One of the nice aspects of the “Professional Open Source Sofware” business model is that you can be very flexible for your customers. The Railo server has a roadmap of core features and downloadable extensions - some free, some paid - but our roadmap can easily be influenced by our customers. Now that more developers are trying Railo every day, we’re seeing more interest in certain features that were already on our roadmap but were either lower priority or scheduled some distance off in the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Marc Funaro kicked off quite a heated debate on his blog lately by raging against people pushing object-oriented programing/design and how his attempt to follow their advice nearly led to the collapse of his business. Marc was expressing a common frustration that many of us have heard from people who try to learn OO, especially from people with a long history of procedural programming and/or no computer science background. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately, the committee has been looking at proposals to extend CFSCRIPT so that components can be written entirely in CFSCRIPT instead of requiring tags. Adobe has been the main driver for the proposals but other committee members have been providing their share of ideas and suggestions when we get stuck (or don’t like Adobe’s proposals).

Right now, we have a pretty solid definition of how CFSCRIPT should work so that you can write entire components. Mostly it follows what you may have seen Adobe show off at conferences but Adobe is still making changes in response to feedback from the committee (and its own banks of prerelease testers, I’m sure) and some of Adobe’s suggestions were considered vendor-specific by the committee.

But we’re stuck on a couple of tags that we’re really struggling to define in CFSCRIPT. We’d like you to help us make some decisions here!

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One of the great things about free open source software (FOSS) is that you can use it without it costing you a penny and you can modify the software to suit your needs and, depending on the license, even bundle it as part of a commercial product you may develop.

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The last week has seen some big announcements in the CF world! On March 31st, Gert announced the open source release of Railo, the next day Mark Drew announced he has joined Railo as CEO of the new Railo UK and then this week Peter Bell announced that he has also joined Railo and will be heading up the new Railo US operation.

I’ve been using ColdFusion since 2001, back when I worked at Macromedia and my team of Java and C++ developers first encountered CFML in the form of very early builds of what went on to become CFMX (6.0). We were pretty skeptical at first.

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Ben Nadel had a bit of a “crisis of faith” last week over his ability to learn OOP the “right” way. He’s highlighted a problem most people have coming to OO these days: in their search for the One True Way(tm), they are overwhelmed and can feel like failures. It can be a long, hard road. In a comment on his blog, I recommended everyone read the first two paragraphs of the “Gang of Four” Design Patterns book because it really sets this in context. I’m going to reproduce those first two paragraphs here to get you thinking. I highly recommend buying and reading the book.

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Luis Majano is offering a one day ColdBox training course on May 13th in the Hyatt (the cf.Objective() hotel). Cost $449. If you’ve already registered for cf.Objective() and want to add this training day, contact Cathy at Best Meetings (cathy at bestmeetings dot com).

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Save $130 with cf.Objective() Early Bird

cf.Objective() 2009 early bird pricing ends on March 16th and the price will go up by $130 after that.

3-day registration is currently $549. 2-day registration is $499.

After March 16th, 3-day registration will be $679 and 2-day registration will be $549. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of people have asked about OpenBD being represented on the CFML Advisory Committee since the original announcement at CFUNITED 2008. I’m pleased to announce that today Matt Woodward joined the committee, representing the OpenBD CFML engine. We now have the three major CFML engines represented on the committee: Adobe ColdFusion, Railo and Open BlueDragon.

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A year ago, I challenged the community to evangelize ColdFusion and convert new developers from other technologies. It was part of a blog post that examined and rebuffed several common arguments that often arise within the community as to why ColdFusion is not more popular. Most of those arguments focus on what people think Adobe should do to make ColdFusion more popular. A lot has happened in the last year since that blog post so I want to revisit the arguments and see where we stand today. Read the rest of this entry »