CFML Advisory Committee Update

July 16, 2008 · 8 Comments

Although we've been relatively quiet since the announcement at CFUNITED, I wanted to let folks know that the CFML Advisory Committee are working away in the background. After that announcement, Ben Forta posted his thoughts on the committee but there haven't been any other public utterances about the committee by its members. We're working on a number of things.

We're drafting a document that will outline what cfscript features, tags and functions we believe to be "core CFML language".
We're also going to draft a document that gives guidance on adding new features in a consistent manner - attempting to define the essence of "CFML-ness".
We're in the process of setting up a website that will have a wiki where we publish our documents and discussions as well as a blog where we make announcements and, more importantly, ask the community for feedback on issues we are considering.

We're considering a Birds of a Feather session at MAX to discuss things with the community as well, very much as an interactive, two-way discussion. There are also ongoing discussions with the Open BlueDragon team to see if we can bring them to the table. Hopefully we'll have more to share on all of this in a week or two.

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Tags: cfml-advisory · coldfusion

8 responses so far ↓

1 David McGuigan // Jul 16, 2008 at 1:53 PM

Very, very nice. We're proud of you guys.

Will the early documents be available for review to community members and if so where/how? Thanks Sean.
2 Sean Corfield // Jul 16, 2008 at 2:18 PM

@David, as soon as we have our wiki up and something to actually publish for review, yes.
3 Gary Fenton // Jul 16, 2008 at 2:32 PM

Thanks for the update, Sean. It would be cool if you can combine a wiki with a discussion forum, so if someone wants to read about the existing syntaxes of a particular tag and proposed changes they can find it in the wiki. Then if they want to pass comment or make suggestions they can do so right from that wiki entry. (To try to keep everything about something specific on one place). Not sure if a hybrid app like that exists? Wikipedia is the least user-friendly example if you want to discuss an entry. Feels like everyone is using the same instance of Notepad via a remote desktop to have a discussion!
4 Sean Corfield // Jul 16, 2008 at 2:42 PM

@Gary, I think it might get a little unwieldy to have discussion threads in the middle of documents but I understand your desire for a more specific two way discussion. We're planning to use the blog to highlight issues that need feedback from the community - or that generate lots of feedback email (we'll have a standard way to submit feedback to the committee).

In general the committee is not likely to do anything controversial. We want to codify the existing language, provide guidelines for vendors to extend it consistently and make proposals for (limited) improvements to the core language that make the language itself more consistent.

If something isn't part of the "core" CFML language, we won't be dealing with it (beyond guidelines on consistency).
5 John Farrar // Jul 17, 2008 at 5:42 AM

Ben mentioned in his CFUnited talk that they couldn't get everything to tags primarily because of CFQuery. Well, what if the variables for the query were passed in as a structure? FFT

I think script needs to at least be complete. There are some things it doesn't do wholistic at this point. It should be complete even if it's not 'completely' :) We should have full try, catch equiv. features, abort, dump, locate, and perhaps a few others.

It would also be good if the board came out with a suggested practice for building custom functions so people know that the code won't conflict with vendor tags added in the future. We have a function for example called _dump() that we lead with an underscore so if (when) Adobe makes things feature complete in script our code will keep on working.

It is also IMO a good thing for any custom tags that are added (like some of the tags BD has the opperate differently from standard tags in "the new standard") be things that can be dealt with in the Admin of the distribution. If the tags cannot be brought into compliance with the board standard then they should not receive the standards compliance rating. (Yes, you should have a button/banner stating that ColdFusion, Railo, BlueDragon is standards compliant with the language board.)
6 Sean Corfield // Jul 17, 2008 at 7:37 AM

@John, all good feedback. Once we have the current core language agreed and documented, and vendor guidelines for CFML consistency, we'll start looking at some enhancements to the core language that make it more consistent.
7 Peter Boughton // Jul 31, 2008 at 11:29 AM

>> Hopefully we'll have more to share on all of this in a week or two. <<

Well it's now a whole day past two weeks... any news? :)
8 Sean Corfield // Jul 31, 2008 at 12:34 PM

@Peter, thank you for being so interested :)

We have a domain and we're setting up the site (well, Ray is) and it will have CodexWiki and BlogCFC and a way for folks to send feedback to the committee (via email).

We're still working on categorizing tags and functions as "core", "extended core" and "not core" (it's a big job - there are a *lot* of tags and functions!).

We're also starting to think about verbalizing "what is CFML?" as a way to create guidelines for vendors who are adding new features - so they stay idiomatic.

The site should launch "soon"... Trust me, we'll blog about it once we have it up with some content!

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