An Architect's View - ColdFusion, Software Design, Frameworks and more...

Blog Ethics

seancorfield — 2008-05-14T11:38:00-05:00

Someone who commented several times on one of my blog entries has been bombarding me with email because I criticized them in comments on that entry and then refused to approve any more of their comments. Now they're demanding that I delete all their comments from my blog and they're starting to threaten me. What would you do if you received an email like this?

The impossibility you imply does not exist. I didn't request that you delete my comments from the public record; I requested that you delete them from your blog. Running a blog comes with some responsibility. Read up on authorship on the World Wide Web. It is my right to demand that you no longer carry my comments on your blog. You have given more than enough reason to justify my decision. Oh, and you make a mistake in assuming I'm going to be waiting a long time. I'm giving you the opportunity to do the right thing. Of course, you may continue to ignore it if you want. Then you will learn the hard way.

Here's the blog entry in question that started the exchange with this person.

Open BlueDragon Blog

seancorfield — 2008-05-12T13:54:00-05:00

The OpenBD website now has a blog where the latest project news will be posted by members of the steering committee. It has already been aggregated by feed-squirrel.

VMWare image with OpenBD, Tomcat, MySQL available

seancorfield — 2008-05-11T15:53:00-05:00

SixSigns have published a VMWare image containing Open BlueDragon on Tomcat with MySQL preconfigured for folks to download and play with. It will run on the free VMWare Player as well as VMWare Fusion for Mac OS X. It's a good way to get started with Open BlueDragon without needing to change your existing development environment.

CFDevCon 2008 details announced

seancorfield — 2008-05-10T13:35:00-05:00

The CFDevCon 2008 website just launched with details about the location and an initial list of speakers and topics. September 25-26, Brighton, UK. As you can see, no topic is listed for me yet. My talk (or talks, perhaps) at CFDevCon 2008 will be brand new so if you catch me at Scotch on the Rocks, you'll still get all new content in Brighton, later in the year. With that in mind, what would you like to hear me talk about? I have a few ideas, based on my work at Broadchoice with Model-Glue, ColdSpring and Transfer, but I'm happy to entertain suggestions from folks who might attend CFDevCon 2008 in Brighton in September!

OpenBD ready2run on Amazon!

seancorfield — 2008-05-10T13:20:00-05:00

An Open BlueDragon AMI is available on Amazon which is built on Cent OS and uses Jetty. I haven't tried this yet but wanted to spread the word for those who are using Amazon to run images.

MXUnit team on Open BlueDragon

seancorfield — 2008-05-10T01:43:00-05:00

The MXUnit team have posted instructions on how to get OpenBD running on Tomcat and JBoss. Another useful resource. The MXUnit team have committed to having MXUnit running on OpenBD (which means removing some strange ColdFusion-specific Java code).

Centralized Open BlueDragon Install

seancorfield — 2008-05-10T00:22:00-05:00

Per Kleven has posted instructions for setting up a centralized installation where you have a single set of OpenBD files shared across multiple web applications on Tomcat.

CFUNITED adds two more Adobe ColdFusion team speakers

seancorfield — 2008-05-09T23:37:00-05:00

CFUNITED just announced two new topics from Adobe ColdFusion team members Chandan Kumar (PDF documents and forms) and Manju Kiran (64-bit ColdFusion). They join Rupesh Kumar, who will be talking about cfthread. It's great to see more of the Bangalore-based ColdFusion team attending conferences! It's good for us to put faces to the ultra-smart guys who build the product we love. It's good for those engineers to meet and talk with the customers who use what they build. [More]

Community and Licensing

seancorfield — 2008-05-09T20:43:00-05:00

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. [More]

Frameworks, Frameworks Everywhere

seancorfield — 2008-05-09T13:34:00-05:00

Kay Smoljak is running a series of interviews with framework developers and has a summary article on SitePoint that includes a survey of people's framework usage. It's going to be a great series of articles and makes interesting reading (FarCry and COOP have been covered so far with Fusebox, Mach-II, Transfer and ColdBox coming soon - and Model-Glue and ColdSpring et al to follow). The survey will only be open for a few more days so rush over and make your voice heard!

Neil Middleton on Open BlueDragon

seancorfield — 2008-05-07T12:47:00-05:00

Neil has an interesting take on Open BlueDragon: he says it makes CFML development easy again and goes on to talk about how the small size of OpenBD and the structure of it allows you to work on packaged applications very, very easily within Eclipse.

Open BlueDragon - Video of Mac OS X setup in Eclipse

seancorfield — 2008-05-04T16:46:00-05:00

Adam Haskell has posted a video showing how to get Open BlueDragon to build / run in Eclipse on Mac OS X. He has also posted a patch file for the cfEngine.java change.

Open BlueDragon - Source change to run on server via Eclipse

seancorfield — 2008-05-04T11:43:00-05:00

This change is certainly needed in order to deploy and run OpenBD directly on a server via Eclipse. It may be needed to run outside of that environment. Either way, it's a small change. In src/com/naryx/tagfusion/cfm/engine/cfEngine.java, around line 607 at the start of setTempDirectory(), you'll see:

tempDirectory = getResolvedFile(systemParameters.getString("server.system.tempdirectory"));

This will fail if the server.system.tempdirectory property is not defined. Replace that line with:

String tempPath = systemParameters.getString("server.system.tempdirectory");

if (tempPath != null) {
tempDirectory = getResolvedFile(tempPath);
}

Now you should be able to build (choose the war target of the build/build.xml file) and then do a clean publish to your server (right-click on the server in the Servers view and select Clean... and click OK). Hit http://localhost:8080/openbd/ (or whatever you set the context root to) and you should be rewarded with the BlueDragon CFML Test Page!

Open BlueDragon - Building from source on Mac OS X

seancorfield — 2008-05-04T11:12:00-05:00

I'll post more detailed notes shortly but I wanted to quickly get a couple of things out there for folks who are trying this. This post assumes you are carefully following the docs/BuildingDebugging.txt instructions (in the OpenBD source download). First off, Java on Mac OS X does not have a tools.jar file so you can ignore the step in the OpenBD instructions about setting up the JDK_15_TOOLS class path variable (tools.jar is incorporated directly into the base JDK install on a Mac). Second, when you import the OpenBD source project, it almost certainly won't let you attach it to a J2EE server (using the Servers view in Eclipse 3.3). This is because it does not have the correct project facets. Right click on your OpenBD project, select Properties, select Project Facets and then Modify Project... Add Java and Dynamic Web Module. Click Finish and then OK. Now you should be able to add the OpenBD project to your chosen server. You may have duplicate libraries at this point (Vince did and I did but that may be due to attempting to build it without setting up the facets properly). Right click on your OpenBD project, select Properties, select Java Build Path and look at the Libraries tab - if you have duplicates, you'll get a red error message at the top, and you just need to delete the duplicates. At that point, you'll need one source code change to get it to run. I'll cover that in a separate post.

Open BlueDragon at cf.Objective()

seancorfield — 2008-05-03T23:31:00-05:00

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