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

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

Tomcat can do SES URLs, albeit with some limitations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make sure you RSVP via the BACFUG website!

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

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

Thank you Todd!

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

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