Big news this week: Obviously well into planning mode for ColdFusion 9, Adobe is seeking end user feedback through a series of surveys. From Adobe “Director of Engineering” Damon Cooper’s blog, there’s firstly the ColdFusion IDE survey:
The Adobe ColdFusion team would like to understand more about how you develop CFML code, what tools you currently use, what features you look for, use and would like in a IDE.
Next, there’s two surveys that ask what you think the ColdFusion team should focus on for ColdFusion 9 (codenamed “Centaur”): the Adobe ColdFusion Features Survey and the Adobe ColdFusion Platform and Vendor Support Survey.
On the ColdFusion frameworks front, things were busy in the Model-Glue world with new releases of Model-Glue 2.0 for ColdFusion and for Model-Glue for Flex.
Still on frameworks, Instalment 6.2 of Adrian Moreno’s Mach II Primer was released: Processing Data with Beans and DAOs using Event Filters. You can follow the Mach-II primer from the beginning with Moving From Procedural to Object Oriented Programming with Mach-II for ColdFusion. Adrian’s primers are a in-depth but still easy to follow – a really good read if you’re new to object-oriented ColdFusion, or even if you’re not!
The buzz around Ajax continues with an Ajaxian article on using the newly released ExtJS version 2.0 with any version of ColdFusion. For those interested in leveraging the built-in ColdFusion 8 Ajax features, Steve “Cutter” Blades posts a short but helpful tidbit: Calling functions when paging the CF8 DataGrid.
Former Adobe Director of Architecture Sean Corfield posts an in-depth look at Common ColdFusion Arguments – addressing issues that pop up all the time on blogs, forums and mailing lists, like whether ColdFusion should be free and/or open source, if Adobe should be doing more marketing or employ more evangelists, and whether ColdFusion should be taught in schools. It’s worth checking out, especially for Sean’s closing call to arms: for every CF developer to convert one non-CF developer to CF.
Ben Nadel comments on the tendency for programmers to self-deprecate in Don’t Be Lazy, Be Proud. For the record, I’ve long believed that a lazy programmer is a good programmer, but Ben’s post is certainly food for thought.
Finally, don’t forget to check out the ColdFusion Open Source Update (detailing 7 updates and 2 new projects this week) and for those with long commutes, the ColdFusion Weekly Podcast features the CF_HotSeat with Jared Rypka-Hauer, the “Chief Instigator” of the cf.objective() conference which will be held in May in Minnesota.
Kay Smoljak
