Jun/098
Railo Express – Quick and Dirty CFML Server
During the recent Adobe User Group Tour – I had to whip up a little app to randomly pick some winners from our RSVP list.
Easy enough but when I went to code it on my laptop I realized I had never installed ColdFusion on it. Oops. I was a bit pressed for time and really didn’t want to mess with getting IIS/Apache running and the long ColdFusion download and install.
I vaguely remembered something about an “Express” version of Railo and a quick visit to getrailo.org and I was downloading a reasonably sized 60mb zip file.
Railo Express is a live version which means that it does not need to be installed. Just extract the zip file it onto your computer and without further installation you can start. This is especially interesting if you e.g. would like to get to know Railo and want to test your applications under Railo or simply use it as development background.
Unzip. I clicked start.bat, Railo spooled up and 30 seconds later I had a running CFML server sitting at localhost:8888! Wow!
So now I’ve got a copy of Railo Express stashed on my USB drive I carry around. Super convenient to have a CFML server available with no installation required and no services running hogging up resources.
Apr/096
Where Does CFEclipse Fit In An Open CFML World?
Lately with all the news about open source CFML I’ve been wondering where CFEclipse fits in? We all know Bolt is on the horizon but being an Adobe product I simply don’t see it supporting the other CFML engines.
While CFEclipse certainly isn’t going anywhere – I do wonder about it’s future. Mark Drew has moved on to Railo (a good thing!). While Mark has stated CFEclipse is not dead, I do wonder how much time he will realistically be able to commit to the project.
So What’s The Big Deal?
I use CFEclipse everyday and it does work, but much like a car, without regular maintenance things begin to fall apart. Today there are over 200 open tickets in the CFEclipse bug tracker. The Adobe ColdFusion Extensions are broken. And I wonder if interest is waning because Bolt is coming?
The Future
I’ve always thought that CFEclipse should be an open “CFML” editor and given the Eclipse plugin architecture it seems like CFEclipse could be built to support the CFML Advisory Board’s ‘core’ CFML language by default and other vendors could supply plugins (free or commercial) that would provide language support for their products. Grand ideas for sure…
The Solution?
I’m not sure what the solution is? People on the mailing list have openly stated they would be willing to pay to have features added to CFEclipse. But who to pay is the question? While we have an abundance of users - people with the time, skills and knowledge to work under the hood have been hard to find.
It may be too early for this but I have wondered if the new CFML kids on the block (OpenBD and Railo) would have spare resources available to help support CFEclipse?
For years the biggest complaint about ColdFusion was the lack of a good IDE. CFEclipse has filled that gap, and with the alternatives (Bolt, Homesite and Dreamweaver) being Adobe products - the CFML community will have much to gain by keeping CFEclipse healthy and open.
Apr/092
Open Source CFML Makes Me Cry
Yep. I’m the “Linux” guy. The anti-Microsoft basher that you get tired of hearing. But I can’t help it. Open-source is here to stay I think and we all need to get used to it – and this includes the CFML community!
The CFML world has long had a closed mindset and I still don’t think most of the community realizes what a revolutionary shift this is for us all. We’ve long been sitting under the Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe umbrella and drinking the Kool Aid…
I admit the beginnings were a bit rocky – but I think that was to be expected. To be honest even I wasn’t sure if open source CFML was going to ’stick’. Adobe has a really big umbrella! But lately though I think open source CFML is gaining traction and is here to stay.
I think both organizations now have some well respected names associated with them to lead the way:
OpenBD has Matt Woodward (Mach-II) who I think is an OS zealot like myself and will be a great resource and speaker for OpenBD.
Last week we learned (on April Fools Day!) that Mark Drew (of CFEclipse fame) was joining the UK Railo team as CEO and today we learn that Peter Bell is joining the US Railo team!
Whoa!
No longer are these merely fancy product titles floating around behind an open source idealogy. Now we have some big community members throwing their support behind the concepts! And I know these people will not let these products wither and die. They are all passionate people who have the best in mind for CFML and I’m so excited to come along for the ride!
Dec/080
CFML Update (from MAX)
Sean Corfield posted his thoughts on MAX 2008 recently on Fusion Authority. One of the tidbits in there caught my eye where Sean discusses a bit of what’s going on with the CFML Advisory Committee which we haven’t heard from in quite awhile. This came up during a session at MAX: CFML: Evolution of the Language:
Next up was the last session of my day:
CFML: Evolution of the Language. No one had contacted me about this, which I thought was a bit off considering I’m chair of the CFML Advisory Committee, but Mark Phillips had managed to get Adam Haskell and Matt Woodward (OpenBD project) and Gert Franz (Railo) involved via Connect, as well as a smattering of Adobe folks, including Jason Delmore. Since I wasn’t officially involved in the BOF, I stayed in the audience until it was impossible for me to stay quiet any longer and I got up on stage to join Jason and the host.
Mark Phillips has a good blog post covering what was discussed as well as a link to a Connect recording of some of the event that is worth a listen as well!
Some very good stuff in there about the future direction of CFML and how the 3 main players (Adobe, OpenBD and Railo) hope to work together between themselves and with the CFML community in the future. I’m looking forward to 2009 and hope we see more from the CFML Advisory Committee.
Jun/0813
Do We Need A CFML Site?
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?
Jun/087
More CFML Open-Source Goodness? Maybe?
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.
Apr/081
CMFL IDE Survey – Initial Results
The ‘Open’ CFML Survey has been up for about a week. As promised here is the first round of results:
| Total Number of Survey Results | 371 |
| First Result | 4/09/08 1:35 AM |
| Last Result | 4/16/08 6:45 PM |
Results are available in both PDF and Excel:
- PDF: cfml-ide-report-041708
- Excel: cfml-ide-report-041708
Both these are just a dump of the data – no pretty graphs. I’m going to try and go through some of this data and summarize it a bit in a more readable format (hopefully I can get to this over the weekend)
I did dump the HTML output (with pretty graphs) into a PDF as well.
- PDF (with graphs): cfml-ide-report-041708a
This is a bit nicer to look at but you can’t drill down into the ‘other’ replies, etc.
Apr/080
CFEclipse Discussions
If you are concerned with the direction and future of CFEclipse – I’d urge you to check out the CFEclipse mailing list. Marc Esher has a great post “Where Is CFEclipse Headed“. I’ve been having similar thoughts lately – he just beat me to the punch in organizing them into a cohesive thought :)
Check out Marc’s post and please consider joining the CFEclipse mailing list and contribute your thoughts.
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