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. (more…)

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. (more…)

As folks know, I’m a big advocate of automated testing in general and unit testing in particular. I’ve gradually become a big fan of Test-Driven Development (TDD) where you write tests first and then write the code to satisfy the tests. I’m pleased to see unit testing well enough established in CFML development now that we have several unit testing frameworks (my current favorite being MXUnit, which I think has become the de facto standard choice for most CFers who are doing unit testing).

Getting into TDD is not easy, however, and I think there are a couple of conceptual problems that take a while to get your head around. One is just a simple case of “Where do I start?”. Given a blank piece of paper, how do you just start writing tests that are an accurate representation of what the yet-to-be-written system is supposed to do?

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I just received my final evaluation forms from MAX 2008. With the exception of one person who “Fell asleep during presentation. It was offensive.”, the comments were mostly positive. There was, however, an interesting undercurrent…

The talk - Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion - shows how to apply the same style of programming that is common in Flex to your server-side CFML code. Consequently, it uses several examples from Flex to set the scene. The intent of the talk is two-fold: 1. to show folks who are new to Flex how to start practicing that style of programming, by way of preparation for Flex; 2. to show folks who are alreday using Flex how to leverage the same style in CFML, making it less jarring to switch back and forth between client and server code.

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cf.Objective() Call for Speakers

Invites have gone out to an initial round of speakers (with suggested topics). Now is the time to throw the doors open wide and accept suggestions / submissions from everyone to fill the remaining slots! See the cf.Objective() 2009 call for speakers.

Scotch on the Road 2009

Big Mad Kev has made it official: Scotch on the Rocks will hit the road in early June 2009! The plan is a day in London on June 1st focusing on CFML, a day in Edinburgh on June 3rd focusing on CFML and Flex and a day in Dublin on June 5th focusing on Flex and AIR. The tentative schedule allows for seven sessions, starting at a leisurely 10am (registration starts at 9:30am). The intent is to reduce your costs by having the conference come to a city near you instead of you having to travel and stay somewhere.

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I just noticed that Mach-II 1.6.0 Release Candidate 1 has just been released! (more…)