thecrumb.com » ColdFusion http://www.thecrumb.com ColdFusion, Ant, jQuery and other geeky stuff with the occasional motorcycle post. Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:52:33 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Do We Need A CFML Site? http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/06/24/do-we-need-a-cfml-site/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/06/24/do-we-need-a-cfml-site/#comments Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:46:02 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=465 I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else mention this but I thought it merited some discussion…

Brian Meloche has a post on his blog Promoting CFML Outside of the CFML Community - Results. I’m guessing this went down at CFUnited.

In particular I was interested in the results from the Group 1 discussion “Promoting CFML to New Developers“. There is a ton of good stuff in there but in particular I thought the first suggestion was timely: “Vendor-neutral CFML Evangelism Site”.

Does it make sense for this effort to work with the recently announced “CFML Language Advisory Committee”? It seems like they share some of the same goals and I’d hate to see a duplication in effort.

Is it time for a community driven “CFML” site?

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]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/06/24/do-we-need-a-cfml-site/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Open-source Killing Commercial Tools (IDE) http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/06/10/open-source-killing-commercial-tools-ide/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/06/10/open-source-killing-commercial-tools-ide/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:14:59 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=462 Saw this interesting article on Slashdot - Open Source Killing Commercial Developer Tools. Will Adobe ever release an updated IDE for ColdFusion?  And if they do - would anyone buy it?

The tools market is dead. Open source killed it. The only commercial tools that can survive today are the ones that leapfrog open source tools.

According to my IDE survey the majority of the 400 respondents indicated they would pay up to $500.

  • 111 - Free
  • 144 - $100
  • 126 - $100-500

But one wonders how much better it would have to be before people switched from the free CFEclipse.  And as I’ve said before - now with 4 CFML engines available - a ‘universal’ CFML IDE become even more important.

The Slashdot article leads to a post at DZone where the author discusses his new IDE which looks interesting as well.

UNA Collaborative Edition is a real-time collaborative development environment for software engineers. It lets two or more developers edit the same code, at the same time. It’s similar to pair programming, but better because both developers can contribute productively, whether they’re located across the hall from each other or on different continents.

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]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/06/10/open-source-killing-commercial-tools-ide/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ That Was Quick. OpenBD Out. Railo In. http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/06/08/that-was-quick-openbd-out-railo-in/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/06/08/that-was-quick-openbd-out-railo-in/#comments Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:32:07 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=456 An Open Message To Gert Franz And Railo

Wow. In a matter of a few days it seems the Open Blue Dragon project has imploded. First Neil Middleton’s post about a comment Vince Bonfanti made. Then Sean Corfield blogged a related post and a day later announces his resignation from the Open Blue Dragon project citing conversations that took place on the Steering Committee mailing list. We’ll probably never really know the full story but it’s a shame that the Open BD project will now probably be ostracized from the CF community.

Open Blue Dragon was always overshadowed by the bad blood that has existed between New Atlanta and Adobe.

Will Railo, with it’s clean history, be able to succeed?

Update: related blog posts:

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]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/06/08/that-was-quick-openbd-out-railo-in/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ More CFML Open-Source Goodness? Maybe? http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/06/05/more-cfml-open-source-goodness-maybe/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/06/05/more-cfml-open-source-goodness-maybe/#comments Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:49:08 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=454 So Railo is going open-source.  While I think this is a ‘good thing’ I am beginning to wonder how we as a CFML community are going to keep up?  While Open Blue Dragon has their steering committee I’m wondering if we don’t need something similar for CFML in general…

What is going to be considered the ‘core’ CFML tags? Where is the IDE that will handle all these different versions?  Is Adobe’s CFQuery going to be the same as OpenBD’s?

I see a lot of benefit in having several choices but it’s going to all be worthless if I can’t reliably port an application from one engine to another with no changes.

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]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/06/05/more-cfml-open-source-goodness-maybe/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ The Savvy CMS - CFEclipse.org Makeover - Part II http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/23/the-savvy-cms-cfeclipseorg-makeover-part-ii/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/23/the-savvy-cms-cfeclipseorg-makeover-part-ii/#comments Thu, 24 Apr 2008 01:07:03 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=435 When we last left our Savvy saga we were facing installation.  Again the great documentation made installation a breeze and sums up the steps required nicely:

Savvy CM installation is very easy. There are no installation programs to be run on the server, instead you copy your files to the web server, modify the includes.cfm file with the correct information for your installation, register the database in ColdFusion, then upload your templates.

There are a few things you need to consider. Savvy includes an application.cfm file so if you are installing Savvy into an existing application (which is possible) you need to take some additional steps in order to allow the use of the Savvy application.cfm. Again these are outlined in details in the online docs.

Next you modify a file, includes.cfm, in which you define you datasource, some path information, site name and description and some other general settings.  Next you run a diagnostic utility which will check your configuration, verify your datasources and warn you if you need to fix anything. If all looks well you can then use the same diagnostic page to create your database.

The few glitches I encountered during installation and configuration were all covered in the documentation.

Once you have Savvy installed and configured the next step is to create a template!

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]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/23/the-savvy-cms-cfeclipseorg-makeover-part-ii/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Triangle Area CFLunch - Come Join Me For Lunch! http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/16/triangle-area-cflunch-come-join-me-for-lunch/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/16/triangle-area-cflunch-come-join-me-for-lunch/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:44:32 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=423 CFLunch

A few weeks ago Dan Wilson and I met for lunch to swap some Flex books (thanks Dan!) and we both commented how we rarely get out of the office. So I thought it might be fun to have a casual ‘geek’ lunch once a month or so just to:

  1. Get out of the office
  2. Meet some fellow developers in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area
  3. Discuss geeky stuff

This is all very casual. Can’t show up - no sweat!

Ideally we could meet 2-3 times a month in various locations around the Triangle. Then everyone could attend a lunch and meet nearby CFers.

  • Work in Chapel Hill - announce a lunch and meet there…
  • Work in Raleigh - let’s meet downtown!

The ultimate goal is to stir up some activity in the local ColdFusion community and get more people out to the TACFUG meetings!!!!

We’ve scheduled our first meeting for this NEXT Friday (April 25th)! More information can be found on the TACFUG website.  If you are interested please leave a comment on the TACFUG site so we can get an idea oh how many to expect.

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]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/16/triangle-area-cflunch-come-join-me-for-lunch/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ The Closed State Of The ColdFusion Community http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/09/the-closed-state-of-the-coldfusion-community/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/09/the-closed-state-of-the-coldfusion-community/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:40:14 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=416 I saw this post on Mike Henke’s blog… ColdFusion is dead (yet again) and of course I had to go read it. Mike’s take was it was just another “CF is dead” rant. But I clicked through and read the original post The State Of ColdFusion and have to agree with many of the author’s points.

Some of the arguments: price, job market, etc., have been hashed over many times and I don’t think it’s worth beating that horse anymore. However he does ask some really hard questions which I thought were really good:

Now on the flip side when did you last hear about:

  • In fact anyone standing up talking about Coldfusion outside of a ColdFusion User Group. Doing this would at least make people aware of Coldfusion.
  • Any promotion of Coldfusion outside of the Coldfusion User Groups.
  • Coldfusion servers and educational package being rolled out free to universities so they can teach Coldfusion.
  • A graduate who knows what Coldfusion is.
  • A new book on Coldfusion in a bookstore online or otherwise.

These are some great questions! I don’t keep up with all the conferences but get the occasional mailer for things and I’ve never seen CF mentioned outside of Adobe/CF conferences (and maybe lately Flex stuff). It would be nice to compile a list of conferences we could possibly attend to spread the word.

We’ve hashed over the CF in education thing lately - this could be a big inroad possibly for Open Blue Dragon? In school? Walk in with OpenBD and CFEclipse on a CD…

And books. There is the WACK but I’d argue that’s not a ‘new’ book. Doing a quick search at Amazon I get 3 pages of results and the WACK series is the only new book I see listed.

I’m really hoping the Open Blue Dragon announcement can spark some excitement about CFML outside our community. Lots of potential here… Push OpenBD in the educational channels! Who’s going to write the first OpenBD book?? Can we get OpenBD into other web development conferences??

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]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/09/the-closed-state-of-the-coldfusion-community/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ The ‘Open’ CFML IDE Survey http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/09/the-open-cfml-ide-survey/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/09/the-open-cfml-ide-survey/#comments Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:00:01 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=414 Ray Camden kindly gave me access so I could setup a survey using his Soundings Survey application (it rocks!).

I’ve copied the original questions from the Adobe survey and added a few John Farrar sent me after some discussions on this open Aptana support ticket.

Once we collect some data I’ll publish the results on a regular basis (Ray’s app supports PDF, Excel and HTML export!). If we need more data we can do another survey….

The idea here is to collect some feedback on what you (the CFML community) want to see in an IDE. This data will be available to anyone who wants to help support CFEclipse or roll your own IDE.

So spread the word: Link to survey!

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]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/09/the-open-cfml-ide-survey/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ OpenBD Steering Committee http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/08/openbd-steering-committee/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/08/openbd-steering-committee/#comments Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:13:20 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=412 Alan has a list of the OpenBD (Open BlueDragon) Steering Committee on his blog:

Andy Allan, Peter Amiri, Mike Brunt, Sean Corfield, Mark Drew, Adam Haskell, Jordan Michaels, Alan Williamson, Matt Woodward and Andy Wu

LOTS of good names on there and some really nice quotes but obviously I’m going to have to step up and volunteer for the committee myself.

OpenBD is FREE

“formalised language”… “masterful clustering-replication mechanism”…

Huh?

Not one of them mentioned the dreaded ‘f-word‘…. Can’t anyone say it??! Me of shallow pockets (have you priced kid sneakers lately?) will…

OpenBD is Free!! (it even rhymes - marketing will love that)

OK. Now I feel better.

On a serious note - I am happy to see such prominent names on the committee and I’m really looking forward to seeing where all this goes. Exciting times!

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]]> http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/08/openbd-steering-committee/feed/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Testing Flex Applications? http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/07/testing-flex-applications/ http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/07/testing-flex-applications/#comments Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:56:28 +0000 Jim http://www.thecrumb.com/?p=410 We are exploring using Flex more (goodbye Powerbuilder!) here at work. We are also doing more and more testing and hope to eventually implement continuous integration.

I’ve seen a few tools to unit test Flex but I’m curious how you test Flex at the application level? For our web applications we are currently using Selenium.

Is there something similar for Flex?

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