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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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!

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...

Packt Publishing has opened nominations for their 2011 Open Source Awards. Nominate your favorite open source CMS (Mura, perhaps?), as well as other categories!

After a lot of things delayed the alpha release of FW/1 2.0, I've now found time to work on DI/1 again and get it into a usable shape. The idea is that you point DI/1 at one or more folders and it searches those folders for CFCs and builds a bean factory to manage them, all by convention (so no XML required!). DI/1 supports dependency injection, by name, through constructor argument, explicit setter methods and property declarations (with implicit setters enabled).

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Even tho' it's far from a 1.0 release, I've updated the cfmljure project on github to contain the latest version that we're using at World Singles and update the examples so they work again, along with updated instructions - mainly that the Clojure code needs to be in WEB-INF/classes/ so that it can be picked up dynamically. This is a fundamental piece of our infrastructure at World Singles, since we rely heavily on Clojure for the Model of our application, with our View-Controller in CFML. It's not intended to be general purpose code but if you want to play around with calling Clojure from CFML, it should get you started.

Don't forget the cfmljure mailing list if you need assistance!

I just declared the official "2.0 Alpha" of Framework One. Although there are a number of minor issues still open against this release, all the major new features are in place and ready for extensive public testing.

The main new features (in no particular order) are:

• custom URL routes with parameter substitution are supported, along with HTTP method restrictions and wildcard routes
• setLayout() to override layout conventions
• view() can be called from a controller, as a way to render email or documents for PDF delivery etc
• controller/service execution can be short-circuited, providing more control over the request lifecycle
• populate() and autowiring now support property-based injection as well as setter-based injection
• additional lifecycle hooks for global before() / after() and pre-rendering setupView()
• complete rewrite of the code to use cfscript - for Adobe ColdFusion 9.0.1 and Railo 3.2.2 or later

In particular, note the last bullet - if you are on earlier CFML engines, you will have to stick with FW/1 1.2 (there will be a 1.3 maintenance release). The mix of tags and script was driving me crazy and I didn't want to add all this new functionality with the code as it is!

I've been a bit lapse in announcing new versions on my blog so, to rectify that, this post includes the full set of changes across all four dot releases so far (below). This is mostly a bug fix release, but it also lays the groundwork for exposing more control over the PreparedStatement used in queries, coming in one of the next few dot releases.

In Leiningen, just add [org.clojure/java.jdbc "0.0.4"] to your :dependencies to use this latest release.

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This year's cf.Objective() was the biggest, most successful ever: more attendees, more speakers, more tracks, more content, more sponsors, lightning talks, BOFs, ad hoc sessions - more, more, more! Yet it still managed to maintain the great ratio of attendees to speakers that gives people a small conference feel with great networking opportunities.

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