2006 in Retrospect

Continuing my tradition from 2004 and 2005, here is my annual retrospective covering 2006. It was a strange year for me. My role at Adobe changed dramatically and my primary ColdFusion focus was on Fusebox outside of my day job - the year started and ended with Fusebox. My day job let me focus on ColdSpring and learn about the Reactor and Transfer ORMs but with a fairly narrow focus, to support our web services. The first half of the year was full of speaking engagements - including the inaugural cf.Objective() conference, the second half was full of deadlines and product launches. The Flex 2 product line was released and with it a new update to ColdFusion MX 7 that brought tight integration with Flex.

Here's my month-by-month rundown of the year from this architect's point of view:

• January
  • Just as last year began with a focus on Fusebox, so too did this year, starting with my announcement that I would be developing Fusebox 5. That set the flavor for the year with more blog posts about Fusebox in 2006 than in the previous years put together!
  • cf.Objective() was already on my mind as details of the conference began to appear, including Adobe being a platinum sponsor, so I booked my flight, hotel and figured out what I was going to talk about there.
  • One of my cf.Objective() talks - "Objects & Persistence" - premiered at the Portland CFUG near the end of the month.
  • Two red hot threads:
    • On topic: Interfaces in ColdFusion (68 comments - interfaces, dynamic typing and the utility of CFCs)
    • Off topic: How not to develop Open Source Software (92 comments - the "Ray Horn Debate")
• February
  • The Austin and Dallas CFUGs got to hear my "Objects & Persistence" talk.
  • cf.Objective() opened registration, posted its session schedule and closed its earlybird pricing.
  • Hal Helms and Jeff Peters launched their podcast "Out Loud" - compulsory listening for all CFers in my opinion!
  • I posted some tips on presenting via Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional (it was still known as Macromedia Breeze back then) that I find myself going back and reading before every presentation I give!
• March
  • I started my new role at Adobe at the beginning of March - it's been a wild ride since!
  • Denver CFUG got "Objects & Persistence", Sacramento CFUG got "Managing ColdFusion Components with Factories", cf.Objective() got both of them. It was a huge success - major kudos to Jared Rypka-Hauer for organizing that!
  • I got hooked on mind mapping and have been using it extensively ever since for a number of tasks from web site planning to general note taking.
  • Jeff Peters released a great little book on using XML in ColdFusion for less than $20.
  • A public beta of Flash Player 9 became available (it was still known as Flash Player 8.5 back then). Later in the year we saw the full public release of Flash Player 9 for Windows, Mac PowerPC and Mac Intel as well as a public beta for Linux.
  • I wrote quite a bit about Model-Glue, ColdSpring and Reactor in these three posts.
  • Matt Woodward and Peter Farrell launched their podcast "ColdFusion Weekly" - more compulsory listening for all CFers!
• April
  • Joe Rinehart released Model-Glue 1.1 and talked about plans for the 2.0 "Unity" release.
  • I upgraded my site to run a pre-alpha build of Fusebox 5 and then released Fusebox 5 Alpha 1 to a small group of testers. I also showed how custom lexicons could be used to write Model-Glue-style fuseactions with message broadcasts and views. Alpha 2 followed after another upgrade to my site (which is currently running a pre-beta build of Fusebox 5.1!) and the Fusebox bug tracker became available thanks to Simeon Bateman.
  • I praised the ColdFusion Weekly podcast. I have to say it's continued to go from strength to strength as the year has rolled past.
  • I released a very simple remote file manager (ZIP), built with Model-Glue, and blogged about how to use it.
• May
  • adobe.com and macromedia.com merged - I talked about how the combined site is powered by ColdFusion.
  • I worked on Fusebox documentation and released Fusebox 5 Alpha 3 and Beta 1 - and by the end of the month, my site was running on a Beta 2 candidate build. I was trying to keep to a two week release cycle at this point.
  • The Bay Area CFUG got my "Factories" talk and I posted the recording link.
  • I bemoaned a badly designed Mach II application that would be hard to retrofit with a Flex UI. It should be a lesson in how to build self-contained business models!
  • I started looking for a ColdFusion developer to work on my team and it proved harder than I imagined. It took two months to find a suitable candidate (see June and August).
  • We bought a Scooba!
• June - what a month for frameworks!
  • ColdSpring reached 1.0 status (RC1 was released at the beginning of the month with the general release just before CFUNITED).
  • The ORM framework Reactor reached Beta 2.
  • Inspired by the Ruby on Rails video, Joe Rinehart released his blog-in-nine-minutes Model-Glue 2.0 video and blew a lot of people away! The public beta followed a few days later - read my initial thoughts about Unity.
  • Fusebox 5 reached its Beta 2 milestone and I finally released the Model-Glue lexicon example. Just before CFUNITED, I gave a shout out to many of the people who had helped make Fusebox 5 a success - once again, I thank you all. RC1 was made available to the public on June 28th.
  • I got my wonderful MacBook Pro and thus began my love affair with Parallels Desktop.
  • The Bay Area CFUG got my "Persistence" talk and I posted the recording link.
  • The "frighteningly prolific" Peter Bell started blogging. Later in the month, Ashwin Mathew of the ColdFusion product team started blogging.
  • Hot thread: MySQL Administrator? (36 comments). FWIW, I'm still using CocoaMySQL.
  • CFUNITED:
    • ColdFusion MX 7.0.2 and the Flex 2 product line were released to much acclaim.
    • My roundup posts for day one, day two and day three. The latter included my take on Duck Typing after inheriting the session from Hal Helms. If I could go back and redo one thing in 2006 it would be not mentioning any possible performance improvements to be gained from duck typing... sigh!
  • And we bought a Roomba!
• July
  • CFUNITED spilled into July with my day four roundup and coverage of Simon Horwith's Object Think talk. The duck typing performance debate continued so I posted more links to the subject and referenced a final comment from Zach Loch!
  • Fusebox 5 was released to the public right at the end of the month.
  • The inaugural issue of the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update was published. High-quality content and almost zero advertising - very impressive work from Judith & Michael Dinowitz and their team of volunteers!
  • My team, Hosted Services, released two new services:
    • The public beta of Protect an Adobe PDF - later replaced by the Adobe Document Center (see November).
    • JamJar - collaborative spaces in Flex.
  • Google started open source project hosting in another step toward becoming a one-stop shop for free, ad-supported, online services of all kinds.
  • My blog reached 1,000,000 page views.
  • Hot threads - mostly focused on ColdFusion and OO support:
    • Java or Ruby? (131 comments - boy, did I touch a nerve with this one!).
    • What is in your wish list? (49 comments - this was a common theme on blogs in the middle of the year).
    • Continuing the ColdFusion and OO theme, I blogged about a comparison with Smalltalk.
• August
  • The position I opened in May was finally filled when Paul Kenney of Tartan and cfcUnit fame joined my team.
  • I finally gave in and had to add comment moderation on my blog :(
  • I was able to talk in architectural terms about what my team was doing with ColdSpring and, initially, Reactor (and, later, Transfer) as well as the REST adapter I built to expose remote CFC methods via HTTP POSTs and XML.
  • And my wife became a cat show judge...
• September
  • After releasing the REST adapter, I released the cfcUnit tests for it and wrote a long post about writing testable software.
  • I started to write more about Mark Mandel's Transfer ORM (my notes on his presentation, building a Transfer adapter for Model-Glue which was incorporated into the core Transfer files and then updated some more, some notes on usage).
  • I continued to write about the architecture of the systems my team was building with Model-Glue, ColdSpring and Transfer and we announced Adobe Acrobat Connect.
  • Hot thread: my Scorpio Wish List (26 comments - my response to the discussions that started back in July).
• October
  • I released my Closures for ColdFusion MX library and then reorganized all my open source projects on Google.
  • A long, involved debate started up about static typing versus dynamic typing. A post on Nando's blog started my ball rolling on this, followed by my response to Vince Bonfanti's thoughts on dynamic typing and then on whether ColdFusion is Java lite. Peter Bell had pretty much the final word here.
  • I started work on Fusebox 5.1 and Transfer 0.6 RC1 was released.
  • And Nick Tong ran a poll on frameworks which was a bit of fun - 330 votes cast so far.
• November
  • eBay started to offer free Flex training through the Silicon Valley Flex User Group. I took the training and finally started to build Flex applications. I just wish I'd had the chance and the cause to do so earlier.
  • My team launched Adobe Acrobat Connect alongside Acrobat 8 and two weeks later we launched the Adobe Document Center. Then the Creative Suite group launched Kuler on <labs> which uses some of my team's web services.
  • I enjoyed a vacation in Los Angeles, England and France - mostly due to my wife's first two judging assignments.
  • And The Fall's "Blindness" appeared in a Mitsubishi Outlander commercial... I'm still shocked every time the commercial comes on television.
• December
  • Mach II 1.1.1 was released and the Fusebox 5.1 public beta started.
  • The second issue of the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update was published.
  • TeraTech took over stewardship of Fusebox. 2007 should be a stellar year for Fusebox!

Last year I predicted that ColdFusion (and its community) would continue to grow and go from strength to strength with more frameworks appearing and that ColdSpring would become far more popular, perhaps even mainstream. I also said we should look forward to cf.Objective() (it was awesome!), CFUNITED 2006 (it was huge!) and Adobe's MAX (which was, by all reports, very impressive). I also hoped for another TeraTech Frameworks conference - it's coming up in February 2007 but, like the previous Frameworks conference, I can't make it, alas!.

I think ColdFusion and its community has definitely continued to grow - the release of Flex and ColdFusion MX 7.0.2 has opened up a whole new area for developers to extend their reach and their skills. We also got a great new ColdFusion publication: Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. We got at least one new framework (ColdBox by Luis Majano) and major new releases of Model-Glue (2.0 beta 1 a.k.a. Unity) and Fusebox (5.0 with a beta of 5.1 appearing at the end of the year). ColdSpring has definitely become much more popular, with numerous talks at user groups and conferences as well as increased coverage on blogs. Model-Glue 2.0 relies heavily on ColdSpring, Mach II has improved integration with ColdSpring this year and Fusebox 5.1 provides a custom lexicon to make it easy to use ColdSpring. That may or may not be mainstream to you but it seems pretty close to me!

So what will 2007 bring? Apollo, Scorpio. What more could you want?

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