An Architect's View

Leiningen is a build tool for Clojure that handles all of your project / library dependencies and makes it easy to work in a more test-driven development style. Once you've installed Leiningen, you can start a new project, on the command line, by typing lein new myproject and it will automatically create a project folder structure with a source tree (src/) and a test tree (test/). Leiningen will download and manage all of your library dependencies transparently, just by typing lein deps. Then you can develop you tests and your code and just type lein test to run all your tests to ensure your code is working. When you're ready, you can package up your project as a JAR file, with or without the Clojure runtime, with lein jar or lein uberjar. Leiningen does a lot more, but that's the basic outline.

Because Leiningen assumes a particular directory structure, I have updated cfmljure to work more easily with Leiningen projects and I have updated the examples that come with cfmljure to be a Leiningen project, complete with unit tests so you can see how things work. I've also updated the installation instructions in the cfmljure README on github to show you how to set things up via Leiningen.

Take cfmljure for a spin and let me know if the new installation process, with Leiningen, works for you!

Learn more about Leiningen on github.

ClojureDocs - Not only will this be useful if you're learning Clojure but it is an awesome example of online documentation! Easy to navigate (drill into Clojure Core and scroll down - the ToC stays visible), everything is categorized, drilling into any function shows examples and you can click to expand the actual source code of the function!

If you follow me on Twitter, you'll have seen me posting about Clojure quite a bit recently. I really like the simplicity and elegance of Clojure. I like the function programming style. I like that it's a dynamic scripting language. I like that it can also be compiled to JVM bytecode and used in any mixed-language project on the JVM.

About a month ago I helped someone get some Clojure code compiled and integrated into CFML, like any other Java-based project, but that set me thinking about being able to just use raw Clojure scripts from CFML without needing to go thru the compilation and deployment process. I asked on the Clojure mailing list how to load and run scripts from Java and that gave me what I needed to create a simple CFC wrapper that lets you write Clojure scripts and dynamically load and execute them from inside CFML.

That's how cfmljure was born on github! It's very early days for the project - I consider this an 'experimental' version - but I've created a Google mailing list for cfmljure and it's also listed on RIAForge). I don't expect it to be crazy popular (like FW/1 for example) but I expect to use it on production projects and thought it would be good to put out there for others to experiment with and provide feedback on.

Things on the roadmap include making it more Leiningen friendly (Leiningen is the de facto standard build tool for Clojure and it definitely makes life simpler) as well as figuring out how to access Clojure variables from CFML. I may even try to figure out how to pass CFCs into Clojure and have them be callable (Clojure can call Java but I'll probably go the route of a Clojure proxy function initially).

Have fun with it! Join the Google Group if you have questions / problems / suggestions!

RTW - Reinventing The Wheel - is normally a bad thing. I'm said several times that the main reason we have no truly great open source software in ColdFusion is because when we see an open source project that doesn't do what we need, we go off and build our version, which we may or may not open source, instead of collaborating on the existing project to make it better.

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Packt Publishing is taking nominations for their annual open source awards. Let's get some publicity for CFML by nominating something great from "our" world!

Nominations are open until September 17th and voting on the top five nominations in each category begins on September 27th. The categories are:

• Open Source CMS - Mura would be a good nomination here!
• Hall of Fame CMS (must be Joomla!, Drupal or WordPress since it has to be one that has won before)
• Most Promising Open Source Project
• Open Source E-Commerce Application
• Open Source JavaScript Libraries
• Open Source Graphics Software

I spent an afternoon with the extremely smart, creative folks at Blue River Interactive today, the minds behind the wonderful Mura Content Management System. We mostly focused on the FW/1 Plugin Template they've created, looking at ways to make it easier to use for Mura developers.

The end result was a couple of enhancements, one suggested by Steve Withington (thank you!) and one suggested by Matt Levine of Blue River, and a new version of the FW/1 Plugin Template on the Mura App Store (version 1.1). If you're building plugins for Mura and you're looking for a little structure, take a look at this plugin. The familiar $ object that provides access to the whole Mura ecosystem is now available directly in FW/1 views and layouts so the techniques you've learned for working with Mura in display objects can be applied to plugins you create with FW/1. Similarly, techniques you've learned for FW/1 - such as relying on the buildURL() and redirect() APIs - will work seamlessly in the Mura plugin, both in the admin and in user-facing pages.

I've posted the PDFs of my two CFUnited 2010 talks on my Presentations page.

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If you're at CFUnited, swing by Potomac A on Friday at 5:30pm for our Birds of a Feather session:

FW/1 (Framework One) is a relatively new framework but rapidly gaining mindshare. It's designed to be simple to use, just like ColdFusion itself! Come to this session and hear how people are using FW/1 in production and what's coming in version 2.0. We'll discuss best practices, look pragmatically at migrating legacy applications to FW/1 and gather all your feedback for 2.0 and beyond. We might even talk about DI/1, the extremely lightweight dependency injection / inversion of control framework that will accompany FW/1 2.0!

From the CFUnited website.

Now that the Saturday schedule is available on the CFUnited site, I can confirm that I'm speaking three times in total:

• Thursday 9:00am - ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape
• Friday 2:00pm - FW/1: The Invisible Framework
• Saturday 4:00pm - ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape