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!

By now, many of you will have read Adam Lehman's blog post that Adobe is no longer part of the CFML Advisory Committee. Adam has disabled comments on that post and folks have been asking me all morning for my take on this so, as chair of the committee, I'm going to post my thoughts - and leave comments open so the community can provide feedback.

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It's a month since CFUnited and I haven't yet posted my thoughts on the conference. I started writing but it turned into an essay and I'm not sure it's worth posting in its entirety, especially since many others have posted their reviews (mostly all glowing - and rightly so!). I will post a brief review of the conference soon - it's on my Things to-do list and everything on that list gets done (eventually). The other overdue blog post on my Things to-do list covers what it was like to be a sponsor at CFUnited. A first for me (sort of). I've been attending (and speaking) at CFUnited since it was CFUN'04 (when I covered the use of Mach-II at Macromedia). Sure, Macromedia and Adobe have been regular sponsors but that is the ColdFusion product team and I was going independently as part of another team - the joys of a big company - so I never felt I was a sponsor (I never worked for the ColdFusion product team - even tho' a lot of people seem to think I did!). This year - 2009 - Railo was a silver sponsor of CFUnited and so I spent quite a bit of time around the Railo "booth" talking to attendees.

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I've talked about the CFML Advisory Committee before and explained that we're working on a specification for the ColdFusion Markup Language that we hope to release this year as CFML2009 and then review every two years. CFML2009 is intended to be a specification of what the language should be by the end of this year. Ben Forta just posted about some CFML enhancements coming soon in ColdFusion 9 but he didn't mention that many of these will be embodied in the CFML2009 spec. I figured it was worth looking at some of the items in his blog post through the lens of the Advisory Committee. Where these features are deemed "core" by the Advisory Committee, expect all CFML engines to provide them fairly quickly. Some features are supported already by one or more vendor, some are new to all three vendors.

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It's been a while since I posted anything formally about the committee and I've started to see it mentioned in comments on blogs and on mailing lists lately so I feel now is a good time to update everyone on where we are, what we're currently working on and what we're trying to achieve. First off, you can always check out the CFML Advisory Committee website. We're updating it as we finalize our decisions but it can be a slow process since this is the first time any group has tried to agree on a specification for the ColdFusion Markup Language. Over the last few weeks, the committee has been pretty active...

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The last week has seen some big announcements in the CF world! On March 31st, Gert announced the open source release of Railo, the next day Mark Drew announced he has joined Railo as CEO of the new Railo UK and then this week Peter Bell announced that he has also joined Railo and will be heading up the new Railo US operation. I've been using ColdFusion since 2001, back when I worked at Macromedia and my team of Java and C++ developers first encountered CFML in the form of very early builds of what went on to become CFMX (6.0). We were pretty skeptical at first.

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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.

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I'm working on a specification suite with Pat Santora, who recently joined the Edmund Event-Driven Model project as a contributor (more on that shortly), and we're using cfSpec to define the expected behavior of Edmund.

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If you have ColdFusion installed in the multiserver configuration (which is the only way I ever install it!), it's easy to also install Railo on top of JRun in the same setup. With ColdFusion in multiserver configuration, you have: In that directory is META-INF/, containing application.xml, and cfusion-war/, containing the ColdFusion instance itself. Download the Railo 3.0.2 WAR file (at the bottom of the downloads page) and unpack the WAR file to a directory called railo-war. You can use jar xvf or rename the .war to .zip and just unzip it. Your railo-war/ directory should now contain WEB-INF/, index.cfm and License.txt. Now move that railo-war/ directory into the cfusion-ear/ directory mentioned above (so it's next to the cfusion-war/ directory. Finally, edit that application.xml file and copy the <module> definition for cfusion-war and change it to say railo-war for the web-uri and /railo for the context-root. Start ColdFusion and you'll see it starts both application servers. http://localhost/index.cfm is Adobe ColdFusion and http://localhost/railo/index.cfm is Railo CFML. If you write frameworks (like I do), this makes it easier to test across multiple engines. I'll probably stick Open BlueDragon 1.0.1 in there next. The same process works for the OpenBD WAR file. Caveats: 1. For OpenBD, I had to add an Apache alias for /openbd to match the location of the exploded WAR so that images loaded correctly (in the shiny new OpenBD Administrator - nice job guys!). 2. For both Railo and OpenBD, I experienced some problems with xmlParse() - OpenBD in particular said "The configured XML parser does not support JAXP 1.3." The solution to the second problem was to add the following to java.args in jvm.config: (all on one line, no space after the =)

As "usual", I start the year with a round-up of the highlights of last year, based on things that I blogged. It's been a strange year for me. After (seven) years with Macromedia / Adobe and most of 2007 spent freelancing, I took a full-time job with a startup and hired some amazing CFers to be part of my team. I (finally) learned Flex (and AIR). I learned a new language (Groovy) and did a lot less CFML programming than I've done in years while at the same time joining first the Open BlueDragon Steering Committee and then the CFML Advisory Committee, as well as attending more ColdFusion-related conferences than usual (cf.Objective(), Scotch on the Rocks, CFUNITED, Wee Dram of Scotch, MAX).

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