An Architect's View

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

Two FW/1 users ran into a problem with error handling where methods from the wrong subsystem could be called if an exception occurred. I considered this an important enough issue to provide hotfixes for previous releases. You can now download tagged releases for 1.0.1 and 1.1.1 which incorporate the error handling changes into the earlier releases (1.0, 1.1). I have to say, git made that very easy since I was able to create a hotfix-1.0.1 branch from the v1.0 tag, apply the changes, tag it as v1.0.1 and then apply those same fixes to the hotfix-1.1.1 branch (from the v1.1 tag) and tag that as v1.1.1 and also master (what will become 1.2).

Based on my experience with this, I'll probably move to adopt the git branching model described on Vincent Driessen's blog. That'll mean that the default download will become the stable branch (master) and there will be a new develop branch which represents the bleeding edge. Given that 1.2 is already in progress, I'll probably defer that change until 1.2 goes Gold on master.

The latest stable release of Framework One is now available for download from github! The previous stable release is still available on that page.

This release features a large number of enhancements suggested by the community including:

[Read more →]

[Read more →]

I just updated this site with the latest FW/1 build and the latest public BER Railo build. Mango powers this blog but FW/1 powers the rest of this site.

The last issue on the 1.1 roadmap was implemented (and documented) this evening so the lastest download from the FW/1 RIAForge site is 1.1RC1.

The final issue was generating SES-style URLs from buildURL() and redirect() calls, as well as allowing anchors in generated links. A new optional argument has been added to both methods - queryString - that allows you to specify additional URL variables, anchors and so on. Generation of SES URLs is automatic if an inbound link was in SES form. Otherwise you can force generation of SES URLs using the new generateSES framework setting.

See the updated documentation on the wiki for more details.

[Read more →]

Apress just released the Adobe ColdFusion Anthology - a 528 page collection of the best of Fusion Authority, edited and updated for the long-lived book format. I was one of the three technical reviewers (along with Mark Mandel and Brian Kotek) as well as a contributing author, so I'm personally very pleased to see this book out in the wild.

I have 3 chapters in the book:

• "Say What?" Handling Unknown Messages with onMissingMethod()
• Beans and DAOs and Gateways, Oh My!
• FW/1: The Invisible Framework

The latter was written recently for inclusion in the book. The other two are probably my favorites among the articles I've written for Fusion Authority over the years.

I'm biased of course, but I highly recommend this book - I hope you buy a copy and find it useful!

An alpha version of FW/1 1.1 can be downloaded from RIAForge (version 1.0.118). The wiki has been updated to reflect the new features. You can follow the progress in the Release 1.1 Roadmap document. I hope to have all of the 1.1 features in SVN by cf.Objective() and my talk will cover some of the updates.

Also at cf.Objective(), I will showcase the logos submitted in the "FW/1 Logo Contest" that is running on the mailing list at the moment and the audience will get to pick the winner!

This weekend has seen a complete migration of An Architect's View from a very old version of BlogCFC (3.5.2) with a custom Fusebox 4.1 skin to the latest Mango Blog (1.4.3) as well as a complete migration of all of the content of the non-blog portion of corfield.org (my personal stuff, my C++ stuff and a bunch of stuff about CFML, Fusebox and Mach-II) from Fusebox to FW/1. I've moved from a VPS on HostMySite to an "enterprise cloud server" at EdgeWebHosting and I think it's all gone pretty smoothly although it's been a lot of work.

Hopefully I haven't broken too many URLs - I spent quite a bit of time working on Apache RewriteRules to try to make sure old URLs still work - but it has given me the opportunity to streamline a lot of the files on the site (can you imagine how much cruft can build up in eight years of running a site?).

What's left? Just the "recommended reading" bookstore portion of my old site. I store the book details in an XML file and process them in a CFC as part of the old Fusebox app (converted from Mach-II before that and from PHP before that). It's late and I can't face it tonight. Then I need to build out a Mango skin that looks like my old site (and eventually re-skin the non-blog portion of the site).

The underpinnings of the site are Apache, Railo (3.1.2.010 at the time of writing), Tomcat (6.0.26 at the time of writing), Red Hat Linux, MySQL. I still have some fine-tuning to do but this is pretty much an out-of-the-box WAR-based install of Railo on Tomcat for this one site on the server. Over time I'll probably build out a home for FW/1 here under another domain, with examples and more documentation than is currently maintained on the RIAForge wiki. That's the plan anyway.

If you find any broken links, let me know (the Contact Me! link is in the right hand column, near the bottom).