I just noticed that Mach-II 1.6.0 Release Candidate 1 has just been released! Read the rest of this entry »

People love music and they love movies.  So it makes sense that music videos can be pretty popular, too, and it should come as no surprise that a new site called MTV Music has caught the eye of the ColdFusion crowd.

Enjoy Metallica?  Or maybe Radiohead?  Take a moment to explore the site, if you want - we’ll be here when you get back.  MTV’s gathered together music videos featuring all sorts of artists, and some interviews and live performance clips, too, so there’s definitely some fun stuff to see.

Now, we’ll move on to how MTV Music relates to ColdFusion.  Two days ago, Raymond Camden wrote, “[T]hey have a nice API: MTVN Content API.  Let’s see who can get the first CFC wrapper done.”  Earlier today, Matt Gifford stepped forward with some things to say and show.

Gifford stated, “My main aim was to create a CFC that would bring back as much combined detail for the user as possible, all contained within a structure and arrays within.  I am really happy with the results so far, and look forward to working on it to tidy it up, add more features, and release it to the big wide open(source).”

Also, as things stand, you can play with his CFC wrapper here.

Here’s hoping you have some fun with the concept.  And since it’s almost Halloween, here’s a fairy tale/horror story of sorts not available on MTV Music.

I said I’d blog more about Adam Lehman’s keynote at A Wee Dram so here it is…

Adam talked about the success of CF8 and the huge uptick in the number of developers since 2007 (I forgot to write down the name of the research company that provided that data but it was a third party, not Adobe). He said that the increase in interest and use of ColdFusion has meant that the lack of (good) developers was one of the primary problems that companies face. Claude Englebert, Adobe’s EMEA CF specialist, confirmed that after meeting with companies all over Europe, CF is very strong but the problem is finding (good) developers.

Adam talked a bit about the various advisory committees (both internal and the public CFML group that I chair) and the free-for-educational-use availability of CF8 from https://freeriatools.adobe.com/coldfusion/.

Next Adam ran through the proposed features for Centaur, including a few new things. He covered the language enhancements around cfscript and CFCs as well as touching on the Hibernate integration.

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Gert Franz just announced the release of Railo 3.0 and one of the important changes for many CFers is that this release combines the previous Community and Professional editions into a single free edition with no restrictions for use (it’s a single “web” with no clustering support but there’s always the commercial Enterprise edition if you need those features).

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ColdFusion is receiving more positive news coverage from mainstream tech sites.

Over at Fusion Authority they point to an article by Joe Rinehart on Dr. Dobb’s Portal. Rinehart says ColdFusion has become his application server of choice. He says he prefers it because it combines straightforward development with features such as Flash Remoting and real-time messaging gateways that make communication between the application server and Flex RIAs simpler.

On the HTML Goodies site, Doug Hughes writes favorably of ColdFusion. “ColdFusion has always focused on making complex and difficult tasks easy. The classic example of this is the ease of querying databases”.

“In most languages you need to have several lines of code to establish a connection to a database server (more if you’re using connection pooling), several lines to build your SQL statement, a couple lines to send the request, more to close the connection and then several more lines of code just to output data from the query into an HTML list. However, early versions of ColdFusion consolidated most of this tedious process into one tag that wraps the SQL statement you’re running and one tag that iterates over results.”

Its good to see ColdFusion receive some positive coverage from other mainstream tech sites.

People who hate surprises may want to steer clear, and those who often find themselves without even a few minutes to spare should be cautious, as well. An Online ColdFusion Meetup is approaching, though, and the event’s open-ended schedule looks like it could play in some attendees’ favor.

Is your calendar clear on August 21st at around noon eastern time? Raymond Camden will be speaking, and on his ColdFusion blog, he wrote, “I’d love it if folks who are planning on attending could give me some topic suggestions. Anything but ColdFusion 8 and Ajax, which is cool and all, but I’ve given that presentation about 10 times this year, and don’t want to give it again until I have to at MAX.”

Only twelve comments have been made following that post, and since one was a joke and another was from Camden, you still have a very good chance of getting your recommendations noticed. Or, if you feel like following the crowd - or just want to know what’s likely to happen - the audience is currently favoring a discussion of CFCs.

All that’s left for you to do beyond the point of weighing in is the simple act of joining up. On the appropriate date and a little before the correct time, visit http://experts.acrobat.com/cfmeetup and select the “log in as guest” option. Then you should be a part of the Online ColdFusion Meetup.

Have fun and learn a lot.

Over on Will Tomlinson’s blog there’s a piece about using structCopy() to create a copy of a struct and a note from Charlie Griefer cautioning that for Will’s example, he probably needed to use duplicate() instead. After discussing this will Will on IM, I figured it might be instructive to look at how structCopy() differs from duplicate() and why you might use it instead.

First off, let me say that the reason I think this causes confusion for a lot of CFers is that they don’t have a Computer Science background so they’ve not had the “Memory and Pointers 101″ course that makes this stuff a lot clearer. Hopefully, this blog post will help fill in some of the gaps.

Some basics. When you assign something to a variable in CFML, you are really doing two things: you are creating a label (the variable name) and you are allocating some memory to associate the label with the data. In particular, with structs, the struct itself exists in a block of memory (well, lots of connected blocks of memory) and then the variable “points to” the struct data.

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Working backwards…

I already blogged the Adobe keynote at Scotch on the Rocks but wanted to cover some of the sessions and the overall feel of the conference.

As I said before, it had a nice, relaxed feel to it and Andy Allan, Big Mad Kev and Stephen Moretti did a great job creating a conference that felt like a bunch of developers simply sharing their experiences and their wisdom. It was a really enjoyable three days with some fascinating sessions in an incredible location.

Neil Webb “Cairngorm for Beginners”. I like Neil’s analogies and presentation style. He was very frank about some of the things people don’t like about Cairngorm but showed how code is organized and did a good job of making it approachable.

Nicholas Lierman “Web Analytics for Developers”. This was a hard hitting presentation (most of what you think you know about analytics is wrong) with a lot of good, real-world advice and some real insight into using tools properly to filter and segment and analyze data to identify behavior.

Neil Middleton “jQuery in a Nutshell”. An excellent introduction to the power of jQuery. I’m only just starting to get into jQuery so I learned quite a few things from this session.

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Scotch has a nice, relaxed feel to it (some people might call it disorganized but I rather like it). The keynote was Ben Forta and Adam Lehman tag-teaming the state of the ColdFusion world (CF8 doing very well, working hard on Centaur).

Big news for European CFers - there is now a dedicated EMEA ColdFusion specialist, Claude Englebert, so that there is a direct contact for all sales-related issues. This was the hottest issue brought up at MAX Barcelona so it’s good to see the U.S. model being rolled out in Europe.

Ben emphasized that CFers should be using CFCs to write better structured code and separating presentation code (CFM pages) from business logic (CFCs). He then went on to talk about LiveCycle Data Services and Adam ran thru some simple demos of what is possible with very little MXML code and almost no CFML code.

Ben closed by talking a little (very little!) about possible Centaur plans around AIR.

It seems all the big information about Centaur is being held back for MAX 2008 (in San Francisco, Milan and Tokyo).

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Vince Bonfanti hosted a Birds of a Feather session at cf.Objective(), he officially unveiled the Open BlueDragon project.

He walked the (fairly large) audience through downloading and running the binary distribution of OpenBD on both Tomcat and JBoss and noted that “ready-to-run” distributions will also be available (Jetty-based initially, with Amazon EC2 and VMWare images following soon).

This was followed by open Q&A for a while and then he showed the source code in Eclipse and demonstrated how to build and run OpenBD from source.

He ran into a bug - triggered by a bad environment setting - and used the step debugger to identify the problem in just a few minutes, then fixed the code and rebuilt and successfully ran the project. I think that was very persuasive for several folks in the audience.

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