An Architect's View

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.

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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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

A conversation on the Railo mailing list, initially about free CFML hosting, turned into a discussion of the scarcity of CFML books. Several people felt that CFML was so easy that books just weren't as necessary as for other technologies. I agreed, and then I shared my current book list (stacked to the right of my computer). I figured I'd share it on my blog as well, just as a data point for some varied reading for CF developers:

• Adobe ColdFusion Anthology (the FAQU stuff) - 3 copies (I was a TR on the book)
• Programming in Scala
• The D Programming Language (review copy)
• Modern C++ Design (possibly a review copy - it dates back over a decade I think)
• Enterprise Integration Patterns
• Groovy Recipes
• Groovy in Action
• ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial (I was a TR on the book)
• Java Persistence with Hibernate
• Spring in Action
• Grails in Action (also eBook formats)
• Adobe Flex 2 (definitely a review copy or raffle prize or some other free source)
• Essential ActionScript 3.0 (probably a review copy)
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
• Refactoring to Patterns

In addition, I have purchased a number of eBooks:

• Becoming Agile
• Clojure in Action
• Distributed Agile in Action
• Erlang and OTP in Action
• JBoss in Action
• Lift in Action
• Objective C for the iPhone

And then in my eBooks folder I also have assorted technical papers on Scala, Forth, TDD, concurrent programming and no-SQL databases!

Two FW/1 users ran into a problem with error handling where methods from the wrong subsystem could be called if an exception occurred. I considered this an important enough issue to provide hotfixes for previous releases. You can now download tagged releases for 1.0.1 and 1.1.1 which incorporate the error handling changes into the earlier releases (1.0, 1.1). I have to say, git made that very easy since I was able to create a hotfix-1.0.1 branch from the v1.0 tag, apply the changes, tag it as v1.0.1 and then apply those same fixes to the hotfix-1.1.1 branch (from the v1.1 tag) and tag that as v1.1.1 and also master (what will become 1.2).

Based on my experience with this, I'll probably move to adopt the git branching model described on Vincent Driessen's blog. That'll mean that the default download will become the stable branch (master) and there will be a new develop branch which represents the bleeding edge. Given that 1.2 is already in progress, I'll probably defer that change until 1.2 goes Gold on master.