An Architect's View

As I did in 2006, here's my review of 2007. For some strange reason, I decided to make some New Year Resolutions in 2006. How did I do? I said I'd do more unit testing - and I did, but there's always room for more unit testing. I said I'd do more open source. Well, I released Fusebox 5.1 and Fusebox 5.5 as well as my Scripting project and a cfcUnit facade for CFEclipse so I think I did alright there. I also said I'd do more Flex and write some Apollo (now AIR) applications. I didn't do so well on those two! I think I'll revert to my usual practice of not making resolutions this year...

2007 was certainly a year of great change for me, leaving Adobe in April (a hot thread with 62 comments!) to become a freelance consultant, focusing on ColdFusion and application architecture. I also worked part-time on a startup through the Summer but consulting has been my main focus and continues to be my total business as we move into 2008.

2007 also saw me getting much more involved with the ColdFusion community, rejoining all the mailing lists that I hadn't had time to read with my role at Adobe, becoming an Adobe Community Expert for ColdFusion and then taking over as manager of the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group.

I also got to speak at a lot of conferences in 2007:

• Frameworks Conference (in February) - thanks to TeraTech since my manager at Adobe did not want me to attend!
• cf.Objective() in May which was amazing (day one, day two, day three, more thoughts) - I was allowed to debut some ColdFusion 8 AJAX features, thanks to the CF product team!
• CFUNITED in June (overview, day one, frameworks BOF, day two part 1, day two part 2, day three).
• Adobe MAX in Chicago (day one, day two, day three) and Adobe MAX in Barcelona (arriving, notes, after thoughts), both in October.
• CFUNITED Express Bay Area in November, reprising my MAX talk about design patterns (which I gave twice more in December to user groups).

I also attended the Adobe Community Summit which was excellent!

ColdFusion frameworks were also very busy in 2007:

• ColdSpring - 1.2 RC1 finally appeared!
• Fusebox - 5.1 and 5.5 releases, a brand new website and Jeff Peters' Fusebox 5.1 book
• Mach-II - 1.5 release and a brand new website (with 1.6 on the horizon)
• Model-Glue - support for Transfer and a brand new website
• Transfer - various 0.6.x releases and an active march toward 1.0 (early 2008?)
• I posted a graphic showing the timeline for various ColdFusion frameworks
• I also wrote a comparison of Transfer and Reactor that people seemed to find useful

Adobe was extremely busy too:

• Apollo (AIR) hit labs in March
• The Scorpio prerelease tour (Ben came to BACFUG in April) with the ColdFusion 8 Public Beta in May and the full release in July
• Creative Suite 3
• Flex began its journey to open source
• The Flex 3 and AIR Beta releases
• Adobe Share

I had a number of rants:

• Why you should leave that (framework) code alone!
• I declared duplicate() is bad for your object's health and drew 26 comments, mostly agreeing with me.
• ColdFusion developers continue to misuse design patterns - continued in October - and the core of most of my presentations this year!
• Vista as a development environment for IIS7, BlueDragon and SQL Server Express. Some days I don't hate Vista. Some days I still do.
• The spiteful idiots at Sys-Con who killed the ColdFusion Developer's Journal and then made themselves look even more ridiculous.
• Early Leopard adopters (I finally ordered my copy on December 28th).

Other good stuff from 2007:

• Ray Camden and Adam Podolnick released ColdFire.
• I bought myself a 17" MacBook Pro which I love.
• Charlie Arehart and Ray Camden resurrected the awesome Online ColdFusion Meetup Group which is now the largest CFUG in the world!
• corfield.org moved to a VPS - thank you HostMySite! - and I passed 1,000,000 visitors with a contest organized by Dan Wilson (thank you!).
• I liked Parallels Desktop for a while to run Windows and Linux on my Mac, then I switched to VMware Fusion Desktop and never went back.
• I bought myself an iPhone which I love.