Life at Broadchoice

May 28, 2008 · 5 Comments

May has been a quiet month on the blog because it has been an extremely busy month at Broadchoice. We completed our 2.0.2 and 2.0.3 releases and launched the new platform with a fair bit of press coverage. The platform is powered by ColdFusion 8.0.1, running Model-Glue 2 (BER), ColdSpring 1.2 BER and Transfer 1.0 BER and runs on a cluster of 64-bit Linux servers with synchronization of the Transfer cache managed through a set of ActiveMQ JMS server instances. The database is MySQL. We're continuing to work on a stream of minor releases as well as planning our next major release with a lot of new features. I'll be pulling together some presentations and articles about how we're using the frameworks together (because I think we're doing some interesting and unusual things, behind the scenes). I'll some a few snippets of code at Scotch in both of my presentations (and again at CFUNITED). I'm talking to the CFDevcon organizers about appropriate topics and they suggested a framework-related session so that might be the first unveiling of some of our ColdSpring / Transfer tricks and tips. I expect Ray will also be blogging about some aspects of our application architecture in due course. Feel free to sign up for a free Broadchoice account and see what we've been up to! Our support site (also powered by the Broadchoice Web Platform, as is our public website - we like to eat our own dog food!) has several ways for you to provide feedback to us!

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Tags: broadchoice · cfdevcon08 · cfunited08 · coldfusion · coldspring · modelglue · orm

5 responses so far ↓

1 John Allen // May 29, 2008 at 4:54 PM

I am VERY excited to read about your experiences. Such a good writer doing such cool things.
2 Stan Cox // May 30, 2008 at 6:49 AM

Stan Cox approves of the use of javascript alerts for form validation.
3 Rif Kiamil // Jun 1, 2008 at 4:33 PM

If we want to use your product we our current CF/ASP.NET site, how could we tie in the user account managment?

aka

Single Sign On.
4 Edward Chowdhury // Jun 2, 2008 at 7:26 AM

Looks great. I assume you built and architected a CMS right or did you choose an open source project to base this on?

Also how did you do the friendly urls. Did you map all possible requests to the coldfusion runtime or use mod_rewrite or something similar?
5 Sean Corfield // Jun 2, 2008 at 10:25 AM

@Stan, I'm not a fan of those either (I didn't do the UI) and we are getting rid of them in favor of "proper" in-place messaging (which you'll find in *most* forms now).

@Rif, we're looking at how best to offer integration with third-party systems but much depends on how much of a security handshake those systems provide (and, of course, we want to solve this in a relatively generic way so that we don't have to maintain custom code for each client).

@Edward, the core is an in-house designed CMS. The friendly URLs are all handled via mod_rewrite on Apache.

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