Take a quick look at Marc:

http://henke.ws/page.cfm/downloads

Must try it all out

Joel

Marc

Watch out for the gotcha with 2 things.

1 – don’t use request scoped variables in the init of controllers. Wont work when you change the mode to testing. At All.

2 – if your using PascalNotation for your controllers, don’t forget to put hyphens in your views

Joel  -  Smarticles

cfwheels

Version 1.0 of coldfusion on wheels was released in late November.

I’ve been watching, and recommending this framework for a while. I recommend everyone taking a really good look at it.

There has been lots of speculation about it not gaining traction. In large organisations, or in large projects, people forget that frameworks can only be replaced when the existing application is redeveloped. In traditional risk-averse environments it can be many years between re-developments. Couple that with some really good frameworks like Coldbox, and Mach II and traction for Wheels could be pretty slow.That isn’t the frameworks fault, its just the way things happen. Sometimes a tipping point has to be reached before community projects explode into life.

All of this can only be aided by the release of the 1.0 release. Beta releases (except by Google) put people off, and hopefully this will mark a step change in peoples attitudes to wheels.

Joel – Smarticles

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A few notes on implicit vs explicit getters and setters.

1) Coldfusion support in CF9 is enabled on the property tag as an attribute – not on by default
http://www.danvega.org/blog/index.cfm/2009/10/6/ColdFusion-9-Implicit-getters–setters-change

2) Coldfusion onMissingMethod
http://www.bennadel.com/index.cfm?dax=blog:868.view
Although Ben Nadel seems to dislike the thing ( it was a while back so maybe he changed his mind?) – and he’s being convinced in the comments. The performance affect was exceedingly marginal (<20ms).

An implementation of what I was talking about is here:
http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2007/8/5/Warning-about-onMissingMethod – the warning relates to using the right arguments. Comments suggested changing find to comparing the first 3 characters to improve performance.

<cfcomponent name="entity_auto" extends="ColdFX.entity" output="false">

<cffunction name=”onMissingMethod” access=”public” returnType=”any” output=”false”>
<cfargument name=”missingMethodName” type=”string” required=”true”>
<cfargument name=”missingMethodArguments” type=”struct” required=”true”>
<cfset var key = “”>

<!— this includes arguments with set —>
<cfif left(arguments.missingMethodName,3) eq “set”>
<cfset key = replaceNoCase(arguments.missingMethodName,”get”,”")>
<cfif structKeyExists(variables, key)>
<cfreturn variables[key]>
</cfif>
</cfif>

<!— this includes arguments with get —>
<cfif left(arguments.missingMethodName,3) eq “get”>
<cfset key = replaceNoCase(arguments.missingMethodName,”set”,”")>
<cfif structKeyExists(arguments.missingMethodArguments, key)>
<cfset variables[key] = arguments.missingMethodArguments[key]>
</cfif>
</cfif>

<!— everything else still throws an error —>

</cffunction>

</cfcomponent>

If you want to turn on auto magic dynamic proxying all you do in your component is

<cfcomponent name="car" extends="ColdFX.entity_auto" output="false">
<cfproperty name="wheels">
<cfproperty name="engine">

<cffunction name=”init”>
<cfargument name=”wheels”>
<cfargument name=”engine”>
<cfset this.setWheels(arguments.wheels)/>
<cfset this.setEngine(arguments.engine)/>
</cffunction>

</cfcomponent>

auto-magic, getters, implicit, setters

Just a really quick one. I saw Andy Scott’s email about scopes and was reminded what was cool about Railo

In Railo administrator at Settings/Scope you can set the Local Scope Mode from update to always, this change how Railo use the local scope, after this change Railo write every un-scoped variable to the local scope, you no longer need the var or local. to write a variable to local scope, this makes code like this a much easier. Michael Offner-Streit

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There’s a new CFUG started in the Netherlands. www.cfug.nl.

I’m still trying to get a virtual group (hopefully turning into a CFUG in the future) started for Coldfusion Developers, coldfusion-centric project managers and Analysts here in Belgium.

If anyone is interested, here is the linked-in group.

Joel

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You can now host test servers and staging servers for free (1 per standard/enterprise license I think).  You need to have CF9 of course.

Terry Ryan has posted a blog about new licensing support. The problem with licenses, even when you are trying to be nice is that they are intentionally prescriptive.   he wrote in comments:

“In anycase, we don’t have Adobe police. The rules here are meant to enable you to have a proper environment, that is the spirit of those rules. We’re not going to hunt people down”.

I think that Adobe are being really nice about this – so kudos to them for that. Although it does start me thinking about what Adobe police would look like…

If you struggle with that there is always the brilliant Railo which has just jumped another point version in Alpha. The version Smarticles have running in production is lovely, lightning fast and stable. If I need a dev instance or 20 I can have them.  Love it.

Licensing, Staging Server, Test Server

The EU hasn’t firmly suggested mandating open source, but its plausible that it could. The recent shift at the Whitehouse,  and the financial crisis hurting taxpayers (and therefore government budgets), provides ample reasons why Open Source will be one of the first cost-improvement.
I was drawn to this topic by a post on the Open Blue Dragon google groups. People are actively talking about mandated open-source.

How would this leave Coldfusion? I think, pretty well.

Much of the EU, national, regional, local governments and quangos use ColdFusion. For governments, and pan-european institutions having competitive open-source, enterprise, rapid application development frameworks is ideal. Already having the developer resources in place makes it almost a fait accompli. The more people who use open-source, the better it gets. I hope that these organisations use their Smarticles, and start to switch to open-platforms like ColdFusion.

There is choice in which provider of open-source coldfusion you want. Would you like the super-fast Railo option, or would you like the Myspace supporting OpenBlueDragon*. You can’t say that about PHP or .net can you? The CFML advisory committee allow for open-standardisation. (if you can’t decide between the open-source options you could always see which is the superior google-fighter). Smarticles preference is for Railo, it’s Swiss, as we’re in Belgian chocolate country; there’s a community in chocolate thing going on.

Don’t forget Adobe. Rationally, it has never been pushed by a sensible economic argument to go open-source with ColdFusion, but if big-business, or government, started switching, so might they. Adobe have been pretty pleasant with open-sourcing in the past. Microsoft, the most ardent Open-Source haters,  have opened a (half hearted) open source foundation. Adobe have open-sourced some pretty cool things – although not Photoshop, or Coldfusion (misers  ).

As for tools, most of the frameworks, and tools are supported by the trio.

As most of the servers are Unix (or derivatives) with J2EE engines, the underlying architectures will need little change.

Within councils, and governments I am starting to see real appetite for open-source. The advantage for them is that they aren’t blind-sided by changes or dumping of product. The crisis has also made large-international organisations a little more fiscally conservative when it comes to expensive software projects. They can pay for what they use. They can even improve the layer beneath, which for a massive organisation could be a bonanza.

Personally I think that the likely shift will be toward a greater shift toward Open Source, which wouldn’t hurt Java, or ColdFusion. I can imagine .net being left out in the cold, unless Microsoft do one of their unique powerplays.

It’s a great time to be a ColdFusion developer in Europe.

Joel

* I know .net…

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If you’re a ColdFusion programmer working in Brussels/Bruxelles please find and join the LinkedIn group I have created.

Linked In: Coldfusion Brussels

I thought it would be good. We have lots of Expats from all over the world here, and it would be good to find out who is doing what.

Joel

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