An Architect's View

I was at MAX and I saw the Meer Meer cross-browser preview technology that Adobe is developing. Given the current buzz about Microsoft's forthcoming SuperPreview technology (announced at their MIX conference), I was pleased to see this response from Scott Fegette, Dreamweaver Product Manager, about Meer Meer and how it stacks up against Microsoft's future offering. It's particularly interesting to note that whilst Microsoft is initially focused on Windows-only, Internet Explorer previews, Adobe's service will be cross-platform, cross-browser from the get-go - and what was shown at MAX five months ago was a real demo of a real service, based on early working builds. In other words, Adobe is a long way ahead of Microsoft on this and is very committed to the workflows and technologies needed to address this complex problem. It'll be very interesting to see how this pans out and whether Microsoft will ever address this in a cross-browser, cross-platform manner.

As noted in several places (and all over Twitter!), Adobe has published its curriculum for both introductory and advanced ColdFusion courses.

The ColdFusion 8 project-based curriculum is designed to teach experienced web developers how to create dynamic, database-driven web applications using ColdFusion 8.

Introduction to ColdFusion 8

This course covers the basics of ColdFusion and focuses on best practices and design, while stressing the importance of usability, optimization, and performance.

Advanced ColdFusion 8 Development

This course is designed to teach you how to take full advantage of ColdFusion 8 while building web applications. The course focuses on best practices and design, stressing the importance of usability, code reuse, performance, and scalability.

Read more about the curriculum, free licensing for education and download the PDFs of each course on the Adobe education website.

I'm very pleased to report that the Bay Area has not just one ColdFusion User Group but two! In addition to BACFUG, which has been around longer than the user group program itself, we now have the East Bay CFUG courtesy of Charlie Griefer (Amcom) and James Morrow (Planitax). The inaugural meeting of the East Bay CFUG will be Tuesday, April 7th, hosted by Planitax in Alameda. It's a great facility - Planitax hosted BACFUG's meeting last night - so you can expect meetings to be broadcast and recorded if you're remote and a chance at foosball and darts if you turn up in person!

We just heard back from Adobe that Broadchoice Workspace has been approved and is listed on the Adobe AIR Marketplace. Download the app! Spread the word!

Got an idea for a session at MAX 2009? (in Los Angeles, October 4-7) Submit it through this page on Adobe Groups.

All of the session descriptions have been posted on the cf.Objective() 2009 website. The sessions page describes the four tracks at this year's conference with session titles and speakers. Click on each title to jump to the description on the full track listing page. Don't forget to check out the schedule - it has had a couple of small tweaks as well. Adobe sessions will be listed nearer the time (since much will depend on where Centaur and Bolt development is at the time of the conference!).

I just received the latest SourceForge.net newsletter and was pleased to see the following promotion from Adobe:

This mailing has been brought to you by: Adobe(R) AIR(TM)
----------
Create and Deploy Rich Internet Apps outside the browser with Adobe(R) AIR(TM) software. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web. Download the Adobe AIR SDK and Ajax docs to start building applications today.

(followed by a sf.net jump link - via DoubleClick - to the AIR SDK download page) Nice to see Adobe reaching out to the open source community to promote development for the AIR platform!

As Adam just announced, he is the the new ColdFusion Product Manager as well as the product manager for Bolt. Adam's very passionate about ColdFusion so it's great news to hear that he's stepped up to take this on. I can also announce that Adam has joined the CFML Advisory Committee, replacing Sanjeev Kumar who is stepping down to focus on Centaur engineering issues.

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.

[Read more →]

About a month ago, I talked about my experience of setting up clustered ColdFusion instances on EC2. Since then we have migrated the Broadchoice Web Platform completely from a regular data center, where it had lived since launch, to the Amazon cloud and now all of the *.broadchoice.com sites and all of our client sites based on the Web Platform are happily running in the cloud. We've been very pleased with the performance and stability of EC2 so far and we're comfortable about scaling out as demand increases. We took advantage of Amazon's EBS (Elastic Block Storage) that allows you to mount S3 storage directly as part of the file system on EC2. This essentially replaces the NAS we were using in the data center where all uploaded files were placed. We run two ColdFusion instances on a medium EC2 instance and run MySQL on a separate EC2 instance (actually on the instance that is currently running our AIR application, the Broadchoice Workspace for Salesforce, along with its MySQL database). We replicate the MySQL databases to another server (in a data center) so that we can restore / recover in the event of a problem with EC2. We also run scheduled backups of the EC2 instances to S3. As I noted in my earlier entry, we're using Apache and the JRun Connector to manage the two instance cluster and failover. I'm still suspicious of the connector due to past experience but so far it has been behaving well and when we restart instances for maintenance, we're generally seeing uninterrupted service, from a user's point of view, as requests silently failover to the other instance. If you're interested in running ColdFusion in the cloud, you'll need to talk to Adobe about licensing (either Adam Lehman or Kristen Schofield) but they are being very encouraging because they want this to happen. The more of us who do this, the better the argument they can present internally to get the EULA changed to support ColdFusion running in the cloud! If you want to learn more about how we handled the migration and/or what to watch out for when designing applications that run well on the cloud, feel free to contact me via this blog or directly (c'mon, you know my email address!).