An Architect's View

Since Mark Drew was also covering cloud computing in London, we've decided to offer a version of my framework comparison talk instead. I'm looking forward to that first week of June despite the crazy travel schedule (I arrive Sunday afternoon and fly back the following Saturday, hopping from Edinburgh to Heathrow on a horribly early flight).

One of the neat features of the Railo Administrator console is that you can easily install pre-packaged applications with just a few clicks. As part of my recent presentation comparing application frameworks, I installed ColdBox, ColdSpring, Mach-II and Model-Glue via the Web Administrator. There are a couple of "gotchas" about the current default settings for those installations that I wanted to cover in a blog post.

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Last night I presented to BACFUG on ColdBox, Mach-II and Model-Glue. I just posted the recording of the presentation to Charlie Arehart's UGTV. I've edited the recording to remove some of the chatter at the beginning and end which is why it will seem to jump in without my usual biographic introduction and cuts off at the start of Q&A.

BACFUG meets tonight in Alameda, hosted by Planitax (thank you!), and the featured speaker will be me! I'll be looking at ColdBox, Mach-II and Model-Glue - talking about their similarities and their differences - and showing demos of each framework. Please see the event listing on Adobe Groups for more details and to RSVP (you must login with your Adobe ID to RSVP!).

It's been a couple of weeks since I blogged about cf.Objective() 2009 so I figured it was a good time to remind people again. This year's conference is just five weeks away! The early bird rate is over but the full price has been held at last year's $629 so it's excellent value! If you've ever wanted to learn ColdBox, this is also a good opportunity with a full one-day pre-conference training class by Luis Majano himself for just $449. This year's schedule features three full days of new sessions - last year, day three was mostly repeats of popular sessions but we had so many great submissions this year that we wanted to showcase as many as possible. We will repeat two of the most popular sessions in the last slot of day three, however, if people fill out the online Session Scheduler (linked from the schedule page) so we know what's popular! The Adobe sessions covering Centaur / Bolt promise to be smokin' hot - Adobe are keeping them secret right now but we hope to be able to post details next week! Finally, the hotel rate is guaranteed thru Monday. It may go up after that (we don't know - that's up to the hotel) so hurry up and book your rooms!

I said I'd look at Railo on Tomcat next but I figured I'd just sneak in a quick Express for Windows post before that so folks don't think I'm forgetting all those PC users.

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I think a lot of people are looking beyond Adobe's licensing model for ColdFusion and evaluating other options. Last year, when Broadchoice decided to use Amazon EC2 as our production deployment platform, we picked Railo to drive our CFML-based iPhone web application because of licensing issues. Whilst that has since been addressed (on a case-by-base basis by Adobe) enough to allow us to move our CF8-based CMS up to the cloud, we haven't had any problems with Railo and we're still using it in production. In fact, our WAR-based build and deployment process lends itself much better to Railo's smaller footprint than the huge-by-comparison WAR files from CF8. Recently I've been getting a lot of questions from people about installing and configuring Railo on a number of systems. The general complaint I hear is that the documentation is somewhat lacking in this area. Of course, this is something that a large corporation with massive resources - such as Adobe - can be expected to score highly on (even though people complain about Adobe's installation and configuration documentation too). Personally, I find Railo easy to install and configure but I'm fairly used to Java-based systems. That's not true for a lot of CFers so I figured I'd start a series of step-by-step posts going through a variety of installation and configuration scenarios for Railo. The two systems I have to experiment with are Mac OS X (Leopard) and Windows 7 Beta. I'm going to start with the very simplest development scenario and build up to a variety of production options.

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Back in Summer 2005, Peter J. Farrell asked is Mach-II dead? There had been very little action on the framework for ages and Model-Glue was the "new kid on the block" and was surging in popularity. A few days later, he proclaimed Mach-II is dead as a call to arms. The result was that Matt Woodward took over the Mach-II project and Peter became lead developer. Since then Mach-II has gone from strength to strength with 1.8 in development now and 2.0 in the planning stage.

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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). You can read all about the training course on the ColdBox website and the cf.Objective() pre-conference page. You can now register for the training when you register for cf.Objective(). You can even attend the training without attending the conference (but why would you want to miss such an excellent conference?). I know some folks were holding off registration until the pre-conference training was announced - now you have no excuse! :) Remember that the early bird ends on March 31st. If you register at least one person from your company before then, other people from your company will be able to register at the same price even after that date (and if you send five or more people, you'll get an additional discount!). After March 31st, the regular price goes up to $629 - which is the same price as last year.

Kay Smoljak is running a series of interviews with framework developers and has a summary article on SitePoint that includes a survey of people's framework usage. It's going to be a great series of articles and makes interesting reading (FarCry and COOP have been covered so far with Fusebox, Mach-II, Transfer and ColdBox coming soon - and Model-Glue and ColdSpring et al to follow). The survey will only be open for a few more days so rush over and make your voice heard!