 1.0 at the CF.Objective conference.
That’s it for this week! As always, leave a comment, email me (kay AT smoljak DOT com) with any tips, or tag your links for:kay.smoljak in del.icio.us.
