An Architect's View

Vince Bonfanti will be presenting a Birds of a Feather session at cf.Objective() 2008 on the Open Source BlueDragon project. New Atlanta are working hard to make an initial source code drop available, especially for cf.Objective(), so that Vince can show how to download, install, build and configure the project - and field questions about New Atlanta's thinking behind open sourcing the J2EE edition of BlueDragon, as well as discussing with the community how the project can move forward, how the license works, how the steering committee operates and so on. If you're excited about New Atlanta's recent announcement - or even just curious about how such a large open source project might work for the CF community - be sure to attend this Birds of a Feather session on Saturday evening at 7:30pm. The schedule shows it running an hour but I expect this will need more than an hour so I currently plan to keep the 8:30pm slot open immediately afterward to allow for an extended Q&A session.

Vince Bonfanti has posted a good explanation of several of the details and implications of opening up BlueDragon. I was pleased to see him call out my blog post about the announcement! Hopefully his post will clarify a lot of the misconceptions I've seen expressed in a number of discussions. Vince points folks to the new Open Source forum on the New Atlanta website which has a lot of good information about the details of dual licensing, the expected process for contributions and so on. I strongly encourage folks to read Vince's post and then read all the threads in the forum.

In a move that has surprised some folks, New Atlanta has announced plans to create a free open source version of their J2EE BlueDragon product. They will continue to develop, sell and support a commercial version of it, as well as continuing the .NET version and the standalone JX version (neither of which will be open sourced).

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As folks know, I bought Vista to run on VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro. I'd felt it was slow and bloated but I figured I'd give it a good run to really make up my mind. What I like about Vista:

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As you might have gathered from my recent posts, I'm trying to set up a full-blown development environment on Vista, just to see how I get on and to compare it with my regular development environment on OS X. Having beaten SQL Server Express into submission after much pain, I figured I'd talk about my experiences getting BlueDragon 7 .NET installed and running. First off, I knew that IIS was not enabled by default but poking around in what I thought were the obvious places didn't give me any clues about how to enable it. Google quickly directed me to a tech note (on MSDN or Microsoft's support site) that showed me the way. The more I work with Vista, the less I like the new Control Panel layout compared to XP. Anyway, I enabled IIS per the instructions and verified that I could access it locally. A quick tweak to the firewall allowed me to access it from OS X as well. All good so far and not too painful. Now that IIS 7 was running, I figured BD7.NET would be a simple install. The install went fairly smoothly but IIS7 refused to serve any pages up afterward. The friendly error message pointed at a problem with applicationHost.config so I tracked that file down (another Google search) but couldn't figure out how to open it (because of security restrictions). Another Google search revealed that I needed to locate Notepad in the Start Menu and right-click Run As Administrator and then Open... and navigate back to the configuration file. By pure guesswork, I changed: which wraps the BD-installed handlers to: and IIS7 came back to life. Yay me! Unfortunately, when I tried to run the BlueDragon Admin, I got a 500 error and something about a bad "ManagedPipelineHandler" in the BlueDragon configuration (and, of course, that text was nowhere to be found in the config file!). Google turned up one reference to this, on New Atlanta's self-help mailing list. Someone called Brian had hit the exact same error back in July but no one had replied. Darn! So I emailed New Atlanta's support and today I got a response from Lori who confirmed that the applicationHost.config settings were correct (with path="") but asked me to check a couple of things... Number one was whether I had installed ASP.NET. Hmm, I thought that was built into IIS7 so it hadn't occurred to me I'd need to set that up independently. It also hadn't occurred to me that BD7.NET would require ASP.NET but that's another story. Lori had attached a screen shot of the same Windows program features dialog that I'd used to enable IIS7 but she showed the options I needed to check to enable ASP.NET. Things still didn't work right but now I could figure out the solution on my own: since I'd installed BD7.NET before ASP.NET, applicationHost.config wasn't what BD expected so all I had to do was merge the BlueDragon handlers into the ASP.NET handlers. Yes, that worked as expected! IIS7 works. BlueDragon works. I can access both from Vista and from OS X. I configured a MS SQL Server data source (to connect to the SQL Server Express instance) and that worked too! Yay! Then I tried to configure a MySQL data source and got "Could not load file or assembly 'MySql.Data' or one of its dependencies." *sigh* So I downloaded the Connect/NET 5.0 ADO-based driver and installed that and rebooted. Still the same error message. Back to Google I guess...

John Paul Ashenfelter kicked off my day with his talk about testing ColdFusion applications. He started out by defining the different types of testing and then talked about some tools that help you test applications. He mentioned cfcUnit for writing unit tests but didn't go into details (Paul Kenney was doing a talk on Test-Driven Development with cfcUnit later on at CFUNITED). John Paul did go into quite a bit of detail about Selenium which is an incredibly cool browser capture / playback testing tool written entirely in JavaScript. I downloaded Selenium and within a few minutes - with a little help from John Paul - I was recording test scripts for a web application and automatically running entire suites of test scripts. Very impressive - highly recommended! John Paul also covered continuous integration (where tests are run automatically for you as you change code) and different types of load testing: testing under expected load, testing for bottlenecks, stress testing - to see what traffic will break the site. Overall, this was a great session and John Paul is an engaging and passionate speaker. The next talk I attended was also about testing: Thomas Burleson of Universal Mind, talking about continuous testing with Flex and ColdFusion. He was plagued with technical problems (the A/V system failed in Ballroom GH for several speakers) and didn't get through all of his presentation, unfortunately. The big takeaway for me was that Universal Mind have developed a Java application that keeps your source code (CFCs and I think AS3 classes too) in sync with your unit tests (assuming you use FlexUnit and cfcUnit). The Java app automatically generates new stub tests (that fail) for any new methods you create in your source code. Unfortunately, I didn't see a URL for this "Synchronizer" tool. Next was Vince Bonfanti's keynote talk about BlueDragon. He surveyed the audience and found nearly half of those present were at their very first CFUNITED and a few people in the audience had never heard of BlueDragon. After a brief overview of New Atlanta, who are now ten years old, he talked about the three main innovations coming down the pike from New Atlanta over the next few years:

• IIS 7 integrated administration and request pipeline (Application.cfc) (2007)
• AJAX & Silverlight support (2007-2008)
• DLR integration (2008 onwards)

Vince talked about how with IIS 6 there are three request pipelines: IIS, ASP.NET, BlueDragon (Application.cfc). With IIS 7, these can be integrated into a single set of handlers, allowing you to write event handlers in Application.cfc that apply to all requests - not just CFML pages. This will also allow for three new Application.cfc event handlers: onAuthenticationRequest(), onRequestAuthorize() and onRequestLog(). This will allow you to write security wrappers in CFML that apply in general across your web server, e.g., for images, HTML pages etc. Vince also showed an early build of the integrated administration, which exposes BlueDragon admin functions directly into the IIS 7 control panel. That means that all of the IIS 7 administrative concepts (cascading settings, remote delegation, deployable application configuration through web.config files) will now be applicable to BlueDragon. Bugs aside in these early builds, this level of integration is pretty impressive and I can see it being very appealing to people who are heavily invested in the Windows platform and IIS 7. Vince went on to show a new tag - <cfupdatepanel> - which allows a portion of a CFML page to be executed remotely as part of an AJAX region. It's a different approach to the AJAX widgets in ColdFusion 8 and my initial impression was that ColdFusion 8's approach is more powerful and more flexible. Vince has since assured me that this is just the first step in AJAX support for BlueDragon so comparisons should wait for now. The final demo in the keynote was a console application that compiled and executed CFML code by using the BlueDragon engine running on the DLR - Dynamic Language Runtime - that Microsoft recently announced. This is codenamed IronDragon (in the spirit of Microsoft's version of Python that runs on the DLR: IronPython). Since Silverlight implements the DLR, this opens up the possibility of using CFML on both the server (as today) and the client (in Silverlight). Given the appearance of Monolight - an implementation of Silverlight on top of Mono (the open source .NET runtime implementation) - this could be a very interesting development.

A public beta of BlueDragon 7.0 is now available. I'm really in two minds about this. Obviously, I'm pleased to see New Atlanta implementing features that ColdFusion MX 7 introduced (nearly two years ago!) but they still aren't tackling event gateways which are incredibly powerful (nor Flash / XML forms or reporting). On the other hand, they continue to extend the language in proprietary ways (for example their <cfdocument> tag implements PDF but then adds PNG and JPG while not supporting FlashPaper). Some of their proprietary extensions are definitely interesting and useful (onMissingTemplate() for Application.cfc is probably what appeals most to me). However, they also seem to be driving their implementation of the language very much into "Java-Lite" territory with the addition of interfaces and abstract CFCs (and null support). A lot of Java and C++ developers don't seem to be able to figure out abstract classes properly so I really don't think that adding that sort of thing to ColdFusion is a step forward. I really think that the folks clamoring for "more OO" in ColdFusion are a very small minority (albeit very vocal!) and that such things don't address what the vast majority of ColdFusion developers really want from the product. All that said, choices are good and the more ColdFusion engines out there, the more it validates the use of ColdFusion as a rapid application development system.

Seen via Fusion Authority, New Atlanta have made available a hot fix for all editions of BlueDragon 6.2. I'm currently running build 261 (the May Hot Fix). The August Hot Fix brings that up to 268 and contains a handful of minor bug fixes.

I spent several hours over the last couple of nights trying to get Tartan running on BlueDragon 6.2. I found several bugs in BlueDragon in the process. The first stumbling block is that BlueDragon does not support WEB-INF.cftags.component as the universal base class for all components. It's mentioned several times in the CFMX documentation so this is at best a compatibility issue that New Atlanta should document and at worst a bug they should fix. Workaround: change WEB-INF.cftags.component to any. The second stumbling block I hit was that the pseudo-constructor of a derived CFC could not access variables set in the pseudo-constructor of the base CFC. New Atlanta just released a Hot Fix that fixes this bug. You'll need it to get Tartan running. Then I tripped over <cfbreak/>. BlueDragon thinks that's an illegal tag. Add a space and it's happy: <cfbreak />. I found the same problem with <cfrethrow/>. Changing it to <cfrethrow /> made BlueDragon happy. Finally, BlueDragon does not allow derived CFCs to call private methods in the base CFC via super. Since private methods are accessible to derived CFCs (because CFML's private really means protected), this should definitely be valid. Workaround: change ServiceFactory.getServiceArgs() to be access="public". At this point my sample application (for my frameworks talk) runs on BlueDragon in all seven variants. Oh, and this exercise did highlight a bug in my code! My Tartan configuration file did not have a <parameters> tag around my DAO factory parameters which caused them to be ignored. This meant that my queries were being run with username="" password="". On CFMX, blank credentials are ignored and the values in the data source (in the CF Admin) are used. On BlueDragon, the blank credentials are used (so the queries failed).

New Atlanta have released BlueDragon 6.2 for .NET and J2EE platforms, as well as their standalone JX and Free editions. Pricing for the .NET and J2EE editions remains at $2,499 per CPU. Pricing for the JX edition is $899 per server. Online support can be purchased for $995, premium support (which adds telephone support, a faster response time and an additional named support contact) can be purchased for $4,995 per year with an option for 24/7 pager support at an extra $2,495 per year.