January 7, 2009
A year ago, I challenged the community to evangelize ColdFusion and convert new developers from other technologies. It was part of a blog post that
examined and rebuffed several common arguments that often arise within the community as to why ColdFusion is not more popular. Most of those arguments focus on what people think
Adobe should do to make ColdFusion more popular. A lot has happened in the last year since that blog post so I want to revisit the arguments and see where we stand today.
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January 6, 2009
Ron has posted a great
step-by-step tutorial for writing testable specs with cfSpec. Using an e-commerce shopping cart as an example, he builds up the spec, one expectation at a time, showing how cfSpec performs intuitive tests on the underlying objects, allowing you to write simple, expressive code, driven by your specification.
cfSpec now includes "stub" objects (with true "mock" objects coming soon) so that you can specify the behavior of components independent from each other (so you don't have to write multiple objects just to get one object's expectations satisfied).
January 5, 2009
As "usual", I start the year with a round-up of the highlights of last year, based on things that I blogged. It's been a strange year for me. After (seven) years with Macromedia / Adobe and most of 2007 spent freelancing, I took a full-time job with a startup and hired some amazing CFers to be part of my team. I (finally) learned Flex (and AIR). I learned a new language (Groovy) and did a lot less CFML programming than I've done in years while at the same time joining first the Open BlueDragon Steering Committee and then the CFML Advisory Committee, as well as attending more ColdFusion-related conferences than usual (cf.Objective(), Scotch on the Rocks, CFUNITED, Wee Dram of Scotch, MAX).
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Posted At : 1:20 AM. |
Posted By : seancorfield |
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bacfug@,
bluedragon@,
broadchoice@,
cfdevcon08@,
cfobjective@,
cfunited08@,
cfunited09@,
coldfusion@,
coldspring@,
edmund@,
flex@,
fusebox@,
grails@,
hosted@,
iphone@,
openbd@,
oss@,
personal@,
railo@,
ria@,
saas@,
scotch08@,
tdd@,
weedram08@
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Comments (3)
January 3, 2009
James Whittaker recently
featured the Broadchoice Workspace on his Refreshing Apps sites which is "a showcase and gallery that shows some of the fantastic Adobe AIR applications that are being developed today".
He says "The application offers lots of functionality" and, in particular, praises the design:
When started this AIR application looks polished from the layout to the iconography used. There is a lot of functionality here but without the large button bars and menu options.
The corporate colour palette mean this application will look right at home on the business desktop and the integration with Salesforce.
Nice to see our hard work getting some public chops. If you want to show your support, pop over to Refreshing Apps and vote for us (we're #3 at the moment with 4.4/5 votes but I'd like to see more votes!).
January 2, 2009
As folks know, I'm a big advocate of automated testing in general and unit testing in particular. I've gradually become a big fan of Test-Driven Development (TDD) where you write tests first and then write the code to satisfy the tests. I'm pleased to see unit testing well enough established in CFML development now that we have several unit testing frameworks (my current favorite being
MXUnit, which I think has become the de facto standard choice for most CFers who are doing unit testing).
Getting into TDD is not easy, however, and I think there are a couple of conceptual problems that take a while to get your head around. One is just a simple case of "Where do I start?". Given a blank piece of paper, how do you just start writing tests that are an accurate representation of what the yet-to-be-written system is supposed to do?
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December 31, 2008
I've been experimenting with a variety of "todo" managers over the last year, trying to find one that fits my needs. I have been a fan of
43actions for most of 2008 because it offered a nice iPhone-compatible web application that was fairly intuitive and, with
Fluid allowing me to have a "desktop" version of 43actions, I had synchronized access from both my iPhone and my desktop. The problem was that it was a web app so it didn't have any integration with either the iPhone or, more importantly, the desktop.
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Liz has posted an
explanation of the process for announcing the remaining topics for CFUNITED 2009. She had earlier posted a list of just over 40 topics and noted that Centaur and Bolt topics will be announced later, as well as commenting that a quarter of the final topic list will be Flex/AIR.
I know some speakers who didn't make the first list assumed they weren't speaking. Not necessarily true. The manager and beginner tracks have not been (fully) announced yet, not have all the Flex/AIR topics and none of the Centaur and Bolt topics (and, indeed, several slots in the other tracks have not been finalized either). Additional topics will be announced over the next few months but Liz wanted to give a sense of what is coming in some of the tracks this year.
Another clarification in her latest post covers the "exclusivity" of Centaur/Bolt topics, namely that certain topics will be exclusive to CFUNITED but by no means all Centaur/Bolt topics. That means that other conferences will be covering Centaur and Bolt (and may well have "scoops" as has been Adobe's practice in the past during keynotes). That's good news for cf.Objective() and Scotch on the Rocks attendees since they know now that they won't miss out on the "highly anticipated next major release" of ColdFusion!
Don't forget that the early bird price ($849 for 4 days) ends TODAY!
December 24, 2008
cf.Objective() 2009 has opened
registration. The list of topics will be published shortly I expect but if you've been to cf.Objective() before, you'll know what to expect!
December 23, 2008
Liz has
announced the first round of topics for CFUNITED 2009. It's an interesting mix of speakers - some old, some new - and a broad spectrum of subject matter.
After CFUNITED 2008, Liz has promised lots of changes and improvements and we already know that the venue is something special and an all-in-one location (addressing a bit complaint about the last few years' conferences). One of the new changes for 2009 is that a quarter of the content will be Flex/AIR related, acknowledging the growth and increasing relevance of these technologies to ColdFusion developers at large.
Some of the highlights (from my point of view) of the topics announced so far:
- Flex development with the Swiz framework - Chris Scott
- Railo Open Source - Gert Franz
- Groovy for ColdFusion Developers - Joe Rinehart
- iPhone Apps + Adobe ColdFusion - Josh Adams
- ColdFusion, Model-Glue, Hibernate, Spring, and Groovy - Ray Camden
- AIR: Building Desktop Applications with Flex 3 - Rob Rusher
- Hack Proofing ColdFusion - Shlomy Gantz
Definitely not your father's CFUNITED!
December 14, 2008
I just received my final evaluation forms from MAX 2008. With the exception of one person who "Fell asleep during presentation. It was offensive.", the comments were mostly positive. There was, however, an interesting undercurrent...
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December 13, 2008
Several people have been blogging about the
OO Quiz created by Hal Helms. I'd question the wording of a couple of the questions but it's a fun way to while away 15-20 minutes and it will definitely test your understanding of object-oriented terminology and principles.
A friend of mine created this in Photoshop and it just tickled me so I thought I'd share:
December 8, 2008
The title says it all. Available
January 1st, 2009 from Pablo Varando.
A dramatic title I guess but this really highlights Adobe's commitment to open source and expanding the reach of Flex:
Adobe Collaborates with SpringSource for Enhanced Flex / Spring Integration.
I've been working with Spring quite a lot over the last few months - we use it to wire things together behind the Broadchoice Workspace - and it constantly amazes me how comprehensive the Spring project is - see below for an example.
By integrating the open source BlazeDS project directly into Spring, Adobe brings Flex integration to a vast community of Java Spring developers who can now expose their Java services to Flex UIs in a very simple way. It should really help the uptake of Flex in the Java community!
An example of Spring's comprehensive nature: Ray blogged about sending email using Spring's mail support via Groovy. I recently built a new Model-Glue 3 app on top of our Groovy services and needed to send email. I could have used CFMAIL but Railo has a bug that does not allow + in email addresses and I didn't want that restriction (since we send email elsewhere directly from Groovy). It was very simple to use the same Spring mail package directly from CFML by declaring the Spring-managed beans in the CFCOMPONENT tag of my controller so that Model-Glue would autowire it!
