An Architect's View

I'm very pleased to have been accepted as a speaker for Scotch on the Rocks 2011! Wow! What an incredible line up of speakers! It's going to be an awesome conference!

SOTR 2008 was incredible so I was very sorry to have missed SOTR 2009 - due to my wife breaking her ankle! Schedule and finances got in the way of me even considering SOTR 2010.

So what will I be speaking about?

To be honest, I don't know. Topics will be announced in about five or six weeks. I submitted three suggestions to the SOTR folks. I don't know what they'll pick.

But I want to open it up to everyone who'll be at SOTR 2011 - what would you like me to talk about? If there's a strong preference for a topic, even if it isn't one that I submitted, we'll see what we can do about accommodating your choice!

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

A rewrite and update of the ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial, this new book covers ColdFusion 9's important new features at a number of levels from language enhancements to ORM and integration with external information publishers and consumers.

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From the BACFUG website:

We are going to do something different in August. Instead having a presenter, we'll ask attendees to share their code, projects or pose problems which the group will work through together. Bring along your laptop so we can talk through the code. If you have concerns about not writing "perfect" code, don't let that stop you from attending. I KNOW my code isn't perfect and I'll be sharing my recent project. Peer review is one of the best ways to become a better programmer. The experienced members of the group are very supportive. Also, sharing your code is NOT required. Feel free to attend and learn from how others code.

AGENDA

• 6:30pm - 6:45pm meet and greet
• 6:45pm - 8:30pm - code share
• 8:30pm - raffle off some books, etc.

San Francisco, CA 94103 - USA

Wednesday, August 18 at 6:30 PM

Details: http://www.meetup.com/bacfug/calendar/13846021/

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 didn't get to many sessions this year but I thought the last CFUnited was great! Here's my review of the event.

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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.