This week - tomorrow in fact - I'll be giving a re-run of my CFUnited talk "Living in the Cloud" at BACFUG. You can read about the talk - and RSVP! - on BACFUG's Adobe Groups website.

See you there!

Just a heads up that I plan to republish a number of my ArgumentCollection blog posts here as Broadchoice plan to reuse the domain name for an upcoming support / corporate blog to accompany their new support documentation wiki and support forums.

That means your RSS feed may show a number of articles that you have already read on their original dates. I will republish each article using the original date but I can't guarantee they won't show up new for you :)

After a year at Broadchoice, it has come time to move on.

I've had a great time working with Ray Camden, Joe Rinehart, Brian Kotek and Luke Kilpatrick - as well as the rest of the team (who don't blog). We created a great content management system (Broadchoice Community Platform, powered by Model-Glue 2, ColdSpring and Transfer, running on ColdFusion 8 Enterprise - now up on the Amazon cloud) and we created an incredible desktop collaboration app (Broadchoice Workspace, powered by AIR, Flex, BlazeDS, Spring and Hibernate, running on Groovy and JBoss - with an iPhone web version powered by Model-Glue 3 and ColdSpring, running on Railo 3.0 and JBoss up on the Amazon cloud). I've learned a lot about Flex and AIR and I've gotten to know Railo as an alternative CFML engine.

After working with such a great team on such a great product, what comes next?

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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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Some people - myself included - have observed runaway memory usage and apparent memory leaks with applications built with certain combinations of CFML frameworks that include Transfer ORM. We spent a lot of time tuning the JVM and looking at code and database usage in our Broadchoice Community Platform (CMS), we worked with Mike Brunt on load testing and tuning (highly recommended - if you have any performance problems, get Mike on your case!) as well as working with Mark Mandel directly on Transfer itself. All that work led to a much more stable system and we decided to just continue investigating as a background task.

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We just heard back from Adobe that Broadchoice Workspace has been approved and is listed on the Adobe AIR Marketplace. Download the app! Spread the word!

Brian Kotek has begun a series on using Swiz, the Dependency Injection framework created by Chris Scott of ColdSpring fame.

Brian's first post just shows the very basic setup (how to specify the classes that Swiz manages and how to load them into your application).

If you're using ColdSpring today in CFML and you're interested in learning Flex, Brian's series might be very useful to you.

If you're tired of the boilerplate code that Cairngorm makes you write (or generate), Swiz might be just what you're looking for and Brian's series will be good reading for you too.

We use Swiz at Broadchoice, in our Workspace for Salesforce desktop application (built with Flex and AIR) and we all love working with the framework!

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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James Whittaker recently featured the Broadchoice Workspace on his Refreshing Apps sites which is "a showcase and gallery that shows some of the fantastic Adobe AIR applications that are being developed today".

He says "The application offers lots of functionality" and, in particular, praises the design:

When started this AIR application looks polished from the layout to the iconography used. There is a lot of functionality here but without the large button bars and menu options.

The corporate colour palette mean this application will look right at home on the business desktop and the integration with Salesforce.

Nice to see our hard work getting some public chops. If you want to show your support, pop over to Refreshing Apps and vote for us (we're #3 at the moment with 4.4/5 votes but I'd like to see more votes!).

This week has seen my focus shift back from ActionScript / Groovy to ColdFusion, although not specifically programming in CFML. A couple of blogs have been buzzing about the pros and cons (and plain ol' whys) of running ColdFusion in the cloud, such as on Amazon's EC2 service. Obviously you can run Open BlueDragon or Railo without worrying about cost but for many people, only Adobe ColdFusion will really do what they need and the current EULA does not really accommodate that (partly because the "per 2 CPU" aspect doesn't cover the Amazon situation where you simply don't know how many physical CPUs you actually have!).

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A dramatic title I guess but this really highlights Adobe's commitment to open source and expanding the reach of Flex: Adobe Collaborates with SpringSource for Enhanced Flex / Spring Integration.

I've been working with Spring quite a lot over the last few months - we use it to wire things together behind the Broadchoice Workspace - and it constantly amazes me how comprehensive the Spring project is - see below for an example.

By integrating the open source BlazeDS project directly into Spring, Adobe brings Flex integration to a vast community of Java Spring developers who can now expose their Java services to Flex UIs in a very simple way. It should really help the uptake of Flex in the Java community!

An example of Spring's comprehensive nature: Ray blogged about sending email using Spring's mail support via Groovy. I recently built a new Model-Glue 3 app on top of our Groovy services and needed to send email. I could have used CFMAIL but Railo has a bug that does not allow + in email addresses and I didn't want that restriction (since we send email elsewhere directly from Groovy). It was very simple to use the same Spring mail package directly from CFML by declaring the Spring-managed beans in the CFCOMPONENT tag of my controller so that Model-Glue would autowire it!

I was just reading a couple of blog posts about deploying Open BlueDragon in the cloud (I started with Matt Woodward's extended blog post on cloud computing) and they've gone as far as integrating OpenBD into Elastic Server - a service that lets you easily configure a server instance based on a number of resources. Very impressive.

Broadchoice Workspace is deployed on the cloud and whilst most of the machinery is Java/Groovy behind the Flex/AIR application, we also have the iPhone-compatible web version which is powered by CFML. It's a Model-Glue 3 / ColdSpring application that reuses the core Groovy services (via a Spring adapter that Joe Rinehart wrote).

So we've been running CFML in the cloud in production for nearly two months now and it's working out really well for us. We're using Railo 3.0, another option for cloud computing.

Adobe have said that cloud deployment is something they want to make possible with ColdFusion so at some point we'll have an embarrassment of riches in terms of choices for CFML in the cloud.

Who else is using CFML in the cloud today? Who is thinking about doing so?

Oh, sorry, that was the title of the BACFUG presentation by Bill Shelton and Marc Esher (of MXUnit fame)!

Unit testing has defined my working day. I've been working on the licensing subsystem of the next build of the Broadchoice Workspace today and because we practice Test-Driven Development (thanx Brian!), that means writing unit tests "first" or at least alongside the production code.

I started by writing the License bean and an accompanying LicenseTest. The bean has a handful of properties and two methods. The unit test has nine test methods.

Fairly confident that the bean was correct, I moved on to the data layer. Apart from encryption, this mostly follows our well-tested generic Hibernate DAO. That meant only a couple of unit tests.

Once those tests passed, I moved on to the service layer. Six unit tests for four service methods.

At this point I'm ready to write the remote service facade (which implements user-level security) but I'm fairly confident our licensing subsystem will work as expected. 623 lines of code, just over half of which is unit tests (327 lines to 296 production code). I'll probably add some more data layer unit tests since I have a couple of "untested" methods (they're used in the service layer tests).

Unit tests may seem dull and tedious but they really can make your life easier.

Today was our official launch, just in time for MAX! Now anyone can download the Broadchoice Workspace AIR application and create a 30-day trial account.

Commercial use will be just $99/user per year with educational licenses at $49/user per year. Registered non-profit organizations can get free licenses.

If you're also a Salesforce user, you'll love the integration between groups in Workspace and your company's Salesforce account, allowing you to see open opportunities directly in the Workspace and create collaborative spaces based on opportunities so that you can work with your non-Salesforce peers on closing deals!

Working with Brian Kotek, Joe Rinehart and Ray Camden on this application has been a wonderful experience. We've all learned a lot from each other as we've learned a lot about Flex, AIR, Groovy, BlazeDS, Spring, Hibernate and integration with CFML via Model-Glue 3 (Gesture) and ColdSpring!

Also, for Workspace users on-the-go, there is an iPhone-compatible web application (with plans for full Blackberry support by year end).

Since I just mentioned BACFUG's free event on the Wednesday of MAX, I figured I should also highlight Ray Camden's ColdFusion Unconference that takes at MAX in parallel with the main MAX sessions.

It runs 11am-6pm Monday, 9:30am-5pm Tuesday and 8:30am-5pm Wednesday. Three full days of ColdFusion sessions including an "Uber Panel" on Wednesday morning (10:30-11:30), hosted by Brian Meloche, which includes three of the Broadchoice team (Ray, Joe and myself) as well as Charlie Arehart and, from Adobe, Adam Lehman and Jason Delmore. Bring your hardest questions about ColdFusion!

The entire Broadchoice team will be at MAX and you'll be able to find us at the Adobe Booth on Wednesday, between noon and 1:30pm, as we will be demonstrating the Broadchoice Workspace at the Adobe Partner demo station.

Today saw the release of Workspace Beta 1 Build 2 and it's been a crazy busy day - but a great way to round off the week!

The team has worked almost around the clock this week to add new features, redesign large parts of the user interface and track down and fix a number of bugs.

We're using the Scrum process with each week being a Sprint and it's been working fairly well for us. We each get to focus on a small set of tasks for the week, we finish the week with a new build and then we discuss what is going into next week's Sprint. Joe (Rinehart) has the most experience with Scrum so he's been leading the charge but it seems a very productive way to develop and evolve a complex feature-driven product.

I've learned a couple of (painful) lessons this week and I'll be blogging about those over on the ArgumentCollection soon.

By the way, the whole ArgumentCollection team is going to be at MAX - see you there!

If you're coming to MAX, you might want to check out the MAX 2008 information website created by local user group managers.

It's running on the Broadchoice Collaboration Platform, our "2.0" ColdFusion-powered platform - not to be confused with the Broadchoice Workspace, our "3.0" AIR/Flex desktop application that launched in beta today!

Things have been a bit quiet on my blog because I was in England for two weeks. Things have been a bit quiet on the Broadchoice blog too because the team has been busy with the Broadchoice Workspace, preparing for the upcoming beta program!

Here's a screenshot of the latest internal build, running on my laptop (with real content!) - the navigation and layout has changed a bit since our earlier screenshots - but we're all using the Workspace in-house to collaborate on projects as we draw closer to launch:

(click for larger image)

In addition to the AIR application, we're also working on an iPhone web application - built with CFML - that exposes all the Workspace content as well as providing the ability to send messages to spaces.

Folks who sign up for the beta program will get to experience both of those!

The beta will start next week on a first come, first served basis (so those who have already signed up will get their login credentials and access instructions around the 15th - thank you for your patience!).

At the beginning of last week, we blogged a sneak peak of our desktop collaboration application and opened signups for the forthcoming beta. We've had a lot of interest so far, so, late on Friday night, we blogged a sneak peak of our desktop behavioral analytics application as well.

The local User Group Managers have created an attendee information site that provides suggestions for transport, tourism and eating out, as well as offering a forum and a suggestion box!

Feel free to browse around and, if you want to participate in the forums or ideas exchange, register as a user on the site (it's free of course!).

The site is powered by the Broadchoice Collaboration Platform and runs on Adobe ColdFusion (despite the lack of .cfm in the URLs).

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This is a re-post to remind folks who are attending MAX to take another look at this site.

I just made another pass over my MAX schedule to finalize my choices and thought I'd post my planned list of sessions so folks will know where to find me:

• Monday
  • Opening General Session
  • Adobe Roadmap: Enterprise
  • Flex Architecture Face-Off - panel
  • Real-Time Collaboration Apps with Flex and Cocomo - Nigel Pegg
• Tuesday
  • Mixing Open Source and Commercial Software
  • General Session
  • Adobe@Adobe: IT Innovation
  • Developing Rich Applications with jQuery and Adobe AIR - John Resig
  • The REST of SOA
• Wednesday
  • Advanced Patterns for ColdFusion Test Automation - Bill Shelton / Marc Esher (MXUnit)
  • Building Real-Time and Collaborative Applications with Flex and BlazeDS
  • Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion - an updated version of my session from Scotch on the Rocks and CFUNITED
  • Cocomo Deep Dive: Building Social RIAs with Flex + Adobe Hosted Services - Nigel Pegg
  • Developing Enterprise ColdFusion Applications - Joe Rinehart

As I was updating my schedule, I noticed that several of the ColdFusion and Flex workshops are already sold out - good to see so much interest in those! I was originally going to Dave Watts' "High Performance ColdFusion" but decided to give up my seat when I saw it was sold out (hopefully someone else will get in now!). There's a lot of excellent ColdFusion sessions at MAX this year but my focus right now is on Flex, AIR and real-time collaboration so that has driven most of my session choices.

Also a reminder that BACFUG meets on the Wednesday evening immediately after MAX ends and I am pleased to announce that we are having a double session with some MAX speakers:

• Bill Shelton and Marc Esher will present on Unit Testing in ColdFusion with MXUnit
• Joe Rinehart will present on Model-Glue 3: Gesture

We hope to have a good turn out with MAX attendees taking advantage of this (free) user group meeting in the evening! Since the meeting is inside the Adobe building, you will need to RSVP for security purposes. See you there!

We have just announced on the ArgumentCollection blog that we are taking signups for the forthcoming beta program of our new AIR-based product. That blog post contains the first screenshots of what we're all working on as well as giving some details about what the product offers as well as how it's built.

Here comes The ArgumentCollection! That's the Broadchoice engineering team blog we've been hinting at over the last few days. If you subscribe to ColdFusionBloggers, you'll already be getting the new feed. We'll try to get it on AXNA shortly.

So what does it mean for me, Joe, Brian, Ray and Nico in terms of our personal blogs? Well, posts that relate specifically to what we're doing at Broadchoice will appear on The ArgumentCollection and posts that are more general - or more personal - will continue to appear on our own blogs. We may also post additional commentary on our own blogs, referring to a core technical post on The ArgumentCollection.

We're hoping that the Broadchoice engineering team blog becomes a valuable source of technical information for folks building complex, large-scale systems with ColdFusion, Flex and other complementary technologies. We're also hoping that you all continue to read our own blogs too of course!

We're finally able to announce our latest new hire: Brian Kotek!

Like Joe, Brian was also part of our Global Developer Meetup and, as Joe hints on his blog Brian also survived our somewhat unusual interview process :)

Brian is a great contributor to many online discussions about OO and I'm really looking forward to working alongside him as we all learn from each other on the team.

Brian is taking the engineering lead on our Demand Accelerator product and you'll be hearing more about that on our soon-to-be-launched team blog.

I have not been blogging as much as I'd like recently. The truth is that right now I'm working on a bunch of things I can't talk about. We announced that we'd hired Ray Camden, Nicolas Lierman and Joe Rinehart but we can't announce who else we've hired yet (next week, I promise!) and obviously we can't talk about who we're going after next (we're still expanding).

We're planning our next generation services (products) we can't talk much about that. Joe has hinted at the analytics work we're doing but we have a roadmap for three distinct Software-as-a-Service products. We'll be talking more about our products later in the year - stay tuned.

We're adjusting our technology stack to take advantage of performance, power and expressiveness. Again, I can't really talk about what we're doing in detail but I can say that we have more Java and Groovy code in our SVN repository today than we had a few weeks ago. We're still deeply wedded to Adobe ColdFusion but I think this trend toward Java and Groovy - and Spring and Hibernate - will continue. On the other hand, we're adding Flex to our stack now and looking at AIR. We're just diversifying.

We're talking about a Broadchoice team blog where Ray, Joe, Nico, myself and - oh sorry, we can't say yet - will blog about technical issues we hit and (hopefully) solve!

This is all just to say the quietness of my blog is temporary and I expect to be back to full volume soon!

Joe Rinehart!

I'm very excited about Joe joining Broadchoice as Systems Architect. I've always enjoyed interacting with Joe on software design and development issues (and socially) so I'm very happy that I can now do that on a daily basis!

Joe's blog post talks about why he joined and what he'll be doing. By the end of his first day on the job, he'd already produced a thought-provoking document on the analytics system that he'll be building with Nicolas (Lierman) and our database specialist, Robert Xiong.

We're a Model-Glue 2 shop right now but we'll be migrating to Model-Glue 3 soon so you can expect several blog posts (from all of us) on that!

Working at Broadchoice just keeps getting better and better! Stay tuned for more hiring news within the next few weeks...

We just completed our first mini-conference in-house and it was an exhausting - but exhilarating - three days. We flew our remote developers into the Bay Area and had three days of sessions, with evening social events, just like any number of conferences we've all attended.

Friday focused on company vision - both business and technical - kicking off with a keynote from our CTO, and then Saturday and Sunday were deep dives into architecture, system integration, user interface design and process & communication.

As a company that has a number of remote engineers, we feel this is an important way to help everyone get on the same page and to encourage intense interactions and information sharing. We're going to try to do this twice a year from now on.

As a result of these sessions, we're also going to be making some changes to how we manage communication internally to help remote folks stay connected (e.g., more video conferencing, more screen sharing when working on projects, regular but brief cross-company conference calls to share business and technical news, increased use of internal blogs).

Does your company do anything like this? How do you work with your remote team members?

Nicolas Lierman, creator of the Google Analytics AIR application, is leaving Boulevart to join Broadchoice. We're naturally very excited to have Nicolas on board and driving our behavioral analytics platform. If you were at Scotch on the Rocks, you may have met Nicolas and heard him talk about analytics - with a very refreshing twist - and if you missed him then, you'll have a chance to catch him at CFDevCon 2008 where he'll be talking about "revolutionizing web analytics with Adobe AIR".

May has been a quiet month on the blog because it has been an extremely busy month at Broadchoice. We completed our 2.0.2 and 2.0.3 releases and launched the new platform with a fair bit of press coverage.

The platform is powered by ColdFusion 8.0.1, running Model-Glue 2 (BER), ColdSpring 1.2 BER and Transfer 1.0 BER and runs on a cluster of 64-bit Linux servers with synchronization of the Transfer cache managed through a set of ActiveMQ JMS server instances. The database is MySQL.

We're continuing to work on a stream of minor releases as well as planning our next major release with a lot of new features.

I'll be pulling together some presentations and articles about how we're using the frameworks together (because I think we're doing some interesting and unusual things, behind the scenes). I'll some a few snippets of code at Scotch in both of my presentations (and again at CFUNITED). I'm talking to the CFDevcon organizers about appropriate topics and they suggested a framework-related session so that might be the first unveiling of some of our ColdSpring / Transfer tricks and tips. I expect Ray will also be blogging about some aspects of our application architecture in due course.

Feel free to sign up for a free Broadchoice account and see what we've been up to! Our support site (also powered by the Broadchoice Web Platform, as is our public website - we like to eat our own dog food!) has several ways for you to provide feedback to us!

Read all about it in the multimedia news release on PR Newswire.

Broadchoice Delivers First On-Demand Web Platform to Build Corporate Communities and Increase Marketing Effectiveness

New Broadchoice Web Platform Integrates Social Networking, Web Content, Marketing Campaigns, and Dynamic Analytics for $1 per Registered User.

Everything my team have been working on for the last six months is a reality. We're live. Web sites powered by Broadchoice, powered by ColdFusion 8.0.1 on 64-bit Linux.

Mark has just announce the second Release Candidate build of Transfer ORM 1.0. He's been holding back on this until Broadchoice confirmed that a particularly stack overflow error in the cache discard was fixed. We confirmed that today for him, after extensive testing - both human and automated.

As many of you know - especially those who attended cf.Objective() - we hired Alagad to have Mike Brunt perform extensive load testing on our system, built with Model-Glue 2, ColdSpring and Transfer. One of the issues he found was a memory leak and Mark worked tirelessly with us prior to, throughout and after cf.Objective() to track it down and fix it. Mike helped us tune and debug our systems and I look forward to having him back to help us when we move to the next stage with our servers (as we investigate additional instances and more JVM tuning).

So download and test Transfer 1.0 RC 2 and report any issues you find to Mark so that he can fix them in time for the 1.0 release at WebDU!

If you're on 64-bit Linux and you're using RewriteRule in Apache, you probably need this Culmulative Hot Fix for ColdFusion 8.0.1. I hit this during testing and it was a blocker for Broadchoice to move from 32-bit Linux to 64-bit Linux (bug 71362). There are also four other bug fixes in this hot fix so check out the Tech Note.

Anyone else running ColdFusion 8.0.1 in production on 64-bit Linux or are we the first company to do so (on our twelve-server cluster)?

If you haven't already seen Ray Camden's blog, he has joined Broadchoice as our VP of Software Development and we're very excited to have Ray as part of our team!

Ray and I have been working together on the new Broadchoice platform for the last few months, initially both as consultants. We both feel Broadchoice is doing something unique, something special and that this is a great move for both of us - and ultimately for a lot of developers out there.

Watch this space!

As is traditional, CFUNITED is publishing brief interviews with all of their speakers. My interview about event-driven programming in ColdFusion has just been published today. I mention Edmund briefly and I'll be blogging more about that in due course. Since the interviewed was "recorded" I have indeed started using Edmund at Broadchoice to manage the workflows in our scheduled tasks.

Since I like to learn something new every day, I tuned in to Trevor McCauley's presentation to Fire On The Bay's meeting tonight and learned about ten cool things that Fireworks can do. Even tho' I'm a huge fan of Fireworks, I learned a bunch of new stuff! Thank you Trevor!

You can watch the recording if you missed it live.

Not being there in person I missed out on beer and pizza, courtesy of meeting sponsor Broadchoice.

For immediate release

On-Demand Services Attract In-Demand Architect

CASTRO VALLEY, Calif. -- Feb. 16, 2008 -- Sean Corfield today announced that he will be joining Broadchoice, Inc. headquartered in San Mateo, California as their Chief Systems Architect and Vice President of Engineering. In this new position, Corfield will oversee the evolution of Broadchoice's Digital Marketing Manager™ platform, expanding the capabilities and scaling the on-demand service to meet the ever-increasing customer base. Corfield said "Broadchoice has a really gifted team that has already created a winning service, used by companies such as Cisco. I'm excited to be part of that team and to have the opportunity to really take the platform to a new level." Broadchoice's Digital Marketing Manager™ is created and powered by Adobe technologies.

Richard Bennion, Broadchoice Founder & CTO, is a long-time advocate of ColdFusion and has been a pioneer in digital marketing for twenty years. "Bennion's energy and enthusiasm was key in attracting me to this role," said Corfield, "and he and I share an enthusiasm for great experiences created by great technology."

Also joining the Broadchoice team is Luke Kilpatrick, co-manager of the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group (BACFUG) and manager of Fire on the Bay, an Adobe Fireworks User Group serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Kilpatrick brings a wealth of experience in UI development and content management systems to the Broadchoice team. Corfield said "Kilpatrick's a friend of mine and I'm looking forward to having him on my team."

About Sean Corfield
Sean Corfield has been a freelance consultant since leaving the Hosted Services group at Adobe Systems, Inc. in April 2007 and was formerly the Senior Architect for the IT division of Macromedia, Inc. for almost six years. Prior to joining Macromedia, Corfield drove the architecture of a number of high-traffic, high-profile websites for a diverse group of companies after working on the ANSI J16 C++ Standards Committee for eight years and building compilers, interpreters and runtime systems. He is also manager of BACFUG and a frequent speaker at ColdFusion conferences around the world, as well as a contributor to a number of open source ColdFusion projects.

About Broadchoice, Inc.
Broadchoice is the leader in providing on-demand marketing solutions for the enterprise. The Digital Marketing Manager™ platform provides a fully integrated, enterprise application for web content management, enterprise marketing management and channel partner management.

For those who aren't sure, this is intended to be a somewhat tongue-in-cheek announcement but the news is real. I start the new job on Monday, February 18th, and I'm looking forward to hiring some of the best talent to help me grow a very exciting product! Stay tuned!