An Architect's View

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).January

• The Flex 3 / AIR 1.0 prerelease tour kicks off in San Francisco at a joint BACFUG meeting with several other UGs.
• Geek Entertainment TV posted an interview video filmed at a cat show that my wife judged (she appears briefly in the opening sequence). The video features several of my friends, both human and feline!
• I challenged the community - controversially, it seems - to convert non-CF programmers to CFML and generated nearly 100 comments. I'll be revisiting that post in a few days to look at what has changed since I issued the challenge.
• Another fairly controversial post was when I 'upgraded' from Vista to XP :)

February

• I joined Broadchoice, Inc. full-time.
• I started looking at Groovy and Grails. By mid-2008, I'd started to move the back end (model) development at Broadchoice from CFML to Groovy (using Flex and CFML for view-controller development).
• I gave my (somewhat controversial) Duck Typing talk at BACFUG.

March

• Fusebox 5.5.1 was released. After that release, I left Team Fusebox and handed the reins over to Adam Haskell. Developing and maintaining a widely-used framework for the community is exhausting!
• I started praising MXUnit as the best-of-breed unit testing framework for CFML. If you're not doing unit testing yet, make it your 2009 resolution!
• New Atlanta announced that BlueDragon JEE would be open sourced. I later joined the Open BlueDragon steering committee - in April - and later quit - in June.
• I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard and lost the contents of my /home directory. I keep my backups a lot more current now!

April

• ColdFusion 8.0.1 was released. This brought 64-bit system support (and support for Leopard) and - my favorites - useful enhancements to onMissingMethod() and attributeCollection.
• Popular Mechanics published an interesting price/performance analysis of Mac and PC computers. I bring this up in the year-end review because this is a perennial discussion on most all of the lists I'm on!

May

• We were pleased to announce that Ray Camden joined Broadchoice. Later in the year we were able to announce that Joe Rinehart and Brian Kotek also joined us (in July and August respectively)! We also announced our on-demand web platform, running on ColdFusion 8.0.1 (on Linux).
• cf.Objective() 2008 was fantastic (I blogged a lot about plans for it in the months before the conference but only blogged about Vince Bonfanti's launch of Open BlueDragon during the conference). I blogged quite a bit about OpenBD during May tho'.
• Adobe released public betas of Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4 and Soundbooth as part of its increasingly open process.

June

• Scotch on the Rocks 2008 was fantastic and Railo announced their open source partnership with Red Hat / JBoss.
• I won a cool T shirt from a contest on Ben Nadel's blog. Ben's blog continues to be unmissable reading!
• CFUNITED 2008 was a mixed bag but it opened with Adobe's announcement of the CFML Advisory Committee and the highlight of the entire conference was Elliott Sprehn's Internals of the Adobe CF Server presentation.

July

• I turned 46 and posted a link to the Best. Guinness. Advert. Ever.!
• Apple released the 2.0 iPhone software update and the AppStore and the world hasn't been the same since!

August

• I bought a CNG-powered Honda Civic and I still love it. It has 3,000 miles on the clock and the exhaust pipe is still squeaky clean!
• We launched the ArgumentCollection blog written by Brian Kotek, Joe Rinehart, Ray Camden and myself (as soon as Brian joined us!).

September

• ColdFusion became available for free for education - a move that many CFers had been requesting for a long time!
• Google's Chrome browser was released... for Windows only :( But it's very cool!
• Railo announced their free community edition of 3.0 providing a full-featured CFML engine with almost no restrictions. We subsequently used Railo Community Edition for the iPhone version of Broadchoice Workspace since we were deploying to the (Amazon) cloud.
• ColdSpring (finally!) released version 1.2 with a brand new web site (including documentation!).
• Kristen Schofield published the ColdFusion evangelist's kit to help CFers "sell" ColdFusion to clients, managers and the world - and in the same week Adobe ran several eSeminars covering ColdFusion!
• A Wee Dram of Scotch 2008 was fantastic! It replaced CFDevCon at the last minute and offered a cheap, one day, one track way to cram on your ColdFusion skills!

October

• The organizing team behind CFUNITED, Stellr, breaks free of TeraTech and the plans for CFUNITED 2009 look very promising indeed!
• Broadchoice released the public beta of Workspace, a new desktop collaboration app, built with Flex / AIR / BlazeDS (and Groovy / Spring / Hibernate / JBoss, running on the cloud).

November

• Adobe announce Bolt - the next ColdFusion IDE at MAX 2008. I wrote up my review of MAX for Fusion Authority.

December

• Adobe and SpringSource announced integration of BlazeDS directly into Spring. This really up the ante for enterprise development with a modern user interface!

Summary I think ColdFusion has gone from strength to strength this year. Two enterprise-class CFML engines are now available for free, one of them open source with the other going open source in 2009. Adobe have promised to open up their process and have started with the CFML Advisory Committee and we can look forward to a public bugbase soon, as well as a ground-breaking new release of ColdFusion and a new IDE. ColdFusion is free for education - both students and teachers - and Adobe has provided material to help us justify the cost for those who have to pay. The CFML community has begun to seriously embrace unit testing - another sign that we're growing as a community. We had some great conferences this year and MAX had more ColdFusion content (including an Unconference) and we can expect even more in 2009 with cf.Objective() in May, a three day on-the-road version of Scotch on the Rocks in June, a revitalized CFUNITED in August and MAX in November (in Los Angeles). I think a lot of developers have branched out and picked up at least one new language this year (be it Flex or Java or Groovy or Ruby or whatever) and realized that multi-language development is the way to go. What do I think 2009 holds? Centaur and Bolt will rock our world - but the effect won't be felt until 2010 at least. Flex and AIR will continue to grow in popularity - and more CFers will pick up these technologies - and I think CFers will continue to pick up other technologies as well and combine them with CFML. 2009 will see Railo released as open source with the support of Red Hat and Jboss and that may bring in a substantial number of new developers from the Java world. We will then be in a world where two of the three major CFML engines are both free and open source which will change the dynamic, even if the impact isn't felt for a year or two. Whatever happens, it'll be another good year to be a CFML developer!