An Architect's View

Last year I attended the first OpenCF Summit and I thought it was a great event for a number of reasons. It's back again this year, Feburary 24-26, in the same great location and it's just $72 for three days of collaborative education.

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I get a lot of emails asking questions. Some of them come in directly to me, some via the Contact page on my blog. With the latter, developers have to provide an email address. Most developers seem capable of doing this, but every now and then someone fills out the form with a bunch of "demands" and fails to provide a correct email address.

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I was very pleased today to get confirmation that my team are all going to Clojure/West in San Jose in March!

We've been a CFML house for a decade but we're using Clojure more and more on the back end to provide a high-performance, concurrency-safe foundation for our application. Back in December a couple of us attended Clojure/conj, with three days of Clojure training for one of our team. Now we're training up another team member on Clojure, and in March three of us will attend the Clojure conference, with training on Cascalog (big data analysis) for one of our team.

It's an exciting time to be a developer!

A minor bug fix update has been applied to both master (2.0) and develop (2.1_pre) to correct a small regression in buildURL() that was introduced late in the 2.0 cycle. Thanx to Seb Duggan for spotting this!

In years past, I have gone back over each month of my blog and posted a review of the year based on what I've been posting during the year. I skipped that for 2009 and 2010 for various reasons but decided to reinstate it this year because 2011 has been a very different year for me.

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After a long period of testing out in the wild FW/1 2.0 reached RC2 back in October and no further bugs have been reported. Only documentation remained and that has now been completed. FW/1 2.0 is gold and can be downloaded from FW/1's RIAForge site. Happy Holidays!

I try not to pay much attention to popularity contests but I was just browsing Github today and happened to notice that FW/1 is both the "most watched overall" and "most forked overall" ColdFusion project on Github. Thank you!

November 28th was the last day for session proposals for cf.Objective() 2012. The open call for speakers has been massively successful this year: a record number of proposals from a record number of speakers!

cf.Objective() has always been known for the high quality - and generally advanced level - of presentations and it looks like 2012 will be no exception! I've been involved with this conference in one way or another since the first year (2006) and I've watched it grow from strength to strength every year, with more sessions, more speakers, more attendees. It all started as an "itch" that Jared Rypka-Hauer felt he needed to scratch and a few years back it went global with the addition of cf.Objective(ANZ). In a time when the economy has caused most people to tighten their belts and several CFML events to disappear, it's good to see "The Only Enterprise ColdFusion Conference" powering ahead.

For several years, I was heavily involved in content selection but in 2010 the conference switched to an advisory board for that job and for 2011, I stepped down completely and became just an observer for the steering committee. Given the huge number of proposals this year, I'm very glad of that role change and I don't envy the job of Bob Silverberg and his team - they have a lot of work ahead of them!

I have no details on the content but I think you can count on it being excellent... If you didn't get a proposal in, there's always next year. If you did get a proposal in but you're not selected, don't feel bad: competition is stiffer than ever!

And me? I didn't think of a suitable talk before the deadline so no cf.Objective() for me in 2012. After ten conferences in 2011 (and I spoke at four of those), I could do with a break anyway :)

The first episode of Chas Emerick's new Clojure podcast, Mostly Lazy was published today after being recorded yesterday morning. He picked me as his first interview "victim" (joke - see his follow up blog post wherein Chas clarifies that this is about community, not journalism!) and we covered a lot of ground in half an hour. Those who know me will be familiar with my focus on CFML / ColdFusion and that comes up in the podcast - if you don't know much about CFML (or your knowledge is based on old, outdated information), you might be in for a surprise as I talk about why I've used CFML so much over the last decade! [from around 13 minutes in]

After two years in the CFML world, FW/1 (Framework One) comes to Clojure!

Intended to bring the same simple, lightweight, convention-based MVC web application development that has proved so popular in the CFML world to the world of Clojure, FW/1 for Clojure is available on Clojars (0.0.2 right now). If you clone the github repo, you'll see a "user manager" example application which is a port of the same app from the CFML version of the framework. The documentation is, as always, a work in progress but covers the basic API and how to create a driver program for the framework in Clojure. More information on the rationale, approach and API of FW/1 can be found on the FW/1 (for CFML) wiki. I plan to adapt this for the Clojure version shortly...