The Week In ColdFusion: June 25-July 1: An unconference, a new book and a boatload of code
Last week there were lots of announcements and the odd bit of controversy in the ‘ol CFML blogosphere… this week, not so much. However, I do have some tasty code posts for you and some even tastier open source news – bon appetit!
Code
- Interested in learning object-oriented programming? Join Ben Nadel as he builds a photo gallery application using OO techniques – and knowing Ben’s hands-on learn-as-you-go blogging style, this will be comprehensive!
- Nick Tong shares a code snippet to export the contents of a table into a CSV file, using the Java StringBuffer
- Rupesh Kumar from Adobe’s engineering team in India discusses the “EvalAtPrint’ attribute in the CFDocumentItem tag, new in CF 8.0.1
- Troy Pullis shares some helpful checks to test your code’s vulnerability to XSS (cross site scripting) attacks (hat tip to Steve Bryant)
- Nic Tunney posts his top 6 underused ColdFusion functions (hat tip to Mike Henke) – ListQualify() anyone?
Coding, debugging and testing tools is an important topic that all too often gets overlooked. The latest Fusion Authority Quarterly Report is all about development environments, and has an excellent set of articles on setting up and using Subversion, as well as the various development platform and IDE options available to the CFML developer. In the same vein, Mike Henke posts his top 6 underused shortcuts for CFEclipse, and Nathan Mische announces the release of ColdFire 1.2, the ColdFusion extension for Firefox’s Firebux debugging extension. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t used ColdFire yet, but that’s something I intend to remedy this week.
Community
The Adobe MAX conference (US) web site has launched (hat tips to Ben Forta, Sean Corfield and Raymond Camden) with 28 ColdFusion sessions – as Sean points out, that’s a good amount compared to the coverage that some of the other Adobe products get.
Raymond Camden is asking for help in fleshing out the ColdFusion Cookbook web site. Do you have a question (preferably one with an answer)? Submit it and you could win a book. Ray also has posted some interesting comments on certification and memorization. And, always one with his fingers in multiple pies, Ray has also announced that he will be leading a ColdFusion ‘unconference’ at the Adobe MAX conference. That’s an interesting approach for Adobe to take and I think it could work out really well – we had a series of CFCAMP barcamp-style events with Adobe’s help in Australia last year, and they were a huge success.
- John Beynon thinks there should be a “staging” license of Adobe’s ColdFusion server. What do you think?
- Sammy Larbi has some more advice for the ambitious developer: if you want to be well known, release your code
- John Farrar’s ColdFusion 8 book is now shipping! It’s available straight from the publishers in paper or PDF format, or through Amazon
Open Source
Brian Rinaldi’s Open Source Update has been going out weekly now for over 2 years! Congratulations Brian and thanks for keeping us up to date with all the good open source stuff. This week, two new projects and four updates, as well as some useful articles on Transfer, varScoper, and ColdFire. Also this week, Brian has moved his blog to Mango, the fairly new open source blogging engine from Laura Arguello. I’m using Mango in some commercial jobs right now and it’s a very sophisticated piece of software.
ColdBox announced earlier this year that they were going to move to a Professional Open Source Software project. Rob Gonda has announced that as part of that transition, partnerships have been announced with several companies to offer ColdBox training and curriculum development.
- Railo 3.0 beta 2 has been released, with several improvements which Michael Streit explains on the offical Railo blog. Barney Boisvert talks about the significance of the array and struct improvements, and Raymond Camden points out the new variable scope handling options.
- Matt Woodward has posted a seven minute screencast which shows how to build an Open BlueDragon WAR from the source code on OSX.
That’s all for now. If you have a tip for me, email kay at smoljak dot com, leave a comment or tag your links in del.icio.us with for:kay.smoljak. And remember: a CFFUNCTION a day keeps the .NET away…
