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!

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!

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!

I've spent today working on a reasonably complex build.xml file, refactoring it to reduce duplication by using the ant-contrib foreach task so that similar targets can be reduced to loops over a list of properties (I'll blog on that later since it includes some fancy nested loops to run Selenium tests across multiple applications on a server).

I wanted a way to look at the structure of the ant file before I did open-heart surgery on it. Google led me to ant2dot and GraphViz (with a very nice version for Mac OS X and the iPhone).

It's a very neat way to quickly get a handle on the dependencies in your ant file and it's certainly helped me figure out how to reorganize things.

My only complaint would be that it doesn't understand the ant-contrib foreach task which has a target attribute and therefore creates a dependency so such children appear as orphans.

I figured I'd blog this in case anyone else finds it useful!

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.

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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...

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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.

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!

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.

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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.

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.

Updated for build 3.1.0.020 and later!

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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.

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I just received my monthly newsletter from SourceForge.net and they list the Top 25 Projects for the month. I thought it was very interesting to see that half of the top ten open source projects this month are for business management (ERP, CRM and HRIS):

1. PostBooks ERP, accounting, CRM by xTuple
2. Openbravo ERP
5. ADempiere ERP Business Suite
8. OrangeHRM - Human Resource Management
9. webERP web-based ERP Accounting

There was a time when Open Source was really just the domain of software geeks and the vast majority of open source projects were very technical: developer tools and libraries.

The business world's view of Open Source has matured and now many businesses are comfortable running core business functions on Open Source software.

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...

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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?

Update: some folks didn't like the idea of providing their MSN / Yahoo! credentials to a Czech server so here's a nice secure way to handle iChat connecting to MSN and Yahoo!

Multi-protocol iChat using OpenFire

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I discovered this today (September 2008) through a colleague so I figured I'd blog it for any other iChat users. Did you know you can use MSN and Yahoo! through iChat? You have to setup a Jabber account with a server that supports the MSN / Yahoo! Transports but it's fairly straightforward. Full instructions here and the recommended Jabber server is njs.netlab.cz (after searching Google for a while). This means I can finally transition off Adium X and use iChat as my one and only IM client! Yay!

In the absence of a printable schedule - sorry, Joe Rinehart says it's a problem with the Media3 hosting and he's been trying to get them to fix it for months! - here is my schedule for cf.Objective() 2009:

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One of the great things about free open source software (FOSS) is that you can use it without it costing you a penny and you can modify the software to suit your needs and, depending on the license, even bundle it as part of a commercial product you may develop.

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After a year at Broadchoice, it has come time to move on.

I've had a great time working with Ray Camden, Joe Rinehart, Brian Kotek and Luke Kilpatrick - as well as the rest of the team (who don't blog). We created a great content management system (Broadchoice Community Platform, powered by Model-Glue 2, ColdSpring and Transfer, running on ColdFusion 8 Enterprise - now up on the Amazon cloud) and we created an incredible desktop collaboration app (Broadchoice Workspace, powered by AIR, Flex, BlazeDS, Spring and Hibernate, running on Groovy and JBoss - with an iPhone web version powered by Model-Glue 3 and ColdSpring, running on Railo 3.0 and JBoss up on the Amazon cloud). I've learned a lot about Flex and AIR and I've gotten to know Railo as an alternative CFML engine.

After working with such a great team on such a great product, what comes next?

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The last week has seen some big announcements in the CF world! On March 31st, Gert announced the open source release of Railo, the next day Mark Drew announced he has joined Railo as CEO of the new Railo UK and then this week Peter Bell announced that he has also joined Railo and will be heading up the new Railo US operation.

I've been using ColdFusion since 2001, back when I worked at Macromedia and my team of Java and C++ developers first encountered CFML in the form of very early builds of what went on to become CFMX (6.0). We were pretty skeptical at first.

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Railo 3.1 Open Source is available! getRailo.org is the new community / open source web site, getRailo.com is the new products and services web site. The sites are still in Beta so you'll see some Latin filler text in a few places and a couple of areas need some work to flesh out the information but they give you access to the latest and greatest version of Railo - and the source code!

If you're tired of CFML being bashed by PHP / Rails / .NET / whatever folks, send them along to Scotch on the Rocks for free!

Sponsored by Railo, Scotch on the Rocks is offering ten free tickets to non-CFML developers!

What a great idea! The blog entry has instructions on how to contact Andy Allan et al to arrange education for your misguided friends.

For a long while, the Railo mailing list (railo-talk) has been hosted on Yahoo! Groups but members were having problems with search failing to return useful results. The Railo mailing list has now been moved to Google Groups (and renamed to just railo):

http://groups.google.com/group/railo

You can still visit the old archives on Yahoo! Groups:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/railo_talk/

Railo 3.1 - the open source edition - is in alpha testing right now and the public beta release is planned for March 31st, 2009, just a few weeks away, with a full release expected in May.

I'm blogging this because I just had to waste a bunch of time trying to figure out why Firefox 1.5 and 3.0 on CentOS could not 'see' my Java 6 installation.

First off, read this page explaining how to manually install the plugin.

Second, note that the default installation of Firefox on CentOS (and other Linux flavors, based on my Google searches) does not create the plugins folder! So, before you can actually follow the instructions on that page, you need to manually create the folder:

Hopefully that will save some other poor soul some frustration!

I just received the latest SourceForge.net newsletter and was pleased to see the following promotion from Adobe:

This mailing has been brought to you by: Adobe(R) AIR(TM)
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Create and Deploy Rich Internet Apps outside the browser with Adobe(R) AIR(TM) software. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web. Download the Adobe AIR SDK and Ajax docs to start building applications today.

(followed by a sf.net jump link - via DoubleClick - to the AIR SDK download page)

Nice to see Adobe reaching out to the open source community to promote development for the AIR platform!

Brian Kotek has begun a series on using Swiz, the Dependency Injection framework created by Chris Scott of ColdSpring fame.

Brian's first post just shows the very basic setup (how to specify the classes that Swiz manages and how to load them into your application).

If you're using ColdSpring today in CFML and you're interested in learning Flex, Brian's series might be very useful to you.

If you're tired of the boilerplate code that Cairngorm makes you write (or generate), Swiz might be just what you're looking for and Brian's series will be good reading for you too.

We use Swiz at Broadchoice, in our Workspace for Salesforce desktop application (built with Flex and AIR) and we all love working with the framework!

I finally got around to adding the recording URL to Charlie Arehart's UGTV. It's a bit of a wild ride: it's two hours long with a 5-10 minute pizza break in the middle (sorry, Connect doesn't let you edit out the middle of a recording, only the start / end). If I'd known how limited the Connect editing was, I'd have made two separate recordings.

Anyway, here is Unit Testing Improves Your Love Life - and - Groovin' To The Fusion: Marc Esher and Bill Shelton of MXUnit fame kick off the first hour and then Joe Rinehart of Model-Glue fame carries the second hour, explaining why a mixed language technology stack can make ColdFusion even more productive.

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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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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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!

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!

I was just reading a couple of blog posts about deploying Open BlueDragon in the cloud (I started with Matt Woodward's extended blog post on cloud computing) and they've gone as far as integrating OpenBD into Elastic Server - a service that lets you easily configure a server instance based on a number of resources. Very impressive.

Broadchoice Workspace is deployed on the cloud and whilst most of the machinery is Java/Groovy behind the Flex/AIR application, we also have the iPhone-compatible web version which is powered by CFML. It's a Model-Glue 3 / ColdSpring application that reuses the core Groovy services (via a Spring adapter that Joe Rinehart wrote).

So we've been running CFML in the cloud in production for nearly two months now and it's working out really well for us. We're using Railo 3.0, another option for cloud computing.

Adobe have said that cloud deployment is something they want to make possible with ColdFusion so at some point we'll have an embarrassment of riches in terms of choices for CFML in the cloud.

Who else is using CFML in the cloud today? Who is thinking about doing so?

I just made another pass over my MAX schedule to finalize my choices and thought I'd post my planned list of sessions so folks will know where to find me:

• Monday
  • Opening General Session
  • Adobe Roadmap: Enterprise
  • Flex Architecture Face-Off - panel
  • Real-Time Collaboration Apps with Flex and Cocomo - Nigel Pegg
• Tuesday
  • Mixing Open Source and Commercial Software
  • General Session
  • Adobe@Adobe: IT Innovation
  • Developing Rich Applications with jQuery and Adobe AIR - John Resig
  • The REST of SOA
• Wednesday
  • Advanced Patterns for ColdFusion Test Automation - Bill Shelton / Marc Esher (MXUnit)
  • Building Real-Time and Collaborative Applications with Flex and BlazeDS
  • Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion - an updated version of my session from Scotch on the Rocks and CFUNITED
  • Cocomo Deep Dive: Building Social RIAs with Flex + Adobe Hosted Services - Nigel Pegg
  • Developing Enterprise ColdFusion Applications - Joe Rinehart

As I was updating my schedule, I noticed that several of the ColdFusion and Flex workshops are already sold out - good to see so much interest in those! I was originally going to Dave Watts' "High Performance ColdFusion" but decided to give up my seat when I saw it was sold out (hopefully someone else will get in now!). There's a lot of excellent ColdFusion sessions at MAX this year but my focus right now is on Flex, AIR and real-time collaboration so that has driven most of my session choices.

Also a reminder that BACFUG meets on the Wednesday evening immediately after MAX ends and I am pleased to announce that we are having a double session with some MAX speakers:

• Bill Shelton and Marc Esher will present on Unit Testing in ColdFusion with MXUnit
• Joe Rinehart will present on Model-Glue 3: Gesture

We hope to have a good turn out with MAX attendees taking advantage of this (free) user group meeting in the evening! Since the meeting is inside the Adobe building, you will need to RSVP for security purposes. See you there!

Sheep-like, I rushed to install Google's new browser, Chrome and was disappointed to see that it's Windows-only (for now). So I fired up a Windows XP VM and installed it.

It's fast, it's clean and intuitive. I like the ability to add "application shortcuts" for web pages - I have Gmail and Google Reader in my quick launch menu already. Nice.

It has very few settings / options. Just the stuff you need. It won't import bookmarks etc from Safari or Firefox, just Internet Explorer. Black mark for that!

I don't like the fixed blue "chrome" (I have XP set to use the silver theme) but I admit that it's "very Google". The bookmarks bar is a little strange - a pale blue "balloon" below the address bar. Again tho', it's very much in keeping with the Google UI approach even if it isn't what we're used to.

And it'll all be open source so you can take it apart and see how they've done it.

Overall: very favorable so far.

New Atlanta's BlueDragon project has never supported Flash Remoting but with the advent of BlazeDS being open sourced by Adobe, TagServlet's OpenBD project has been able to take advantage of the synergy of open source to offer both HTTPService and RemoteObject invocation of CFCs from Flash/Flex. Watch Matt Woodward's screencast showing how to set up and run Flash Remoting with Open BlueDragon.

A couple of years ago, Pete Freitag provided a very brief overview of Apache, GPL, LGPL, BSD and MIT licenses. Today, Grant Skinner has provided a more in-depth discussion of GPL, LGPL, MPL, BSD and MIT (plus a few other options). Worth reading.

Sammy Larbi has a great blog post on the value of contributing to open source projects. He cites several famous names - people we know because they contribute to projects we know. This is part of a series of posts from Sammy on "how to save your job" (by improving your skills) and is inspired by Chad Fowler's book (52 ways to save your job). Good reading!

A client I have been working with just released their first open source project: a multicolumn dropdown menu plugin for jQuery. Their use case is to allow users to easily navigate complex hierarchical menus of options either via the mouse or via the keyboard.

I had nothing to do with this project but given my recent interest in jQuery, I felt it was worth blogging about. I think it really shows the power and simplicity of jQuery.

Note: Vince updated his post to use more neutral language - thank you Vince! - so I have updated this post to be more neutral as well.

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Vince Bonfanti just announced New Atlanta's "new ColdFusion-to-.NET and ColdFusion-to-Java migration services." and goes on to say "As experts in ColdFusion, ASP.NET, and Java technologies, New Atlanta is uniquely positioned to assist organizations that want to migrate their ColdFusion applications to either the ASP.NET or Java EE web application platforms."

Vince has said in the past that he sees BlueDragon.NET as a migration path from CFML to .NET so this isn't entirely surprising. His blog now has a sidebar that consolidates links to posts he's made in the past three years on this topic (the posts span July 2005 to January 2008 so they're not exactly "news").

It's clear that Vince and New Atlanta are going in a very different direction to Open BlueDragon. Vince is not involved with OpenBD and it is TagServlet, not New Atlanta, who are behind the open source project.

ColdFusion continues to thrive under Adobe's leadership - the hints around Centaur suggest that it will be a mind-blowing release. Open BlueDragon is available now for download - in several ready-2-run formats, as a simple WAR or even in source code form for you to use for free in pretty much any way you want. And at Scotch on the Rocks, Railo announced their partnership with Red Hat to move the Railo CFML engine to jboss.org as an open source project which should extend the reach of CFML into the Java community.

It's never been a better time to be a CF developer - more choices, more advances.

Gert is kicking off the Railo keynote at Scotch on the Rocks.

Big announcement: Railo is going open source and joining with the JBoss project! It will be LGPL2.

Railo Enterprise will still exist and will contain the non-open source features such as video handling and PDF generation, as well as having support offered.

If you're an IRC fan, there are two channels on chat.freenode.net: #openbd for discussion of the OpenBD project and #cfml-lang for discussion of CFML itself.

Why freenode instead of dal.net (home of #coldfusion etc)?

Well, freenode is home to #ruby, #rubyonrails, #groovy as well as all the Smalltalk and Haskell channels. Given the nature of OpenBD, it seemed more appropriate to put the channels on freenode.

Daemon is considering changing the license for FarCry 5.0 from Common Public License 1.0 (CPL) to a dual licensing model with GPLv3 and commercial options. Jeff Coughlin interviews Geoff Bowers of Daemon about this possible change and what it might mean for FarCry users and developers.

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Vince Bonfanti hosted a Birds of a Feather session this evening where he officially unveiled the Open BlueDragon project.

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Adobe just announced it is opening up the SWF and FLV/F4V formats amongst other initiatives for the Open Screen Project. This aims to bring Flash Player ubiquity to all devices, large and small - and, in due course, AIR as well. The list of partners is very impressive and includes chip and phone manufacturers, network companies, content providers...

If you use Mark Mandel's awesome Transfer ORM in a cluster, you've probably wondered what to do about keeping the cache in sync across servers in the cluster. I've had to solve this problem a couple of times now and I figured I should publish an example of how to do this.

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This time it's me in the spotlight, interviewed by Alan Williamson. Previous interview victims have been Mike Brunt, Peter Amiri and Andy Allan. Keep you eye on Alan's blog for interviews with the remaining members of the Open BlueDragon Steering Committee.

Don't forget that cf.Objective() 2008 is the first place to get your hands on Open BlueDragon where Vince will launch the project to the public and a number of the OpenBD Steering Committee members will be present to answer your questions.

This year's cf.Objective() has a lot of firsts. If you're not attending, you're going to miss out on a lot of world premier events!

We've worked hard to make cf.Objective() 2008 a "must see" event. We have a number of firsts this year that we're very proud of:

• The public release of Open BlueDragon on May 3rd!
• The public unveiling - and Alpha - of Model-Glue 3: Gesture!
• The public unveiling of Mate, the new Flex framework from AsFusion!
• The first conference to feature the latest rising star in the frameworks world: ColdBox - with an introductory session and a two hour, hands-on advanced workshop!
• The first public information about Swiz, the new Flex framework from Chris Scott of ColdSpring fame!
• Speaking of Chris Scott, we're the first conference to feature a two-hour, hands-on workshop for ColdSpring!
• We're also the first conference to feature a two-hour, hands-on workshop on agile development for ColdFusion developers by the leading light in automated process & testing, John Paul Ashenfelter!

How can you pass this up? $629 for three full days of brain-cramming, enterprise-level information in a hotel that's only $120 a night! Register Now! The room rate is only guaranteed for a few more days!

If you're a Mach-II user - or thinking of using Mach-II - you might also be interested in the pre-conference classes.

Alan Williamson introduces the members of the Open BlueDragon Steering Committee in a post today that includes quotes from each committee member about their hopes for the project.

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Mike Steele has updated CFEasyMock to add strict and nice mocks, making this a 1.0 release. If you are doing unit testing and haven't yet checked out this framework, you really should download it and see just what it can do for you.

Alan Williamson just announced that the BlueDragon open source project has an official name: Open BlueDragon, or OpenBD for short. The steering committee has also created a public mailing list for discussing all things related to the project.

As a fan of unit testing, I was interested to hear about a new mock object generator project appearing in the CF world.

I've been using Brian Kotek's ColdMock for a while and I really like how easy it makes it to test CFCs that depend on several other CFCs - because you can create "mock" versions of those CFCs on the fly that return specific values. Mock objects are a good way to provide a consistent environment for your CFCs under test, as well as a way to let your CFCs be tested without them affected the "real" environment (because you can create a "mock" environment which can even include things such as data access objects to fake the whole database layer).

As I blogged recently, I've switched from cfcUnit to MXUnit and the mailing list is pretty active. Mike Steele posted that he had ported EasyMock to CFML. My first reaction was "Have you looked at Brian Kotek's ColdMock project?" and Mike explained that EasyMock isn't just about creating simple mock objects but about verifying behavior in those mock objects.

Intrigued, I read about EasyMock, a Java project that targets JUnit, and realized the power of being able to create mock objects that expect to be called in certain ways and can, as part of your unit test, actually verify the calls made on them!

I asked Mike to send me a build and I played with it and liked it a lot, pretty much instantly. I sent him some feedback and very soon I got an updated build that incorporated much of my feedback - and a note saying he was already going in that direction. Nice to find a project where I'm on the same page as the author!

You can download the latest build from the CFEasyMock project page on RIAForge. It's a very simple but very powerful concept that should really help you with your unit testing!

No fair! No fair! Brian Rinaldi leaks the upcoming Transfer 1.0 release along with the ColdBox-powered documentation wiki.

Transfer continues to evolve at a rapid pace. The SVN repository is light years ahead of the last "official" release (0.6.3) and 1.0 is "coming soon". Mark Mandel deserves huge kudos for his work on this project - and his intent to turn this into "Professional Open Source". In other words, making Transfer something we can rely on like we rely on JBoss or MySQL today.

Come to cf.Objective() 2008 to hear Mark talk in person about Transfer in two great sessions!

Vince Bonfanti has posted a good explanation of several of the details and implications of opening up BlueDragon. I was pleased to see him call out my blog post about the announcement! Hopefully his post will clarify a lot of the misconceptions I've seen expressed in a number of discussions.

Vince points folks to the new Open Source forum on the New Atlanta website which has a lot of good information about the details of dual licensing, the expected process for contributions and so on.

I strongly encourage folks to read Vince's post and then read all the threads in the forum.

In a move that has surprised some folks, New Atlanta has announced plans to create a free open source version of their J2EE BlueDragon product. They will continue to develop, sell and support a commercial version of it, as well as continuing the .NET version and the standalone JX version (neither of which will be open sourced).

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Most of us know by now just how easy it is to write Flex applications backed by ColdFusion. Adobe have done a lot of work to ensure that integration with ColdFusion is seamless. It's very impressive.

Browsing through the Grails site, I noticed they have a plugin for Flex so I figured I'd try it out.

Following the instructions, I installed the plugin (grails install-plugin flex) which took a fair while to fetch the plugin from the codehaus.org site and build it and install it into my project. Then I created a service class - a regular Groovy class - with just this one additional line:

It had a method, hello(), that returned a string.

Then I put my main.mxml file in the web-app directory of my Grails project with these lines inside the mx:Application tag:

You don't need to build the project. You don't need to set any paths in FlexBuilder. Just create the MXML file.

Then I hit the MXML file in my Grails app:

http://localhost:8080/bookstore/main.mxml

Much churning ensued as the Flex app was compiled on demand and then up it came with the Hello button. Click. The return value from my HelloService.groovy hello() appeared in the text box.

It's a trivial app but it showed just how incredibly seamless the integration is. It uses the Web Tier Flex compiler for on-demand MXML compilation and it automatically manages the destinations for you.

And I mean see... Kev McCabe has posted a series of video tutorials about Apache, Subversion and Trac on Windows. This should be very helpful for folks wanting to set up local version control and bug tracking but who feel a bit daunted by all these packages. Kev takes you through how to install each package and then how to configure them to work together.

I've had my head down working hard on client projects lately and finally got some time this evening to catch up on blogs. Wow! Adobe sure has been busy!

AIR Beta 3, AIR extensions/updates for Flash CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3, Flex 3 Beta 3, BlazeDS, Brio Beta, Flash Player 9 Update...

Good grief!

I just installed the new Flex Builder plugin but won't get a chance to put it through its paces for a few days. The AIR installer is sitting on my desktop and I'm just about to install the updated Flash Player. Oh, and I have my Brio account but haven't had time to play with that either. Maybe Adobe think we need something to keep us busy over the holidays?

Check out Adobe Labs to see what you might be missing!

At MAX, Brian Meloche ran a BOF on this topic and he has published his interim report as well as the specific findings of the non-ColdFusion target group.

Brian focused on what the community can do which is the right approach in my opinion (Ruby and PHP got popular because of their community, not because of corporate marketing) and one of the key suggestions from the non-ColdFusion target group was for the community to rally around a single point of promotion and build CF versions of all the free, open source software integrations that are seen in the Java, PHP and .NET communities. We won't get their by constantly reinventing wheels - we need to pitch in and help with existing projects (and authors of projects need to get better about allowing others to contribute - which is one of the problems with RIAforge since it does not support multiple contributors).

I recently saw some discussions about how Ruby is way better than ColdFusion because it allows stuff like this: at which point b is an array containing "a!", "b!", "c!", "d!".

So I added a Collection class to my Closures for ColdFusion library so that you can do this:

at which point b is a Collection containing "a!", "b!", "c!", "d!".

It's actually based on the Smalltalk collection class but it lets you do very Ruby-like stuff. I still have a couple of minor tweaks to make it even easier to use and I still have more documentation to add but I figured I'd blog it so folks could download it and try it out - see the Software pod on my blog.

The Closures for ColdFusion library works on CFMX 7 but the new Collection class requires CF8 - sorry!

OK, so many of you already think I'm an Apple fanboi but I've resisted Pages and Keynote in the past because they're every bit as proprietary as Microsoft's bloatware Office product.

I have diligently stuck with NeoOffice/J - free, open source, open standards. It's a bit clunky but it works. I've used it for years. I helped (a little) with the Mac OS X port of OpenOffice.org back in the 1.0 and 1.1 days. I've always felt it's quirks are worth putting up with for the karma of Free Open Source and Standards.

I'm putting together my presentation for MAX and trying to work with Adobe's PowerPoint template. Someone really needs to teach those Adobe folk how to use PowerPoint! The template is horrific to work with and, unfortunately, exceeds the abilities of NeoOffice/J. It's all been very frustrating.

So, Apple released iWork 08 and it claims great Microsoft compatibility. Everyone is ooh-ing and aah-ing over the new features and the all-new Numbers spreadsheet. I'm thinking "yeah, whoop-di-do, another proprietary app".

Eventually... Well, I decide to at least download it and try it out. I open up Keynote and open up the Adobe PPT file. Perfect rendering. Wow! I create a few new slides and reorder them. Everything. Just. Works.

OK, I'm impressed... so I open up Numbers and bring in my invoicing spreadsheet. Ooooh, I think I'm going to faint! A spreadsheet actually looks attractive! And guess what? It. Just. Works.

Damn. I guess I'll be buying Apple's proprietary office suite after all. I'm stunned at how good it is. I love Free Open Source software and I'm willing to cut it a lot of slack but Apple has really hit the nail on the head here and the suite is definitely worth the $79 entry fee...

I just added my cfcUnit facade code into my Google Code project that already contained Closures, Concurrency, IRCBot and Scripting. Rich Kroll sent me a nice little fix for a bug in the facade so I figured it was a good time to move that file under version control and make it part of my regular builds process.

Feel free to file bugs and enhancements in the issue tracker - and thank you for using my code!

I read this article a few years back but a friend just reminded me of it, in response to some questions being asked on a mailing list that we are both on.

Eric Steven Raymond's How To Ask Questions The Smart Way may come across as rude and elitist but it contains a lot of useful information about getting your problems solved effectively (and if you think it really is rude or elitist then you may be one of the people he insists doesn't "get it").

Compared to how the ColdFusion community behave (at least, in general), the Unix community is much less tolerant of laziness and "stupidity" but I expect we all recognize certain people or certain questions in ESR's article.

I know I have certainly answered questions with a link to a Google search or to a LiveDocs page (when all I have done is copy'n'pasted the user's question into Google and found the user's answer).

Underlying the basic advice is an important sentiment. Well, several important sentiments. Don't assume the problem is the software (and that applies especially to open source projects that the authors have poured their soul into). Don't assume you are entitled to an answer. Don't ask a question you haven't at least tried to answer on your own - read ESR's article if that makes you in the least bit indignant!

I make myself available on lists and IM for questions. I try very hard to be polite and tolerant and patient when I'm fielding a constant stream of questions. Sometimes I don't succeed but if you read that article you should get a sense of why I might sometimes be a bit sharper in my reply than you would like!

I went a long, long time before I added a wishlist to my blog (and I've stated several times very publicly that I will never, ever add paid advertising to my site). That said, an iTunes gift certificate makes me much, much, much more tolerant and patient and much more inclined to answer questions that I may think you haven't tried hard enough to answer yourself!

Anyway, read the article - if it offends you, read it again. Once it stops offending you, absorb all the hints and tips on how to get answers faster - and then look at the various mailing lists and forums you're on and you'll see why some posters are ignored (if they're lucky) or answered with rude retorts.

Newbies are always welcome, "lusers" are not (read ESR's article for commentary on that).

The all-new Bay Area ColdFusion User Group website just went live. It is based on Matt Woodward's open source Capitol Hill User Group application, built with Mach II 1.5 and ColdSpring 1.0. It's still a bit of a work in progress (both as an application and as a website) but more content and functionality will be added over time.

After the networking event, Joe Rinehart hosted a Birds of a Feather session on frameworks. He covered the new release of Model-Glue 2.0 for ColdFusion, the Alpha 1 release of Model-Glue for Flex (which looks very exciting!) and said that Model-Glue for Java, developed by Chris Scott (I think) would also become an official Model-Glue project - all on the new Model-Glue website.

Next up I covered the Fusebox 5.5 release which is currently in limited Alpha with a public Beta planned in July (as soon as we can get enough documentation together on the new features). I also announced publicly that providing a migration path for Fusebox 3 was on the roadmap (for Fusebox 5.7 probably).

Matt Woodward (and Peter Farrell) presented Mach II 1.5 which is in Beta right now, and the new website. He also talked about plans for their 2.0 release (but didn't go into specifics).

Next up was Chris Scott, who said that an official 1.2 release would appear within a few weeks and then they would be working toward a 1.5 release. This will be the last release of ColdSpring that will run on CFMX 7 - ColdSpring 2.0 will require CF8 because they want to take advantage of cfinterface and onMissingMethod() to make ColdSpring faster (and simplify the core files).

Last up was Doug Hughes who assured us that Reactor would hit an official 1.0 release as soon as the documentation was complete. Ah, the dreaded documentation...

Just sat through a very interesting presentation on Open Source initiatives at Adobe by Dave McAllister and wanted to put out some links and notes.

Dave noted that Adobe has been active in Open Source for a good long while but has recently begun to move away from the Adobe Open Source License (a vanity license - like the old Fusebox license) to more standard licenses such as BSD and MPL. We've seen the ActionScript Virtual Machine released to the Mozilla Organization (as Tamarin) and this week the Flex 3 SDK was just released as Open Source with the ActionScript and MXML compilers and ActionScript debugger all following later this year.

You can keep tabs on Adobe's voice for Open Source on the Open at Adobe blog.

You can read about (some of) Adobe's Open Source projects on opensource.adobe.com, which includes the Adobe Source Libraries and the Generic Image Library. The latter was accepted into the Boost project for C++ - an open source library project that I was involved with back in 1998, when I was still involved with the ANSI C++ Standards Committee!

Dave also mentioned RIAForge which is probably the most well-known Open Source effort around Adobe technologies, as far as the ColdFusion community is concerned.

Adobe Apollo is now AIR - Adobe Integrated Runtime and the easiest way to develop for AIR is Flex Builder 3 (beta). The Flex 3 SDK is also available on Adobe Labs with nightly builds as well as a public bugbase.

There are quite a few changes between the Apollo Alpha (aka "M3") and the new AIR (aka "M4") builds so you'll have to make some source code changes to rebuild your Apollo apps. It's not a big deal - I had my Apollo app - an administrative console for a website - up and running as an AIR app in just a few minutes. Despite the new Flex 3 SDK, my (recompiled) Flex apps and my new AIR app seem to work just fine with my existing CFMX 7 and CF 8 sites.

And tomorrow I get a whole day of training on AIR so I'll have more to say in the next few days.

I just updated the Scripting for ColdFusion 8 project to compile and cache the embedded scripts.

The PHP example runs in around 35ms on the first hit and around 1ms on subsequent hits. The Ruby examples run in around 100-200ms on the first hit and around 2ms on subsequent hits.

Over the next few weeks I'll be adding more languages and reorganizing the code structure (and changing the custom tag API a little bit). I'll declare a Beta once I have things nailed down a bit more but if folks want to play with the Alpha and provide feedback, I'd appreciate it.

The title says it all - visit Scripting for ColdFusion 8 on RIAForge!

I'll be working on documentation (using the RIAForge wiki) over the next few weeks - as well as adding documentation for my other projects on RIAForge: Closures for CFMX and Concurrency for CFMX.

Here's a couple of examples of Ruby running inside ColdFusion 8.

First off, the example that follows the lead of the PHP example (albeit a little more complicated):

Several ColdFusion scopes are available directly in Ruby as global variables (the variables scope as $coldfusion and CGI, form, session and URL as global variables of the same name, lowercased).

Unlike the PHP scripting engine, any actual output from Ruby is lost (puts, print) or, more accurately, written directly to the system console which is not very helpful. Instead, the last expression evaluated is converted to a string and used as output of the custom tag.

Here's another example showing a Ruby class used with a block and an iterator:

I haven't done much testing with the Ruby version yet, in particular what happens when you manipulate Ruby objects in ColdFusion (or vice versa).

Python, Groovy and Haskell are on my list. I may go through the entire Sun Scripting Engine list eventually (Awk, Tcl and a variety of strange pseudo-languages are there).

Update: now supports Ruby as well as PHP! I'll post a couple of Ruby examples next.

We're always getting grief from those PHP folks, aren't we? What if you could run PHP code directly inside ColdFusion?

This outputs Hello Sean and greeting = wibble. Yes, you can pass ColdFusion variables into PHP and set variables in PHP that you can access back in ColdFusion land. [Note: Unlike the first version I posted, the new version takes no attributes but instead makes available the entire variables scope from the calling page - and now uses $_COLDFUSION which is more in keeping with PHP.]

How is this possible? Well, ColdFusion 8 uses Java 6 which provides access to the javax.script package and all the J-language implementations available. Quercus is a Java implementation of PHP and it is implemented as a script engine.

Sun has provided a number of JSR-223 ScriptEngine and ScriptEngineFactory implementations and there are Java implementations of a number of languages.

Combine that with a simple custom tag and the code you see above becomes a trivial extension for ColdFusion 8!

Credit to axelclk for the missing piece of the puzzle!

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Update: you can download what you need from my 'software' pod on my blog: Scripting for ColdFusion 8. Installation instructions are given inside each script directory's example.cfm page. The project now has Ruby support.

The source code is available on Google Code - along with my other Open Source projects and I'm setting up a central location on RIAForge as well (as soon as Ray approves my project request).

I hear so many good things about PostgreSQL that I figured I ought to try it out. That and I have a consulting project that requires it.

Checking the PostgreSQL site, I see no OS X distribution so I Google and find this Apple Developer Center article on PostgreSQL. My first reaction is "Oh, come on! There has to be an easier way!".

Brandon Harper pointed me at PostgreSQL Tools for MacOS X on SourceForge. I download the developer kit and the tools but the installation only seems to be partial so after half an hour of pfaffing around, I go back to Apple's page.

It actually wasn't as painful to get it all installed as it looked (I was just being lazy). So now I have PostgreSQL 8.2.4 running locally. Yay!

Any hints and tips for a new PostgreSQL user?

I downloaded the Smith Project and took it for a test drive.

First off, as I mentioned at the end of my earlier blog post, the integrated Linux version, with Jetty included, does not work on Mac OS X.

So I tried the WAR deployment next. My first target was JRun but it wouldn't work there. So I tried Tomcat 6. Nope. Tomcat 5.5. Success!

Smith starts up (in just under 6 seconds) and some very basic CFML pages show it working. I try the admin console and all the pages come up but no setting changes take effect. Hmm...

Well, let's try something a little more complicated. Let's try Fusebox 5 and the skeleton application.

It doesn't like this:

It requires this: There's a few of tho' in the Fusebox core files.

It doesn't implement cfprocessingdirective. Fine, I'll just comment that out in fusebox5.cfm. Now I'm just getting an impenetrable compiler error about some exception already having been caught in the compiler, flagging a cfinclude.

Anyone else had any experience with Smith yet?

Two users reported a strange bug where calls from FutureEvent to FutureTask methods were failing with access denied.

Those CFCs are both in the same directory and the access was specified as package. However, it seems that if CFMX figures out the path used for the code is different in case, it denies access. Both users were on Windows and I believe in both cases they had defined the /org/corfield/concurrency mapping as a Windows file system path that included at least one uppercase letter. When CFMX locates the called CFC (in the same directory), it seems to always generate a fully lowercase file system path and so the comparison fails (between the mapped CFC with uppercase in the path and the "discovered" CFC with all lowercase in the path).

I "fixed" this by changing access="package" to access="public" on four methods in FutureTask.

You can download the updated version from RIAForge.org.

Well, we knew it was coming at some point...

Today, the Smith Project went open source! They support CFCs now but there are still quite a few red X's on the tag/function support charts. It'll be interesting to see how well they support CFCs, since that's been one of the big bugaboos with BlueDragon according to a lot of folks I've spoken to. Compatibility is certainly king when you're paying for a cloned product and BlueDragon falls short there: it doesn't run several popular ColdFusion frameworks (but, by comparison, Railo work very hard to ensure they run those frameworks). How will people measure a free open source product? Will they cut it more slack on compatibility?

Clearly, with all the innovation coming in Scorpio at the high-end and Smith entering the field at the low end, the game is going to change.

2007 looks like being an incredible year to be a ColdFusion developer!

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FWIW, the basic download and run option does not work on a Mac - it fails with a Null Pointer Exception.

Adobe just announced their plans to release the source code for Adobe Flex as open source. You can read more details on Adobe Labs.

The Mozilla Public License will be used to cover the source the AS3 Flex SDK (available in source form since the release of Flex 2) as well as the Java source for the AS3 and MXML compilers, the debugger and the core AS3 libraries from the SDK.

Most of the infrastructure should be in place by the summer with a full transition to open source by the end of 2007.

You might also want to watch the video interview with Ely Greenfield and David Wadhwani by Robert Scoble of PodTech.

Adam Podolnick and Ray Camden have released ColdFire, the ColdFusion debugging plugin for Firefox. Installation is simple: install Firebug, install the ColdFire XPI file, drop the coldfire.cfm debugging template into your ColdFusion installation tree (under WEB-INF/debug), select that debugging template in your CF Admin and you're off to the races!

And it works beautifully!! Kudos to you both for this!

Just got off a debugging session with a ColdFusion developer. They're using Fusebox 5 and successfully running an existing Fusebox 4 site on it. The developer IM'd me because he was having a problem getting a new application up and running. No matter what URL he tried, the application always showed the same default home page. I suggested a few things in IM but nothing worked. Curious, I fired up my public Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional room and asked the developer to join me. I made him a presenter and asked him to shared his screen and show me his fusebox.xml and circuit.xml files. They looked fine. So I requested control and had a look at a few other files in his application - everything looked fine but the application resolutely refused to display any fuseaction except the defaultFuseaction. As a last ditch idea I edited his fusebox.xml file to explicitly set the fuseactionVariable parameter. Success!

This said that the default value being used was not the documented default. I asked him to show me where the Fusebox 5 core files were on his system. I opened up fuseboxApplication.cfc and saw that someone had changed the underlying defaultFuseaction!

So, someone had modified the core files to create behavior that was at odds with the documentation and the result was a developer spending goodness only knows how much time trying to figure out why their basic little application didn't work - and then about another hour combined of my time and his, tracking down the problem.

Remember folks: Leave that code alone!

A common discussion in the ColdFusion community is around which IDE to use and how available IDEs reflect on the language itself. For ColdFusion, the choice is essentially between Dreamweaver at $399 (or HomeSite+ which ships "for free" on the Dreamweaver CD - essentially ColdFusion Studio for $100 less than it used to cost) and CFEclipse, the free plugin for Eclipse. Which you choose depends on whether you are primarily doing visual development (layouts and design etc) or back end development - although I use both (the right tool for the right job etc).

With that in mind, it's interesting to see that Code Gear has just announced Delphi for PHP - an IDE built with Delphi (and inspired by the existing Delphi IDE) but for PHP developers. It's Windows-only right now (because Delphi is Windows-only - BTW, HomeSite / HomeSite+ is a Delphi application which is why it too is Windows-only) and will cost $299.

That places it in pretty much direct competition with Zend Studio which also costs $299. Zend Studio is cross-platform, which is a big plug, and of course there is also the free PDT (PHP Development Tool) plugin for Eclipse.

Brian Rinaldi has a great post on why it's usually a bad idea to modify open source frameworks. He gives some very solid reasons why you should treat a framework as a black box instead of changing how it works. There's an interesting stream of comments too. I think the one thing that resonates most with me is not part of the original post but in one of Brian's own comments in the ensuring thread:

I think there is a presumption by some people that open-source is open so that you can modify the code. I think in many cases it is as much or more about transparency and soliciting input from the broader user community than it is about empowering users to modify the code.

Open source is really about culture and mindset and these two sentences sum up, for me, the core misunderstanding that many people have about the process.

About once a year, I tend to mention Haskell on my blog. I like functional programming languages - that was my research topic for three years after I graduated from university. Haskell is a very powerful functional programming language that has a number of available implementations and, as I discovered this weekend, a very active community.

Last time I messed with Haskell, I chose the nhc98 compiler because it was easily available for the PowerPC Mac. When Haskell had cropped up in discussions with not one, but two ColdFusion developers this week, I figured I'd install it on my new Intel Mac. Except nhc98 is not available as a binary distribution for the Intel Mac. Easy, I thought, download the source and build it myself. The build failed. The notes suggest using the ulimit command to remove the file-size limitation on the shell. OK. The build still failed. The notes say if you can't solve it with ulimit, use another Haskell compiler to help bootstrap the build.

Try as I might, I couldn't find an existing Intel Mac binary of any Haskell compiler. But there's an IRC channel listed on the Haskell web site. #haskell on freenode.net. I figured that #coldfusion is so helpful that I might as well try the #haskell channel... There were nearly 300 people in there! And, guess what? They were very happy to help me for several hours. First, they pointed me at an Intel Mac build of ghc (the Glasgow Haskell Compiler) which, incidentally, was contributed by a member of the Haskell community (i.e., built from source and submitted back). I installed it and it worked just fine. So far so good.

Then I installed hmake and hi (hmake interactive) which are build and shell tools for using Haskell compilers. I ran into problems with a library dependency. Again, the IRC channel folks were very helpful. Following their instructions, I removed the (obsolete) dependency and successfully built and installed the two hmake tools. Yay!

Then I went back to nhc98, determined to build that from source. I ran into several more dependency problems. Back to the IRC channel. Similar advice (nhc98 is old and the dependencies aren't needed when using newer compilers to bootstrap it). I finally got it built but, unfortunately, every file it generated just crashed. By this point, the IRC folks were wondering why I was bothering since nhc98 has really reached a dead-end. They pointed out that ghc has an interactive tool (ghci) anyway. So I admitted defeat and starting playing with ghci...

Some of the tutorials on the web features code that didn't work. A quick check in with the IRC channel and I learn that Haskell 98 had a flat namespace for libraries but since then the standard library ("Prelude") has been reorganized into a hierarchy of packages. We discussed some of the slight differences between Haskell 98 (per the tutorials I was trying to follow) and "modern" Haskell and I kept on learning.

One of the interesting things about the channel is that members are constantly swapping code fragments and experimenting amongst themselves with ways to solve problems. Very collaborative!

So, once again, I'll suggest to the curious among you to check out Haskell.

I'd also ask you to think about the difference between the #coldfusion channel on DAL.net and the #haskell channel on freenode.net. #coldfusion has 20-30 members most of the time and occasionally gets as high as 50. For the most part it is banter about everyday life but folks will rally and focus if someone comes on asking a ColdFusion question. #haskell has 270-300 members and discussion is mostly about Haskell. We're all so very passionate about ColdFusion and we like helping newbies. Why are so few CFers on IRC compared to Haskell developers?

Thanx to Brian Rinaldi's Open Source Update, I found a new blog - Sammy Larbi's. Sammy tried out my Closures library and shows an example that sort of works so I figured I'd post the "right" way to do things so that a variant of Sammy's example works as he expects.

First off, Sammy mentions the fix he had to apply to make the Closures library work on his system. I thought it was a 6.1 / 7.0 difference but it turns out he found a real bug and the fix is needed even on 7.0 if you use a mapping for the library. Secondly, while debugging Sammy's example, I found another bug - a potential thread safety issue. Both are fixed in SVN and the latest "daily" build ZIP file.

So, moving on to Sammy's code, here's the corrected version of his container.cfc:

Compare his each() method to mine. He names the method and then repeatedly binds the value variable. That doesn't actually do what he thinks. If you want to call a closure, you simply call it with arguments as shown above.

However, in order to do that, you need to identify the arguments when you create the closure. You do that by specifying the argument names in the call to new() like this:

That fixes part of his problem.

His other problem is the beenhere variable. He wants to bind that variable to the context in which the closure is created. Note that he wants to update the variable inside the closure and output its (updated) value outside the closure. In order to do that, you need to bind the context. First we change the closure to this:

We've made beenhere a member of a structure. Now we can bind the variables context of the closure_test.cfm page to that structure: This causes the (free) reference to outer in the closure to be bound to the (creation-time) variables scope context.

Here's the updated test page:

Hope that helps anyone else who is trying to use my Closures library!

I love The Register. It always has such a warped view of the world. It covered the Tamarin project announcement yesterday which means that El Reg thinks it's pretty big news. That's definitely a good thing.

Unfortunately, their coverage is a little strange... The article starts out just fine, mostly quoting from the press release, but then quickly goes off the rails. When they talk about Flash Player 9, they completely fail to mention the huge performance boost and the all-new Virtual Machine. Then they say "Adobe was compelled to open its Flash source code" to "stay relevant" and that this is all about "compatibility and stability with Firefox". The author, Gavin Clarke, clearly didn't read beyond the first couple of paragraphs of the press release that he quoted. Mind you, most of his Register articles focus on Microsoft so perhaps I should cut him some slack...

Ted has a great blog post that explains visually just what Tamarin is all about. His diagram shows the various components in the Virtual Machine and how they interact - as well as making some observations on what Tamarin might enable in the future.

Adobe has contributed source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine, the powerful standards-based scripting language engine in Adobe Flash Player, to the Mozilla Foundation.

Read the press release for more details.

Mark Mandel has released a major update to his Transfer ORM library (don't be fooled by the minor version number change from 0.5 - this is a huge release!).

You can read all about the new features in his blog entry about the new release. If you have any concerns about trying Transfer because it hasn't reached the magic "1.0" release yet, put those concerns aside and try it anyway. My team has been using Transfer happily for a while (and will shortly be launching a new service where the persistence layer is powered by Transfer!).

The Mach II team are looking for your feedback! This is one of the great things about the Open Source community - if you use a project, you can have a voice in how it develops. At least, that's how Open Source should work so props to Matt and Peter for doing this!

Firefox 2.0 is here. I'm running 1.5.0.7 and 2.0 side-by-side right now (although only one can actually be running at once) to see how I feel before I commit to upgrading. So far - an hour in - Firefox 2.0 feels very good. I like the subtle UI changes, the better organized preferences dialog and, most of all, the spell-checking on textarea form fields (although it doesn't know the word 'textarea'!).

I was disappointed that the Fusebox 5 reload extension is "not compatible" (strangely the Fusebox 4 reload extension is compatible - go figure!).

Mark Mandel has moved his Transfer ORM project to RIAForge with forums, bug tracker and Subversion repository. The current download is still the 0.5 build but Subversion contains a much more up-to-date version (which we are using at Adobe). You can read Mark's blog at Compound Theory.

If you have an Open Source project built with Adobe technologies, you can register it at RIAForge, a site developed by Ray Camden, Ben Forta and others. It provides dedicated domain names for projects, Subversion for source code control, bug tracker, project blog, forums... And it's built with Adobe technologies (of course).

You can now get Closures for CFMX, Concurrency for CFMX and my IRCBot Event Gateway from the org-corfield-cfmx project on Google Code. Right now you need SVN to download stuff - I'll probably add specific prebuilt ZIP files in due course if folks would find that easier (add an issue to the project!). You can now download "daily" builds.

The Concurrency for CFMX library is halfway between release 1.2 and 1.3(!). The IRCBot Event Gateway needs the documentation updating to match the new directory layout. But I'll get there...

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I just added a Google Groups mailing list to the project, also accessible from the project site.

Some minor updates to the Closures for CFMX library:

• You can now make a closure from a text expression - if the factory doesn't find return and ; in the code block it will add them automatically.
• The call() method is automatically an alias for the generated function which means that if you provide an argument specification, you no longer have to use named arguments in the method call.
• The code examples have been updated to better illustrate the equivalent of the Ruby select / filter example on Fowler's bliki (link posted by Peter Bell on the previous entry)

I'll try to get the code posted to Google Code but may well reorganize my Concurrency project at the same time to create a single project for all future corfield.org open source libraries.

I was having a discussion about closures with someone recently and I said they wouldn't make sense for ColdFusion because the syntax would be too ugly. On Friday evening, I decided to try to prove myself wrong.

You can download my Closures for CFMX library from the "Software" pod on my blog.

Read the comments in the index.cfm file for details on how to use it. Here's one example from that file:

You'll get 42 each time. No idea what anyone might want to use this for but it's "cool". Enjoy!

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Peter Bell added a few comments including a link to Martin Fowler talking about closures. I figured I'd add an example showing how you might do similar things in ColdFusion with this library.

First off, you need a select function to match Ruby:

Now we'll build a collection (a struct) containing some simple struct data elements:

Finally, we run the Ruby-like select method: We create the closure to match Ruby's code block { |e| e.isManager } - we name the argument (the second argument to the new() method so it can be called without having to used named arguments - as the select() method expects.