Update: Lansdowne room rate extended to March 31st!

---

Just noticed this in the hotel and travel tips for CFUnited 2010:

$179 room rate special ends Monday 3/15/10 - tell your ColdFusion and Flex friends so they don't miss out! Last year the hotel sold out of rooms...

If you're attending CFUnited, you definitely want to stay at the Lansdowne if you possibly can - it's an awesome hotel/resort! - so make sure you don't miss the special room rate (or, worse, miss the room block completely if they sell out like last year!).

Today the CFUnited team published the full list of topics for CFUnited 2010 and I'm pretty impressed! In past year's I've grumbled that I've found it a bit hard to fill my schedule but there's a lot of variety this year and a lot of new and exciting topics. The changes to the process for picking submissions has clearly paid dividends. At a quick glance, I saw about 30 sessions that I'd happily attend so I'm looking forward to the scheduler being updated so I can start to plan my days!

After a bit of radio silence, Scotch on the Rocks is back with a bang this year and it's coming up soon, just a month after cf.Objective()! Scotch hits TigerTiger in London on May 24th and 25th. A limited number of Super Early Bird tickets were available and they're already gone so you'll want to buy your tickets fast to get in on the action! And action there will be with the speakers currently (mostly) under movie hero pseudonyms and the first few topics announced. I guessed one of the speakers' secret identities and Andy said I'd won an Irn Bru (I love Irn Bru!) but I don't know whether he's offering prizes in general :) He let me know some of the other speakers and their topics - kick ass stuff, so don't miss Scotch this year!

Next week, some of the Railo team will be at CeBIT in Hannover, the world's foremost tradeshow for the digital industry. This is a great opportunity for us to expose more people to CFML!

Gert and Mark will be there, on the CONTENS CMS booth, along with Intergral. You can read more about Railo at CeBIT on the Railo site. That news release explains how you can get a free ticket to visit the booth and learn about Railo, Intergral and CONTENS can do for you!

The first Culmulative Hot Fix has been released for ColdFusion 9 bringing a number of useful bug fixes for cfscript as well as a couple of other important fixes. The Tech Note doesn't list 80717 as fixed - you can't declare a function called default in cfscript - although that is marked closed in the bug database. That one is of special interest to me because FW/1's out-of-the-box convention is to use 'default' for the default item in a section and it meant you couldn't write FW/1 controllers in cfscript on CF9, unless you changed the default item.

Since I haven't yet installed CF9 on my new desktop, I can't test the CHF out yet. I'll probably get to it this week but if anyone can confirm either way before then, please add a comment here!

I'm very pleased that two of my submissions for CFUnited 2010 have been accepted:

• FW/1 - The Invisible Framework
• ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape

Thank you to everyone who voted for those two topics!

You can now install a plugin to Mura that lets you easily add FW/1 applications into Mura. See the Mura blog for more details!

February 17th sees me presenting FW/1 live and in person with free pizza, beer and soda! What more could you want?

Barring technical difficulties, it will be broadcast and recorded via Connect - details on the BACFUG website.

Please RSVP so they can estimate pizza and beer (and get you on the security list).

Michael Smith has blogged his thoughts about the state of the CF union survey results. As might be expected from Michael, it's a bit of a "warm fuzzy" reading of the results and a couple of commenters there cautioned against reading too much into the results given the very small number of respondents (compared to the known size of the CF user base).

I've been watching the survey results with interest so I figured it was time to post my thoughts.

First off, the survey sample is very small. 730 respondents. That's less than 0.1% of all CFers. Second, this represents primarily the CFers that could be reached by a conference organization and blogs / Twitter. That means that it is a distorted sample that by definition leans toward those folks most active and most likely to be either more experienced CFers or those trying to expand their skillset.

That all said, let's take a look at the numbers...

[More]

Back at CFinNC, I sat down with Dan Wilson for an informal 15 minute interview about standardization, open source and my thoughts about CFML. DZone published the video today.

Watch Dan Wilson interviews Sean Corfield on DZone!

A few folks have asked me to post the "napkin" on which I wrote the spec for FW/1. My "napkin" is actually Evernote because I have it on every computer and my iPhone so it's always with me and it's easy to develop notes with.

I started the spec on July 17th and "finished" it on July 20th. The spec was titled "New Lightweight Framework". Here's what it said:

Goal: Create an extremely lightweight convention over configuration framework.

Considerations:

• Leverage Application.cfc and lifecycle
• Automatically call controller, model, view if appropriate
• Autowire from bean factory?
• Application.cfc extends org.corfield.X
• Programmatically set everything, no XML
• variables.framework struct to specify everything
• variables.framework.action is URL / form variable for the, er, action, defaults to 'action'
• variables.framework.home is home action, defaults to main.default
• fold URL / form into request.context
• ?action=section.item maps to controllers/section.cfc:item() then models/section.cfc:item() then views/section/item.cfm
• implicit layouts based on actions

Caveats:

• Should controller / model be instantiated every request or cached?
• How should cache be refreshed?

That's it.

I wrote the first version of FW/1 on July 19th. You can see the original 381 line framework.cfc on RIAForge.

If you click 'Return to SVN History', you'll see the entire history of framework.cfc - with the majority of changes since early November being Ryan Cogswell's awesome contributions. One of the reasons I love version control (and why I was so pleased to see Ray add source / history browsing to RIAForge!).

So there you go: an insight into my design process!

If you missed me live on the meetup, here's the recording of the presentation. My audio died around 45 minutes in and there's a short gap while I restarted Connect but it was after the bulk of the preso and before the Q&A so hopefully folks won't find it too disruptive.

There were about 80 people there - great to see so many folks interested in FW/1!

The next FW/1 preso will be at BACFUG on February 17th.

The awesome free open source content management system, Mura, just released the latest version: 5.2.

In addition to lots of great usability improvements, I'm very pleased to see that they've switched the Mura admin from Fusebox to FW/1:

NEW Admin Framework - We're switching to Sean Corfield’s FW/1 (away from FuseBox) to improve performance

You can read more about Mura 5.2 on their blog!

This year's cf.Objective() is offering SIX pre-conference classes! You can choose from Building Secure CFML Applications, ColdBox: 100 Training, Developing Applications with ColdFusion 9 ORM, Getting Started with Flex / AIR Development, Mach-II / OOP from the Ground Up, Rapid Development with Model-Glue 3! Wow!

Some of these are one-day courses (Wednesday April 21st) and some are two-day courses (Tuesday April 20th and Wednesday April 21st).

We have eight Birds of a Feather slots open at cf.Objective() and we've had six (and a "half") suggestions so far so I want to open it up and get more suggestions and hear which ones you'd like to see.

If you're not familiar with the format, a Birds of a Feather session is intended to be interactive and a chance for like-minded people to discuss particular topics. Each session is lead by a conference attendee and there's often a short, informal presentation at the beginning to frame the discussions and then it opens up for everyone to share ideas and experiences as well as ask questions and learn more about the topic.

So far we've had (in no particular order):

• Bob Silverberg - Pecha Kucha: this is an interesting session format (not exactly a BOF) where each presenter gets about seven minutes to present with a slideshow of 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds. The presentations can be about anything (but we'd like them to be of interest to the sort of folks who attend cf.Objective()!). It's an interesting and creative format. Read more about What Is Pecha Kucha? and also Bob's original blog post about a Pecha Kucha at cf.Objective() where several people have shown interest in presenting.
• Matt Woodward - Open BlueDragon: this would cover topics such as writing plugins for OpenBD and any other related topics that folks want.
• Jason Dean - Security: last year's security BOF was well-attended so Jason wants to do another one this year.
• Sean Shroeder - Extending Mura: Mura is becoming increasing popular as a rich, powerful CMS these days and whilst he's doing a session on building websites with Mura (on Saturday afternoon), he wants to talk with folks about extending Mura, writing plugins, using frameworks with Mura and so on. I've built a few sites with Mura and leveraged the rich event model as well as incorporating Model-Glue and Fusebox apps so I think this would be a great chance for folks to learn what's possible and share their experiences!
• Wil Genovese - Home Brewed ColdFusion Monitoring: Wil presented this on the CF Meetup back in December (and it was well-received) so this would be a chance for other folks to share their tips, trick and tools and make a nice, rounded educational session about monitoring your servers.
• Peter Bell / Sean Corfield - Being Agile: there is increasing interest in so-called "agile" methodologies within the CF community (although many of the concepts have been around for a long time) and Peter is giving two talks on Thursday about various agile-related techniques so this BOF would allow for more feedback and questions and hearing from others about the pros and cons in their experience. Read the Twelve Principles of Agile Software and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development to get a sense of how "agile" is intended to be different (and better, according to Peter and Sean!).
• Guitar Hero - or perhaps some equally raucous social competition? The leader of such a BOF would be responsible for organizing the gaming equipment but, given the suggestion, we figured it might be fun to turn one of the BOF slots over to something more fun and less technical... thoughts?

Bob's Pecha Kucha will definitely happen. It's a new, interesting idea for the CF community so that leaves seven slots to fill. Suggest new topics in comment here and vote on any of the topics suggested (either in the post or in comments). I'll post an updated list once we have some feedback.

Recently quite a few people have been asking me whether the DevWebPro site is "scraping" my blog or somehow stealing my content. Clearly we're all very touchy about this subject (in light of the outrageous behavior of a certain nameless publishing company)!

So I want to reassure everyone that I have an agreement with DevWebPro that they can republish any of my blog posts that they find interesting - they only publish a fraction of what I write. Here's my author archive with selected blog post re-prints. As you'll notice (I hope) the "comments" link at the bottom of each post on their site links directly to my blog so any comments are always on my blog, not their site (yes, I know they have their own comments tab too).

They choose which blog entries to syndicate, they choose the categories, they choose the title, I get links back to my site on every entry.

My first FW/1 presentation will be on February 4th at 6pm Eastern on Charlie Arehart's excellent Online ColdFusion Meetup User Group.

ColdFusion has always been about simplicity and "getting stuff done". I created Framework One (FW/1) in that same spirit: with just one file and some simple conventions, you won't even notice you're using it! If the learning curve, code bloat and XML have put you off other frameworks, find out why developers are saying "FW/1 is perfect" and how you can use it to just focus on your code, be productive and stop worrying about "the framework".

Register this week to save $100 on this year's cf.Objective()!

Adobe will showcase ColdFusion 9 at cf.Objective() 2010 with six topics. The schedule has been updated with two Adobe topics each day and they are listed on the session page as well. We believe Terry Ryan will be handling most of the Adobe talks but we'll be confirming that as soon as we know for sure!

Now that Adobe's talks are finalized, we'll be picking two more community submissions from our list and adding those. If you submitted a talk and wondered why you haven't received either an acceptance letter or a rejection, now you know. We hope to let everyone know within the next week!

We're also ready to accept BOF suggestions - I'll make a separate blog post about that in the next few days.

Want to win a ticket to CFUnited this year?

Help tell the CFUnited team about the "state of the union" in the CF world and a random submission will win a $999-value ticket to attend the conference at the wonderful Lansdowne resort at the end of July!

Read their blog post for more details and the link to the survey.

Another incentive for completing the survey is seeing the results! As I write this, about 60 people have completed the survey and the results so far already make interesting reading...

Since I spent quite a bit of time wrestling with this over the last week, I figured this blog post may help others. First off, a caveat: I'm running the latest version of ColdBox 3.0.0 from SVN which is "almost" Beta 4 and the details of error handling have changed a little over the last few Betas (for the better).

ColdBox provides a number of ways to handle different types of errors. I'll cover the following options:

• onMissingAction
• onInvalidEvent
• ExceptionHandler
• onException
• MissingTemplateHandler

[More]

I'm on the advisory board for CFUnited and I'm track chair for content that relates to frameworks and OO development. We're reviewing submissions right now and, although overall there's a lot of topics submitted, I'm surprised at how few we have in the OO and frameworks areas.

Mach-II and Model-Glue are well represented in the frameworks area but there's only been one ColdBox submission (and it wasn't from Luis!) and no Fusebox or cfWheels submissions. There's a couple for FW/1 (thank you!), a couple for ColdSpring, one for LightFront and a few general ones. So please feel free to help round that out by submitting framework topics!

The OO development pickings were even slimmer - just six submissions so far! C'mon speakers, you can do better than that! Please submit some more OO development topics!

Here's a list of confirmed and potential Framework One presentations in date order:

• January 12th - NYCFUG - Javier Julio
• February 4th - CFMeetup - Sean Corfield - to be confirmed
• February 17th - BACFUG - Sean Corfield
• April 22-24 - cf.Objective() - Sean Corfield

The following presentations have been submitted but not yet confirmed:

• May 6-7 - webDU - AJ Mercer
• July 28-31 - CFUnited - Sean Corfield

After speaking to Dee Sadler, I'll also be submitting a different version of the presentation to:

• June 19-20 - D2WC

This is a Designer/Developer Workflow Conference and FW/1 is ideal for folks who want to build maintainable applications without having to learn a whole bunch of framework stuff just to get basic tasks done.

Once I find out more details about Scotch on the Rocks 2010, I'll submit a FW/1 talk there as well.

The following two talks of mine were accepted for cf.Objective() 2010:

FW/1 - The Invisible Framework

ColdFusion has always been about simplicity and "getting stuff done". I created Framework One (FW/1) in that same spirit: with just one file and some simple conventions, you won't even notice you're using it! If the learning curve, code bloat and XML have put you off other frameworks, find out why developers are saying "FW/1 is perfect" and how you can use it to just focus on your code, be productive and stop worrying about "the framework".

ColdFusion and the Open Source landscape

Once upon a time, if you wanted to develop applications in ColdFusion, you had to pay for any third party tools you needed - and you rarely got the source code. Things have changed! These days there are free and open source options right across the board to help you get your job done faster, cheaper and with more confidence. Find out how the burgeoning open source community can help you - and, perhaps, how you can help the open source community in return!

cf.Objective() 2010 is April 22-24 in Minneapolis, MN. Registration is open and the early bird ends January 29th.

There are six pre-conference classes this year!

The Content Advisory Board have finalized all the sessions for cf.Objective() 2010 and the accept / reject emails should start going out today to folks who submitted proposed talks!

We have a draft schedule prepared already so as soon as the accept / reject letters are in the mail, we'll make a formal announcement and start updating the website so everyone can see what great content the conference is offering.

Registration is already open and there is a broad selection of one-day and two-day pre-conference classes available this year!

Read all about it: FW/1 1.0 released for 2010!

As that blog entry says, thank you to everyone who has contributed to the creation of Framework One!

Here's to a lot more FW/1 applications in 2010 - and coverage at user groups and conferences!

I've said several times that I won't declare a 1.0 release for FW/1 (Framework One) until I had completed the Reference Manual. Well, the Reference Manual is complete now! It's kinda bigger than I anticipated but it documents every method in FW/1, both public and private, as well as explaining the API available to controllers, services, views and layouts. It also explains all the request scope variables used by the framework and provides quite a bit of detail on how FW/1 can take advantage of a bean factory.

I'll be making one or two additional tweaks tonight and then declaring a 1.0 release for the New Year!

Coming soon: two new documentation sections covering how to design applications (some general MVC and OOP guidelines, as well as some FW/1 specifics) and how to migrate applications to FW/1 (both from legacy, procedural code and from other frameworks).

A few weeks ago, I blogged about a fix for running Selenium with ant on Snow Leopard and several people have asked me to blog about the basic setup for which that fix applies since it is of much broader interest to developers... Yes, good point!

A bit of background first. I'm working on a large ColdBox project and one of the first things I did when I joined the project was to start creating some unit tests and integration tests. ColdBox has integration with MXUnit so you can fairly easily write unit tests for parts of your model and integration tests for your event handlers. Over time we've built a suite of over 100 MXUnit-based tests. If I had my way, we'd have a lot more by now but test-infecting your colleagues isn't always easy!

[More]

One of the new features in Adobe's ColdFusion 9 release that has excited a lot of developers is the broad range of enhancements to CFML's "other" language: CFSCRIPT.

In the past, I've been very disparaging about CFSCRIPT and I've gone so far as to say in several public - and private - forums that I felt CFSCRIPT should be deprecated and no further effort spent on it. It was always a bit half-baked with weird restrictions and lots of important features missing. It was annoying to use, because you often had to switch back to CFML's tags to get things done. With increased use of CFCs, the restrictions in CFSCRIPT made it even more painful to use because you could not specify function arguments easily in CFSCRIPT - no types, no defaults - and you couldn't express a function's access or return type.

[More]

Today I needed to update a custom tag we use to display form fields in a ColdBox app to treat the labels as i18n resource keys. Normally in a view you can just call getResource(key) and get back the translated value based on the current locale. Simple. Part of what makes ColdBox great for international apps!

However, you can't call getResource() inside a custom tag called from a view. You might think you can just do caller.getResource(key) but that fails with an exception that the variable controller is not defined. That's because your views run in the context of a CFC and the custom tag has its own context.

I initially came up with a slightly complicated way to pass things to the custom tag but I ended up having to make getResource() public in ColdBox's FrameworkSuperType.cfc. Not ideal. It worked but it was clearly a hack.

I complained to Luis about how hard this seemed to be and he sent me the following code snippet to use in a custom tag:

Remember that you're in the context of a CFC in your view? Well, getResource() is in the variables scope and it, in turn, references controller - which is in the variables scope of the view... or rather the context that the view is executed in. So by setting variables.controller in the custom tag, the call to caller.getResource() finds it and runs properly.

It's still a bit of a hack in my opinion but it's slightly more elegant than what I was trying to do so thank you Luis.

I'm posting it here so a) I can find it again in future and b) others may benefit from this.

David Tannersyn commented on my blog post about MFG.com taking three years to overhaul their web site. He's interested in a balanced argument as to why anyone would choose CFML over Java in this day and age.

Here's David's comment, with my answers interspersed.

I spotted your comment on the Tech Crunch, MFG.com article (among many other CF advocates), found your blog, and had a look around.

The TechCrunch article received a lot of commentary from CFers, much of which bordered on fanboi-ism - which we as a community do tend to slip into because of our passion for CFML. Some of the comments were downright insulting (to TechCrunch and to MFG.com) which might be a whole bunch of fun but doesn't do our image much good when viewed from outside our community. Given some of the heat in the comments, I'm glad David still took the time to come here and ask questions - many folks reading those comments probably just wrote us off!

[More]

This cropped up on the TDD mailing list and it made me smile so I wanted to share it along with some commentary. A fairly common request from folks in the CF community is for "static" methods (and data members) to be added to CFML. Folks look at Java, think it's a cool concept, and want it in CFML as well. I generally pop up and say it's a bad idea and that Java only has static because it doesn't have any concept of a global application scope (which CFML does, of course).

[More]

A few people have asked on Twitter and via email what is happening with submissions that have been sent in to Jim and myself. We're a bit behind. We hoped to have reviewed all the submissions last week and to have been notifying everyone this week about accepted and rejected sessions. Sorry!

We're actually about two weeks behind (which is just as well for a few speakers that are still submitting their sessions!). We've had over a hundred submissions so far and we will only be able to accept about half of them. There are some fascinating topics being submitted - in addition to the great topics suggested by the Content Advisory Board for the first round of invited speakers. We've also had multiple submissions from a number of speakers (up to six submissions from a single person!) which helps us a lot because we have a fixed limit on the number of speakers we can accept (for budgetary reasons).

We should be able to get through the reviews next week and then we'll be notifying speakers the week after (the holiday week). We're hoping to have a list of sessions posted by year end and a rough schedule posted the week after.

Registration should be open next week for those who want to get cf.Objective() into this year's budget without waiting for a published schedule.

About two weeks ago, Hal Helms blogged that he is leaving ColdFusion for Ruby on Rails. Naturally it stirred a lot of the traditional "is ColdFusion dead?" worrying from the community, so much so that Hal posted a follow-up on ColdFusion's death which suggests we focus on the value of applications, rather than any specific technology.

Hal's been a father figure for a lot of CFers. His podcasts and blog posts have always been good listening / reading, with a lot of thought-provoking content. He was one of the early evangelists for OO in ColdFusion although more recently he's pulled back from this position and said several times that he feels certain "gurus" are pushing OO too hard and spreading misinformation (although he wouldn't name any names, which kinda created more heat than light and left a general sense of FUD around OO in some parts of the community - like we needed more of that!).

Hal listed half a dozen reasons for his shift from ColdFusion to Ruby on Rails and I'd like to talk more about those reasons in this blog post.

[More]

I'm pleased to announce that Ryan Cogswell has joined the Framework One team as a committer! Ryan has been providing excellent feedback on the framework for quite a while and always provides suggested code changes with his ideas. I've been incorporating almost everything that he has raised so I felt it was time to provide him with full Subversion access and become a full-fledged member of the development team.

Ryan's recent additions to FW/1 include a number of enhancements that make the framework more robust and more flexible, especially around error situations or accidental misuse of certain framework features - which all help developers be more successful with FW/1.

The latest enhancement from Ryan is the ability to string together multiple FW/1 applications as "subsystems" so that URLs can take the form app1:section.item and app2:section.item, allowing for modular construction of large, complex applications. New modules can just be dropped in alongside existing modules and seamlessly integrated! Nice work Ryan - thank you!

As the FW/1 mailing list has grown to nearly 80 members since I launched the project in late July and several people have sites in production based on FW/1, I'm going to start blogging more here as I feel it is now realistic to start promoting FW/1 as a serious option for CF developers at large who are looking for a framework that provides structure without getting in the way.

I'll be submitting talks to cf.Objective() 2010 and CFUnited 2010 that will introduce FW/1 to a larger audience (if the talks are accepted, of course)!

Updated with the PDF to download to make the process easier!

---

cf.Objective() 2010 is ramping up and is ready for the public call for speakers and topics! We have the same broad tracks as last year:

• Architecture & Design in Software
• RIA: Flex/Ajax/AIR
• Process & Methodology
• Integration & Tools

If you're interested in speaking, download the speaker request form (PDF, 152KB), fill it out and then send it to Jim Louis per the instructions in the form. The PDF has all the delivery dates, speaker consent agreement and so on.

Topics must be submitted by November 30th! You have about two weeks.

Some background on the cf.Objective() selection process...

As I previously blogged, we have a twelve person content advisory board this year who have already come up with suggested topics for about 80% of the schedule and invitations have gone out to an initial list of speakers (usually two or three per topic). Many of those speakers have already replied (they also have until November 30th) and we're starting to sift through their submissions to pick the best one for each topic. The public CFP will help us fill the remaining 20% of the schedule. This process us ensures we have a well-rounded set of topics as well as letting us get at least part of our schedule organized and posted before the end of the year to help folks decide to register with their company's year end budget!

I'm working on a Railo project that is using some Scala code for part of the system and I'm using Ant to drive the build process. The Scala website has a lot of tools and documentation and you can read about compiling Scala with Ant for the basics of how to get started.

What they don't cover there is what is needed to bundle up that compiled Scala code and put it somewhere that Railo can get at.

Here's the Ant task I use to create and deploy a JAR:

${www} defines my web root and ${scala.home} defines where Scala is installed on my system.

Read on for more details of the build-scala and docs-scala tasks...

[More]

Another note to self. I love TextMate! It's my primary code editor for most work these days (on Mac OS X). It's lightweight and extensible and there are lots of bundles available for it.

Rob Rohan has created TextMate bundles for ColdFusion, Railo and BlueDragon - I use the Railo one day-in, day-out and I'm very happy with the syntax highlighting and shortcuts it provides.

I've also started doing some Scala work recently and there is a pretty good TextMate bundle for Scala as well.

And of course a bundle for Git - which is also self-updating (from git)!

Although this blog is often running on a bleeding edge "dev" release of Railo, I want to draw your attention to this version as it is a "preview" release, in preparation for our upcoming 3.1.2 public release.

If you're comfortable running pre-release software, please consider updating to 3.1.1.017 and helping us test this prior to the public release.

You can read more about the 3.1.1.017 preview release on the Railo blog.

I'm posting this as a reminder to myself since I've had to do this twice in the last few weeks and have to Google it each time...

To install TrueType Fonts on Linux so that Java can access them ought to be as simple as copying them to $JAVA_HOME/lib/fonts/ but it isn't. You (also) have to go through the following process to make them valid system fonts:

Installing fonts on Linux

I don't think the xfs restart is needed (since both of the servers I've installed fonts on lately have not had xfs running in the first place).

This process was required to make the fonts visible to the Alagad Image Component (which is now free open source!). Your mileage may vary of course.

TechCrunch ran a story yesterday about MFG.com's site overhaul. The new site uses Java and took three years for their team to complete, during which time the team felt "hand-cuffed" and the "great ideas" the company had couldn't be executed.

To me, that whole story sounds like an expensive failure.

Of course, the fact that it was a ColdFusion to Java transition has drawn a lot of comments from the CF community but most of those comments focus on the CF side of things and the suspicion that MFG.com didn't do its research (I personally suspect they got hooked in by an "enterprise" consulting group who started them down the Java tracks).

Whilst we can all sing the praises of CFML and criticize MFG.com for many things, I think we all need to look at the business aspects of a three year project to relaunch a web site in this fast-paced world. Yes, I'm sure it was a massive project and involved a lot of integration work but even so, macromedia.com was completely rebuilt from the ground up in less than that - and Macromedia's complete ERP replacement project (with 38 integration points!) was also completed in substantially less than three years...

The Content Advisory Board (twelve of last year's speakers) have just finished their initial selection of topics and potential speakers for the four tracks at cf.Objective() 2010. Best Meetings, the cf.Objective() conference planner, will be sending out invites shortly, asking a variety of speakers to submit on topics that we've picked. Since this all happens behind the scenes, I thought it would be worth a blog post to explain the process.

The CAB start by approving the tracks (we'll have four in 2010, very similar to the 2009 tracks) and then pick about a dozen topics they think 'fit' in each track. Some of these topics are popular staples, some are deliberately bleeding edge and / or very advanced, in keeping with the conference's reputation.

Next, the CAB pick up to three speakers for each topic so that we get a chance to see multiple submissions on each topic and can pick what we think sounds like the best content for the attendees. Some speakers get multiple topic invites, some get only one. An invite is not a guarantee that you'll be picked but it gives you 'first shot' at slots on the schedule (indeed, about half the submissions are rejected precisely because we invite multiple speakers to submit on each topic!). Our goal is to fill about 80% of the schedule this way.

Once we have the initial responses in, we'll open a public Call For Papers for general submissions to fill most of the remaining 20% (the platinum sponsor gets four slots plus a keynote).

I think the CAB have done a great job this year and we have some great topics lined up. As soon as we can confirm speaker submissions, I'll post a list.

In the meantime, here's the CAB volunteers:

• Architecture & Design in Software
  • Brian Kotek
  • Brian Meloche
  • Matt Woodward
• RIA: Flex / Ajax / AIR
  • Laura Arguello
  • John Mason
  • Dan Wilson
• Process & Methodology (including Frameworks)
  • Mark Drew
  • Adam Haskell
  • Kurt Wiersma
• Tools & Integration
  • Jeff Coughlin
  • Peter Farrell
  • Bill Shelton

Thank you!

After the success of CFinNC, I wanted to remind people about BFusion/BFlex which is happening this weekend (Saturday 24th & Sunday 25th) in Bloomington, IN.

Saturday is ColdFusion day, Sunday is Flex day. Each day is just $10 and offers a choice of three all-day training courses or three full tracks of sessions (two intermediate and one advanced)! You can still register here for the conference!

More information about the content each day:

BFusion is a full day of hands-on ColdFusion training. It features a true beginners track, a beginners track for programmers new to ColdFusion, an intermediate track on framework-based development, and other hands-on sessions for intermediate and advanced developers.

BFlex is a full day of hands-on Flash Platform development with Flex, AIR, Catalyst, and Flash Builder. It also features beginner and true beginner tracks, as well as hands-on sessions for intermediate and advanced developers. New this year is a track for designers looking to use Adobe Flash Catalyst for developing Rich Internet Applications.

Check the web site for hotel availability if you're not local!

Now that I'm back from CFinNC and (almost) caught up on lost sleep, I wanted to share my thoughts about this event (and the trend it represents).

First off, huge kudos and thanx to Dan Wilson, Jim Priest and the entire TACFUG crew who put on this event! It was well organized (especially for a first attempt) and I'd rate the content - and the networking - right up there with some of the best ColdFusion conferences I've attended. The fact that it was free did not mean that quality suffered at all - well done to all those involved!

After a smooth and well-staffed registration process, Adam Lehman presented his opening "not a keynote" talk, pointing out that he was technically on vacation and it was a bit odd doing a keynote-style talk now that ColdFusion 9 has actually been released! He covered a lot of ground in a nice, relaxed style that went over well with the crowd (which included quite a few folks for whom this was all news anyway).

On day two, Joe Rinehart opened with an "inspirational" keynote-style piece based loosely on his CFUnited keynote. He explained why he'd fallen in love with ColdFusion and then drifted away and how he'd recently fallen in love all over again, this time with the community and what they'd shown ColdFusion is capable of. It was a good, upbeat talk that also went over well with the crowd.

[More]

This morning I presented ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape (PDF, 544k) at the awesome CFinNC conference. The feedback has been good so far so I wanted to get the slides online quickly for everyone to download / read.

The talk covers several aspects of open source development in ColdFusion and gives some insights into the For ColdFusion Foundation (4CFF).

A question just came in from a prospective Railo user: "What databases does Railo support?"

I answered it in email directly to that user but figured it was worth a blog post so others can easily see the full list:

• DB2
• Firebird
• H2 Database Engine
• HSQLDB (Hypersonic SQL DB)
• MSSQL - Microsoft SQL Server (Vendor Microsoft)
• MSSQL - Microsoft SQL Server (Vendor jTDS)
• MySQL
• JDBC-ODBC Bridge (for Access,MSSQL)
• Oracle
• Other - JDBC Driver
• PostgreSQL
• Sybase

Of course, since you can configure any JDBC driver directly (under the "Other" option), you can use Railo with any database for which you can get a JDBC driver but most people are interested in the default, out-of-the-box list.

We'll be adding support for Apache Derby in a future release.

Since I promised to keep most news about my lightweight, convention-based MVC framework, FW/1 on the RIAForge project blog, this is just a quick to say it's had a few updates and is currently at build 0.6.3. Recent updates have mostly been bug fixes as more and more people start using the framework and some FW/1 sites are now in production which of course makes me very happy!

I'm planning to complete the Reference Manual soon and make another pass over the Developer's Guide and examples. I hope to declare a stable 1.0 release fairly soon!

One of the common complaints I hear about ColdFusion's popularity (or perceived lack thereof) is that we don't have any of the 'killer' open source applications that make PHP (or insert language of choice) so popular.

If you look around at great open source applications (MediaWiki, Drupal, Wordpress, Apache, OpenOffice, Linux, Firefox etc), they all have a few things in common:

• A dedicated team of developers - and documentation authors and testers and so on
• An organization that helps with project logistics, community management, marketing and so on
• Financial support of some form - usually in terms of sponsorship for infrastructure, sometimes in terms of actually paying people to work on the project

In the CF community, we have none of these. A handful of open source projects have a small team of developers, rather than being just a lone developer. Some projects have infrastructure (e.g., Trac/SVN) donated by a company - and that includes RIAForge and any of the source code hosting companies that offer free plans for open source projects.

What if an organization existed to help open source CFML projects grow? What if that organization could offer infrastructure, assistance with project logistics and marketing, and could help marshal volunteers to encourage better documentation and testing and so on?

That's the idea behind the For ColdFusion Foundation. 4CFF was announced at CFUnited as a incorporated, non-profit organization with a board of directors in place and a set of bylaws based on the Apache Foundation. The goal of 4CFF is:

The For ColdFusion Foundation (4CFF) is a non-profit dedicated to helping the ColdFusion Community at-large through fostering a collaborative environment for ColdFusion Free Open-Source Software Projects and their Developer Communities, so that we all may enjoy great software.

Since CFUnited, 4CFF has been working on logistics and is close to announcing the first two open source projects that will be moving under the 4CFF umbrella. It's early days for the foundation but you can read more about the concepts behind it and the people involved on the 4CFF website and you can follow announcements on Twitter. You can join the foundation's free membership mailing list or send your thoughts to the foundation, via the 4CFF website.

If you're at MAX, quite a few of the board will be there and you can ask your questions in person. Look for the Space Chimps!

I've received some questions about the Railo Enterprise Bundle so I figured it would be good to blog an answer for everyone.

The questions are usually couched in terms of "what's in the enterprise version of Railo that isn't in the free version?" and, given Adobe's and New Atlanta's tiered editions and pricing, it's not too surprising that people think the Railo Enterprise Bundle is a different "edition" of the Railo server that costs money (and has more features).

Perhaps we've chosen a misleading name for it but the bundle is pretty much exactly that: a collection of stuff you can buy, but at a reduced price. So what do you get in the bundle?

• FusionReactor Enterprise Server Monitor
• FusionDebug Interactive Step Debugger
• All the current Railo commercial extensions

In addition, you get one year's Silver support from Railo and a year's maintenance on FusionReactor and FusionDebug. And you save money over buying all the components separately.

Let's dig into the bundle more deeply...

[More]

I Twittered a while back that I'd decided to go to MAX after all, on an exhibit hall pass for just $200. I didn't go into much detail but now that it's beginning to be promoted on Twitter - by Liz Frederick, now of Adobe, and others - I figured it was worth a blog post.

The $200 exhibit hall pass gets you into a lot more things than you might realize. You get access to the exhibit hall (duh!) which means you get access to the Unconferences as well - which is pretty good value on its own. In addition, you get access to:

• The sponsor welcome reception (Monday evening)
• The Adobe Keynotes (Monday and Tuesday)
• The Birds of a Feather sessions (Mon/Tue/Wed lunchtimes)

Frankly, $200 for the ColdFusion Unconference alone was the killer for me and what made my decision to attend. Access to the keynotes and BOFs is gravy - and very welcome!

I think Adobe have made a very smart decision making this option available, especially with the economy the way it is. Hopefully a lot of CFers - especially local to LA - will be tempted by this ticket and take advantage of what is really very good value!

As you may have heard, registration has been open for CFUnited 2010 has already been open for a while and the super early bird price is an incredible bargain of just $499!. That early bird price must end this Friday, September 25th so hurry up and register to take advantage of this special low, low price!

Why so early? By getting a block of early registrations, Stellr will be able to secure a better deal for the conference because they have a longer lead time on venues and facilities.

So help Stellr and save yourself some money - register this week for CFUnited 2010!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I started writing up my experience of CFUnited 2009 but it turned into a giant essay as I was going into a lot more detail than I'm sure anyone would really care about. So here's the condensed version:

CFunited 2009 was awesome!

OK, you probably want a bit more detail than that so read on.

[More]

It's a month since CFUnited and I haven't yet posted my thoughts on the conference. I started writing but it turned into an essay and I'm not sure it's worth posting in its entirety, especially since many others have posted their reviews (mostly all glowing - and rightly so!). I will post a brief review of the conference soon - it's on my Things to-do list and everything on that list gets done (eventually).

The other overdue blog post on my Things to-do list covers what it was like to be a sponsor at CFUnited. A first for me (sort of). I've been attending (and speaking) at CFUnited since it was CFUN'04 (when I covered the use of Mach-II at Macromedia). Sure, Macromedia and Adobe have been regular sponsors but that is the ColdFusion product team and I was going independently as part of another team - the joys of a big company - so I never felt I was a sponsor (I never worked for the ColdFusion product team - even tho' a lot of people seem to think I did!). This year - 2009 - Railo was a silver sponsor of CFUnited and so I spent quite a bit of time around the Railo "booth" talking to attendees.

[More]

Registration for CFinNC is now open!

I'm looking forward to CFinNC. I think it's great to see yet another ColdFusion event on this year's calendar, especially since this one is free to attend! Hopefully it will attract some new developers to CFML as well at that price.

Here's more information about the conference:

CFinNC is a free web development conference held in Raleigh, North Carolina during the weekend of October 17th and 18th with an International line-up of speakers presenting on timely and relevant topics on web development. Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors and the creativity of the planning committee, registration for the event will be free and includes entry to the weekend event and to all presentations.

In order to keep the event free we have removed some hard costs and some benefits you normally get from paid-registration events.

Please be aware of the following:

1) You are responsible for paying for lunch for both days. We have enlisted the services of a local caterer and will be providing lunch each day for $10/day. This includes a sandwich, chips and drink. Please bring cash the day of the event! We will not be able to process credit cards!

2) Limited Edition, Collectible CFinNC conference t-shirts will be available for purchase for $15 with any proceeds going to offset costs and possibly sponsor a planning committee dinner (if we sell them all).

Lunch and shirt purchase is completely optional. You may indicate if you would like to purchase lunch and/or a t-shirt on the registration form.

For more information, please check the CFinNC website at: http://www.cfinnc.com.

The recording of my recent Living in the Cloud presentation to BACFUG is now available (and posted on Charlie Arehart's UGTV). Enjoy!

This Friday, at noon Eastern, I'll be on the CFPanel show, created by Dan Vega and Todd Sharp. Myself, Ray Camden and Adam Lehman will be talking about how ColdFusion as a language is moving forward. All three of us are members of the CFML Advisory Committee. Two of us are on the board of 4CFF, the new non-profit corporation formed to promote the CF community and Open Source projects. Two of us represent CFML engine vendors. It should be an interesting and lively debate!

I just received confirmation that two of my submissions have been accepted for CFinNC, the ColdFusion, Flex, AIR conference in North Carolina in October. I think this will be a great event for the "East Coast Silicon Valley" and I'm really looking forward to speaking there. Here are the two sessions I'll be giving:

Design Patterns in ColdFusion Come find out what design patterns are really about and how they can make your life easier. (You're probably already using some design patterns, although you may not know it.) For this session, we have distilled decades of software engineering experience into a well-documented set of blueprints that can be applied to common problems to ensure clean, maintainable code.

This will be an updated version of the presentation originally created for the "Inspire" track at MAX 2007.

ColdFusion and the Open Source landscape

Once upon a time, if you wanted to develop applications in ColdFusion, you had to pay for any third party tools you needed - and you rarely got the source code. Things have changed! These days there are free and open source options right across the board to help you get your job done faster, cheaper and with more confidence. Find out how the burgeoning open source community can help you - and, perhaps, how you can help the open source community in return!

This is a brand new talk that looks at the huge surge in Open Source projects and tools surrounding our community, including 4CFF, RIAForge and other resources.

This week - tomorrow in fact - I'll be giving a re-run of my CFUnited talk "Living in the Cloud" at BACFUG. You can read about the talk - and RSVP! - on BACFUG's Adobe Groups website.

See you there!

In all the activity of CFUnited, I forgot to post that Railo 3.1 Final was officially released (at CFUnited). It's build 3.1.1.000 and it's available for download right now - or you can easily upgrade your existing Railo 3.1.0.xxx Beta server by selecting Services > Update in the Server Administrator (as shown in these instructions on upgrading Railo on our community site).

For folks who've been reluctant to run pre-release software on a production server, this is the build you've been waiting for :)

I was so busy as CFUnited I didn't get around to upgrading my blog or local development server until five minutes ago. As usual, the update was fast and smooth!

Where? On SlideSix of course! Created by Todd Sharp (using ColdFusion and Flex) and lauded by everyone who uses it, SlideSix was featured in Joe Rinehart's day two keynote as an inspirational example to all CFML developers about what is possible.

So, here's my Living in the Cloud presentation on SlideSix.

So it's Sunday and I'm back home after an intense four days in the Washington DC area at CFUnited 2009. Hard to believe it's over and I'm still digesting the presentations and the information I picked up during the (excellent) networking opportunities. If you missed it this year, do whatever you can to attend next year (especially if it returns to this fabulous location).

I'll be collecting my thoughts later today and writing up a (very long) blog entry about my experiences at the conference.

In the meantime, thank you speakers for the great sessions, thank you attendees for all those discussions in hallways - and the bar! - and thank you especially Liz, Nafisa and the rest of the Stellr team for an awesome event!

Since several people have asked, I get into CFUnited on Wednesday morning, hopefully in time for the keynote. I got a good deal on a red eye from San Francisco - it's non-stop and I hate burning daylight traveling.

I've already posted my intended session schedule (PDF) so you can track me down easily although I do have a couple of client meetings to fit in and time on the Railo booth.

Yes, Railo are sponsoring CFUnited and we'll be there at the Railo booth with schwag to give away, a sign-up sheet for folks interested in our consulting services and, of course, Gert, Mark, Peter and myself to answer all your questions about the Railo server as well.

I'm giving my Living in the Cloud presentation on Wednesday afternoon (last session before dinner) and again on Saturday (last session of the conference). I'm also hosting a CFML Advisory Committee BoF on Wednesday night where you can hear what we've been up to over the last year since the committee was formed and hear about our plans for the future.

There are going to be some interesting announcements at CFUnited that will affect lots of CF developers.

See you Wednesday!

I'm working on a ColdBox project right now for a client and, as some may have gathered from my occasional tweets, I've set up Hudson as a Continuous Integration server that pulls the latest code from git, restarts the test server instance, reloads the test database and automatically runs the MXUnit-based test suite, whenever someone commits files to the main git repository.

We have unit tests for individual components and we have integration tests for the ColdBox event handlers. Luis has provided pretty good documentation for writing such tests but one of the challenges I faced in getting some of the integration tests working was that they redirected to a new event!

[More]

Fusebox is the oldest application framework for CFML and it's gone through a number of dramatic changes over the years. Initially it was more of a methodology than a framework and it was really only with Fusebox 3 that it solidified into a full set of core files and what we traditionally think of as a "framework" these days.

Fusebox 4 was a complete rewrite and not backward compatible. Fusebox 4.1 added some interesting new features and then Fusebox 4.2 (previewed in 2005) never appeared. It was a bit of a dark period for Fusebox with no progress being made and some awkward politics behind the scenes.

In 2006, I was asked to take over the project and I insisted that backward compatibility be maintained, despite another full rewrite. The result was Fusebox 5, but not without yet more political drama, mostly behind the scenes. In order to move forward, Fusebox shifted out of the control of The Fusebox Corporation and under TeraTech's benevolent guidance. I almost had to fork the project to make that happen.

Initially, TeraTech were very proactive and they organized a large survey of developers to find out what they wanted from the framework as well as supervising a complete overhaul of the website. The result of the survey was Fusebox 5.5 - and the no-XML option. The website was a huge improvement but support dwindled before the documentation could be fully overhauled.

I made a minor point release and began planning Fusebox 5.6. I wasn't using Fusebox in any of my projects, however, which made it difficult to push ahead solo, without input and guidance from the project owner, TeraTech. The community were happy with the framework and only a few enhancement requests were coming in.

Adam Haskell expressed interest in becoming more involved so I handed over the role of lead developer to him and he settled in, making small enhancements and starting to plan for the future. Like me, he found little input or guidance from TeraTech and, because of their disinterest, also found it hard to get traction on any real change.

Well, just as I almost forked Fusebox three years ago to get Fusebox 5 released and the framework moving forward, Adam is now on the brink of forking Fusebox to get things moving forward again. When this issue cropped up in 2006, lots of discussions led to the previous project owners agreeing to hand off the project to a new team. Adam has made the same request of TeraTech. I hope they take the same path and allow the framework to move on. Otherwise, what we know as Fusebox today will remain stagnant and the code will resurface under a new name and development will continue anyway, leaving TeraTech with an outdated legacy. That's one of the great things about open source: you can never close it down and you can never lock people into a single vendor.

If you have any opinions on the future of Fusebox, feel free to comment here or on Adam's blog post - and feel free to talk to either of us at CFUnited next week.

I really enjoyed last night's EBCFUG meeting! Charlie Griefer laid out some discussion points for "Why Use a Framework?" and then everyone talked about the pros and cons in the context of each point. It was a great discussion with some really interesting experiences being shared. Charlie has posted the audio recording on his blog, so everyone can listen along.

He plans for future meetings to follow the same interactive / collaborative approach as the first two and it really is a nice change from the lecture format most of us are used to at CFUGs.

If you're a CF developer in the East Bay, you should join EBCFUG!

The East Bay CFUG meets tomorrow (Tuesday August 4th) in Pleasanton, CA. It's a roundtable discussion about why you would - or would not - use a framework so it could be a very lively and interesting session! See you there I hope?

See link for more details / RSVP.

I tweeted my schedule recently but figured I'd also post it here for folks to discover where to find me next week - OMG! It's next week!

So, here is my CFUnited schedule (PDF). I'm speaking on Wednesday (5:30pm) and Saturday (4:15pm) and I'm also hosting a BOF on Wednesday evening:

The CFML Advisory Committee - Happy First Birthday!

[More]

Some API updates and a new sample application (a port of LitePost), a downloadable build and more API updates have pushed the version number to 0.4! Read the project blog over at Framework One's RIAForge website for more details.

Ben Forta explains why ColdFusion Builder is based on Eclipse in a great blog post that examines the alternatives and the history of CFML editors.

I'm afraid I never liked HomeSite / ColdFusion Studio.

[More]

Adobe's sessions at CFUnited have been announced. In addition to the keynote, there are a dozen sessions on ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder!

Adam Lehman kicks off with a general "What's New" talk on Wednesday after lunch and Ryan Stewart will showcase what you can do with CF9/FX4 together. Thursday and Friday are the main events with five sessions on each day! Half a dozen of the ColdFusion engineering team will be over from Bangalore to speak about features they helped develop so you can get the information right from the horse's mouth! In addition, Terry Ryan and Adam will also be giving sessions on some of the new features. I think the highlights for me will be Manju Kiran's "Advanced ORM" on Thursday afternoon and Hemant's "Insider's Guide" on Friday afternoon but Adam's "Building Extensions with CFML" (for CFBuilder) and Hareni and Terry covering "Working w/MS Office, Sharepoint and Exchange", both on Friday morning, also look very interesting.

If you're new to Eclipse, Bhakti and Dipanwita's "Getting Start (Bring Your Laptop)" session on CFBuilder should be gold.

See the CFUnited blog post for more details.

Over the last few days I've been working on a new MVC application framework for ColdFusion. It's very lightweight and completely convention-based. Beyond this introduction, I won't be blogging about it here but you can read all about about on the project blog over at Framework One's RIAForge website.

That's where you'll also find the forums, wiki, source code repository and bug tracker. The blog also has a link to the new mailing list if you'd rather use that instead of the forums.

What is FW/1? Read the RIAForge project description and introductory blog post there.

Why create FW/1? Again, read the project blog on RIAForge!

Starting tomorrow (Wednesday), Railo are running a Twitter-based competition to win a ticket to this year's CFUnited conference. Read the Railo blog entry for the rules!

Brian Ghidinelli reprises his excellent cf.Objective() 2009 presentation for BACFUG tomorrow night (Wednesday July 15th).

See the BACFUG post on Adobe Groups for more details and an RSVP (login to RSVP).

Charlie Griefer, manager of the East Bay CFUG, kicked off the July meeting with his vision of what he hopes the EBCFUG will develop into to: an interactive group with a good social network. He hopes to see more meetings based on hands-on labs and a regular post-meeting social event that allows members to talk about issues and get feedback from the group.

For the July meeting, Charlie presented Balsamiq Mockups, a fascinating tool to enable collaboration with clients on user interface / user experience aspects of a project. After a brief slideshow and demo, Charlie turned it over to the members to explore the AIR desktop app and the online demo.

This was very valuable experience and much better than a regular "lecture".

If you want to get "hands-on" with ColdFusion and related technologies, this could be the user group for you!

I've talked about the CFML Advisory Committee before and explained that we're working on a specification for the ColdFusion Markup Language that we hope to release this year as CFML2009 and then review every two years.

CFML2009 is intended to be a specification of what the language should be by the end of this year. Ben Forta just posted about some CFML enhancements coming soon in ColdFusion 9 but he didn't mention that many of these will be embodied in the CFML2009 spec.

I figured it was worth looking at some of the items in his blog post through the lens of the Advisory Committee. Where these features are deemed "core" by the Advisory Committee, expect all CFML engines to provide them fairly quickly. Some features are supported already by one or more vendor, some are new to all three vendors.

[More]

Updated for build 3.1.0.020 and later!

---

As of today, you can easily build your very own version of Railo from the latest source code in Subversion! This blog post will take you through all the steps necessary to download, build and deploy a new copy of Railo for your own testing, experimentation and general edification.

[More]

After I posted my instructions for building Railo from the latest source in SVN, there were some appreciative tweets and success stories but Erik-Jan Jaquet asked can you explain to me WHY I would want that?

It's a very good question so here are some of my thoughts on why you might decide to build an open source project from source yourself...

[More]

I wanted to follow up on Part IV Appendix about SES URLs with Tomcat.

Tony Garcia mentioned it there in a comment and since then Jamie Krug mentioned it in a comment on the Railo blog:

Tomcat can do SES URLs, albeit with some limitations.

[More]

Michael Dinowitz poses a very interesting question over on Blog of Fusion: are there really ColdFusion jobs out there?

What he's mostly talking about are those open reqs that you keep seeing, month on month, that never seem to get filled, but he is also asking why well-qualified people have a hard time getting hired. He doesn't really answer his own question but he gives some good advice about applying for jobs...

[More]

A couple of months ago I wrote about the support and consulting services offered by Railo Technologies (US, UK, CH). As I've been talking to more people about CFML in general, I sometimes run into the belief that since Railo Technologies grew up around the Railo server, the only consulting we offer is specific to the Railo CFML engine. Whilst it's true that the annual support contracts we offer are specific to Railo, we have a great team that has had a lot of experience with CFML at large over the years and so we're able to help companies - and individuals - solve a pretty broad range of problems.

[More]

Charlie Griefer has found a new location for East Bay CFUG (in Pleasanton) so the group will be meeting in July to refocus and move forward. If you're an East Bay CFer, you should make sure you attend!

If you have any suggestions for things you'd like to see in the Railo server, you can suggest them on the Railo feedback forum as well as voting for existing suggestions!

October will be a treat for ColdFusion (and Flex) developers!

Adobe MAX happens in early October down in Los Angeles, then Dan Wilson and friends are organizing a North Carolina ColdFusion conference in mid-October followed by BFusion/BFlex organized by Bob Flynn and friends (I believe this will be a week after the NC conference).

Then you can have a month of down time before the next RIAdventure Cruise'n'Conference in December. This year organizer Joshua Cyr has teamed up with the 360 Conference team to make the event even bigger and better!

Luis Majano just announced ColdBox training the day before CFUnited. If you're going to CFUnited this year and you're interested in learning more about ColdBox from the creator of the framework, I can highly recommend this intense, one-day pre-conference training class!

I was privileged to sit in on parts of this course before cf.Objective() this year and was very impressed at the amount of material covered, the quality (and thickness!) of the handouts and the hands-on approach that Luis takes.

One of the nice aspects of the "Professional Open Source Sofware" business model is that you can be very flexible for your customers. The Railo server has a roadmap of core features and downloadable extensions - some free, some paid - but our roadmap can easily be influenced by our customers. Now that more developers are trying Railo every day, we're seeing more interest in certain features that were already on our roadmap but were either lower priority or scheduled some distance off in the future.

[More]

As I've been working on my Living in the Cloud talk for CFUnited (since I didn't have to complete it for Scotch on the Rocks), it occurred to me that this is a topic covering stuff I worked on in the middle of 2008 (Broadchoice Workspace, built for Amazon EC2 and S3) and the end of 2008 (migrating Broadchoice Workshop to Amazon EC2).

Conferences usually want topics submitted a long way in advance of the conference, even tho' drafts and the final version of the talk can be delivered just before the conference. CFUnited 2009's deadline for topic submissions was December 1st, 2008, eight months ahead of the conference. MAX 2009 opened its call for speakers on March 3rd 2009 and closed it in late April, six months ahead of the conference.

Conferences set deadlines far in advance so that they can offer a good roster of speakers and talks because that's what attracts attendees. I've been on the advisory for a number of conferences and getting a schedule out early is key in the battle to boost registration.

Our industry moves very fast. Something that's hot in the Fall may not be on anyone's radar today. Something that's hot today may be old, old news by the Fall. Conference committees have to guess what will be attractive, many months in advance - which is extremely hard! And yet, one of the biggest complaints we hear about conferences is when they have the same topics every year - which is a natural consequence of trying to fill the schedule so early: how many brand new topics can you think of off the top of your head?

How do you feel about conference schedules? Do you feel they manage to stay ahead of the curve? Do you think there's too much "safe" content? Do you have suggestions for how conference committees can balance the need to publish a schedule so folks will buy tickets against the desire to feature bleeding edge topics?

Do you think I'm too concerned about this - and that maybe there's no real issue here?

After the "Help the CFML Advisory Committee" thread got so long (145 comments at the time of writing this!), some folks asked for a summary.

I just posted a detailed summary with explanations to the committee mailing list. Here's an abbreviated summary:

• In first place with 18 votes was: introduce a set of objects!
• In second place with 11 votes: use pure function notation using body= and sql= to pass in strings to mail() and query() respectively.
• In third place with 9 votes: tagname(attributes) { writeOutput("string"); logic(); writeOutput("string"); }
• In fourth place, a new idea, with 6 votes: introduce E4X syntax to allow tags in script.
• In last place, my poor, unloved favorite, with just 4 votes: tag { }

Since we still need to handle custom tag invocation somehow, my recommendation to the committee is to look more deeply at the function notation, with a view to adding a form of cfimport that introduces a prefix/taglib so custom tags could be invoked as: which would be equivalent to: Without the body attribute, it would be a simple tag invocation like this: Thank you everyone for contributing to the thread!

I'll keep you posted on what the committee decides to do next on this tough issue.

Don't miss the ColdFusion 9 / Flash Builder 4 tour when it hits the Bay Area: Ben Forta, Adobe's Senior Technical Evangelist, will be the speaker at this cross-user group event!

Learn about Flex 4, Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builer), Flash Catalyst, ColdFusion 9 and Bolt!

Make sure you RSVP via the BACFUG website!

I'd like to extend a warm welcome and a big round of applause to Todd Rafferty who has just stepped up to become the (volunteer) Community Manager for Railo!

Todd has already started to pull together a couple of FAQs on the community site (getrailo.org) and monitors Twitter and mailing lists for questions about Railo so he can point people at the right resources.

Thank you Todd!

Last night I visited the Sacramento CFUG to talk about Railo. There was a pretty good turnout and a nice relaxed environment for the meeting with comfy chairs and plenty of pizza and sodas (thank you Clear Capital!). The audience was very interactive, asking lots of questions, which always makes presenting much more enjoyable when I'm free of the 50 minute constraint of conferences.

[More]

The Sacramento CFUG has invited me to talk about Railo on June 9th:

Railo - Free as in beer and free as in speech!

Railo's CFML engine is now a Free Open Source Software (FOSS) project under the JBoss Community umbrella. Sean will provide a history of the Railo project, show several of its unique features - and its compatibility - and talk about future plans. Come armed with questions so you can go home fired up with answers!

The group has provided me with a (long) list of questions they want answered so it should be an interesting evening. I don't know whether it will be broadcast / recorded (ask the UG manager, Seth Duffey).

Railo supports a scope that synchronizes across multiple servers: cluster scope. Just like server scope is accessible across multiple applications on the same server, cluster scope is accessible across multiple servers. This blog post looks at how to set it up and use it.

[More]

Marc Funaro kicked off quite a heated debate on his blog lately by raging against people pushing object-oriented programing/design and how his attempt to follow their advice nearly led to the collapse of his business. Marc was expressing a common frustration that many of us have heard from people who try to learn OO, especially from people with a long history of procedural programming and/or no computer science background.

I've left comments on a few of the blog posts but several people have asked me to go into a bit more depth about my thoughts on this issue (since I'm one of the people sometimes accused of "pushing" OO and insisting it's the "right" way to do things).

[More]

Alurium's Peter Amiri just announced 60-day free trial accounts that offer Railo with full Web Administrator capability, so you can see how Railo works for you without even needing to install it yourself!

Sounds good? Visit Alurium and click on the 60 Day Free Trial badge on the home page to sign up!

As just announced on the Railo blog, a new beta build is available. 3.1.0.015 includes a number of enhancements, bug fixes, performance improvements and compatibility improvements.

One of the really nice things about the way Railo patches work is that you can apply them automatically from within the Server Administrator and have your server restart without having to do anything more than click a button! I upgraded my site this morning from 3.1.0.012 to 3.1.0.015 and was very pleased with how easy it was!

I've almost recovered from this year's cf.Objective() so I wanted to get my thoughts on paper before the memory blurs too much. As usual, it was an excellent conference with top-quality sessions from top-quality speakers. It's the only conference that I would pay to attend - and would pay out of my own pocket if I had to. I learn plenty of new things at cf.Objective() every year and the networking is phenomenal because it's a relatively small, friendly conference (around 200 attendees this year).

[More]

Lately, the committee has been looking at proposals to extend CFSCRIPT so that components can be written entirely in CFSCRIPT instead of requiring tags. Adobe has been the main driver for the proposals but other committee members have been providing their share of ideas and suggestions when we get stuck (or don't like Adobe's proposals).

Right now, we have a pretty solid definition of how CFSCRIPT should work so that you can write entire components. Mostly it follows what you may have seen Adobe show off at conferences but Adobe is still making changes in response to feedback from the committee (and its own banks of prerelease testers, I'm sure) and some of Adobe's suggestions were considered vendor-specific by the committee.

But we're stuck on a couple of tags that we're really struggling to define in CFSCRIPT. We'd like you to help us make some decisions here!

[More]

I just posted the slides (as a PDF) and the code example (account.zip) under PRESOS and SOFTWARE on my blog. You'll need to download cfSpec from RIAforge to run the sample code.

With my recent change of employer, a change was necessary on the CFML Advisory Committee. I was previously a "community member" of the committee which was made up of:

• Adobe: 2 votes (Ben Forta, Adam Lehman)
• Open BlueDragon: 1 vote (Matt Woodward)
• Railo: 1 vote (Gert Franz)
• Community: 3 votes (Ray Camden, Rob Brooks-Bilson, me)

In order to retain the voting balance, I have taken over Gert's voting role, representing Railo, and so we needed a new community member.

After lots of discussion, the committee selected Peter J. Farrell and extended our invitation last night. I received an acceptance email from Peter this morning.

Welcome to the committee Peter!

Due to a session cancellation and several requests from the community, the Railo team will be hosting a Q & A BOF at cf.Objective() at 3pm (Friday) in the Nicollet C room.

This is all somewhat last minute so we're trying to get the word out. Gert Franz, Peter Bell and myself will be available to answer all your questions about Railo the CFML engine and Railo Technologies the consulting organization. Hope to see you there?