An Architect's View

I get a lot of emails asking questions. Some of them come in directly to me, some via the Contact page on my blog. With the latter, developers have to provide an email address. Most developers seem capable of doing this, but every now and then someone fills out the form with a bunch of "demands" and fails to provide a correct email address.

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I was very pleased today to get confirmation that my team are all going to Clojure/West in San Jose in March!

We've been a CFML house for a decade but we're using Clojure more and more on the back end to provide a high-performance, concurrency-safe foundation for our application. Back in December a couple of us attended Clojure/conj, with three days of Clojure training for one of our team. Now we're training up another team member on Clojure, and in March three of us will attend the Clojure conference, with training on Cascalog (big data analysis) for one of our team.

It's an exciting time to be a developer!

A minor bug fix update has been applied to both master (2.0) and develop (2.1_pre) to correct a small regression in buildURL() that was introduced late in the 2.0 cycle. Thanx to Seb Duggan for spotting this!

I was very pleased to get an email last night notifying me that my session proposal has been accepted for Clojure/West in March! Due to the number of high-quality submissions, I'll get a 25 minute slot instead of a 50 minute slot so that'll be quite a challenge and I'll have to narrow the focus of my talk to make it fit. Here's the original title and description - the talk will be a subset of this, yet to be decided:

Real World Clojure - Doing Boring Stuff With An Exciting Language

Clojure is often praised for its ability to tackle complex data problems and the glory goes to pattern matching, logic programming and massive scale (Storm, Cascalog etc) but what about real world problems? Is Clojure really only useful for hard problems?

In this session we'll take a look at using Clojure as a general purpose scripting language. World Singles has a multi-lingual, multi-tenant web platform for Internet Dating and we've adopted Clojure as our primary back end language. We'll look at solving real world problems - persistence, email, internationalization, configuration and environment control - ordinary problems, in ordinary applications, to see how Clojure can help you in your day-to-day life.

Given my association with clojure.java.jdbc, I'll probably focus mostly on that part of our usage but I hope to at least give a flavor of the other stuff we're doing with Clojure.

In years past, I have gone back over each month of my blog and posted a review of the year based on what I've been posting during the year. I skipped that for 2009 and 2010 for various reasons but decided to reinstate it this year because 2011 has been a very different year for me.

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After a long period of testing out in the wild FW/1 2.0 reached RC2 back in October and no further bugs have been reported. Only documentation remained and that has now been completed. FW/1 2.0 is gold and can be downloaded from FW/1's RIAForge site. Happy Holidays!

As Clojure continues to evolve, it's a good idea to ensure your projects work with multiple versions of Clojure so that you are prepared for the future. Luckily, Leiningen makes that easy with a plugin called lein-multi which allows you to specify multiple sets of project dependencies and run tests against all of them automatically.

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Starting on December 5th and running for six weeks, the author of "Clojure in Action", Amit Rathore, is leading an online introduction to Clojure course for just $325. See the CodeLesson web site for more details on this Clojure course.

I'm fortunate that Amit is local to me so I've attended two of his one-day training courses already. In fact my first real introduction to Clojure was Amit's "ProClojure Bootcamp" back in May 2010 and it was a great jumpstart. More recently I attended his "Day of Macros" course which was pretty mind-blowing. Each of those cost $199, so the six week online course is great value since it will cover all of that and more!

If you're at all interested in Clojure, this would be an excellent way to come up to speed and find out what all the hype is about - for a very reasonable price!

I try not to pay much attention to popularity contests but I was just browsing Github today and happened to notice that FW/1 is both the "most watched overall" and "most forked overall" ColdFusion project on Github. Thank you!

November 28th was the last day for session proposals for cf.Objective() 2012. The open call for speakers has been massively successful this year: a record number of proposals from a record number of speakers!

cf.Objective() has always been known for the high quality - and generally advanced level - of presentations and it looks like 2012 will be no exception! I've been involved with this conference in one way or another since the first year (2006) and I've watched it grow from strength to strength every year, with more sessions, more speakers, more attendees. It all started as an "itch" that Jared Rypka-Hauer felt he needed to scratch and a few years back it went global with the addition of cf.Objective(ANZ). In a time when the economy has caused most people to tighten their belts and several CFML events to disappear, it's good to see "The Only Enterprise ColdFusion Conference" powering ahead.

For several years, I was heavily involved in content selection but in 2010 the conference switched to an advisory board for that job and for 2011, I stepped down completely and became just an observer for the steering committee. Given the huge number of proposals this year, I'm very glad of that role change and I don't envy the job of Bob Silverberg and his team - they have a lot of work ahead of them!

I have no details on the content but I think you can count on it being excellent... If you didn't get a proposal in, there's always next year. If you did get a proposal in but you're not selected, don't feel bad: competition is stiffer than ever!

And me? I didn't think of a suitable talk before the deadline so no cf.Objective() for me in 2012. After ten conferences in 2011 (and I spoke at four of those), I could do with a break anyway :)