An Architect's View

It's now official: I'm speaking at the OpenCF Summit in Garland, TX in February! This will be a unique event in the CF world, with its focus on open source, and it has a lot of interesting types of sessions on the schedule: Pecha Kucha, Open Spaces, Hackfests - as well as regular sessions - and several BOFs and panels!

In addition, many of the OpenCF Summit partners are listed, including Railo Consulting, O'Reilly Media, Packt Publishing, hosting companies and consulting groups.

I think it's one of the most exciting new conferences on the schedule - I hope lots of people will agree and take advantage of this event with it's low price of $199!

The official 1.2 release of Framework One - FW/1 - has just been tagged and published on github. You can download it from RIAForge.

Release Candidate 2 had been out for about a month with no issues reported. A few small enhancements were made since RC2. You can see the list of commits here, on github.

FW/1 1.2 Release Candidate 2 is now available on RIAForge! It contains a number of fixes committed over the last three weeks that address a serious bug found in RC1 and provide some enhancements that improve consistency. If this RC passes everyone's tests, it will be the Gold release of 1.2!

I've updated cfmljure to version 0.3 and made a small API change to clean things up and better support access to Clojure variables from CFML - see the last section of the README on the github site.

The API change will break code that tries to use the old public data member .defn. Sorry (but that was an ugly way to implement it, wasn't it?).

In the next week or so, I plan to work up an example application that uses FW/1 and cfmljure together to implement the Model entirely in Clojure and the View-Controller portion in CFML - probably a little contact list manager that uses a database (so the SQL access will be done via Clojure).

RTW - Reinventing The Wheel - is normally a bad thing. I'm said several times that the main reason we have no truly great open source software in ColdFusion is because when we see an open source project that doesn't do what we need, we go off and build our version, which we may or may not open source, instead of collaborating on the existing project to make it better.

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I spent an afternoon with the extremely smart, creative folks at Blue River Interactive today, the minds behind the wonderful Mura Content Management System. We mostly focused on the FW/1 Plugin Template they've created, looking at ways to make it easier to use for Mura developers.

The end result was a couple of enhancements, one suggested by Steve Withington (thank you!) and one suggested by Matt Levine of Blue River, and a new version of the FW/1 Plugin Template on the Mura App Store (version 1.1). If you're building plugins for Mura and you're looking for a little structure, take a look at this plugin. The familiar $ object that provides access to the whole Mura ecosystem is now available directly in FW/1 views and layouts so the techniques you've learned for working with Mura in display objects can be applied to plugins you create with FW/1. Similarly, techniques you've learned for FW/1 - such as relying on the buildURL() and redirect() APIs - will work seamlessly in the Mura plugin, both in the admin and in user-facing pages.

I've posted the PDFs of my two CFUnited 2010 talks on my Presentations page.

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If you're at CFUnited, swing by Potomac A on Friday at 5:30pm for our Birds of a Feather session:

FW/1 (Framework One) is a relatively new framework but rapidly gaining mindshare. It's designed to be simple to use, just like ColdFusion itself! Come to this session and hear how people are using FW/1 in production and what's coming in version 2.0. We'll discuss best practices, look pragmatically at migrating legacy applications to FW/1 and gather all your feedback for 2.0 and beyond. We might even talk about DI/1, the extremely lightweight dependency injection / inversion of control framework that will accompany FW/1 2.0!

From the CFUnited website.

Now that the Saturday schedule is available on the CFUnited site, I can confirm that I'm speaking three times in total:

• Thursday 9:00am - ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape
• Friday 2:00pm - FW/1: The Invisible Framework
• Saturday 4:00pm - ColdFusion and the Open Source Landscape