what do I know

If anyone is in the Orlando area tomorrow night, stop on by the Adogo meeting! We will be raffling off a license for ColdFusion 8 as well as giving away great Adobe stuff to anyone in attendance. Luis Majano will be giving a presentation on the latest version of ColdBox as well as an overview of the framework. Also, I will be leading a BoF on the multitude of ColdFusion frameworks that we have access to as a community. Hopefully I can encourage a good amount of discussion like Max did for our RIA BoF back in August.

Hope you stop by tomorrow, 12/04, at our usual time (7:00 PM) at Devry in Millennia. Highwinds Network Group will be sponsoring the meeting and bringing food along, so worse case you get fed and enjoy some casual CF conversation.

I’m definitely very excited for the ColdFusion community. This conference has turned out to a great step in the right direction in terms of architecture for sure. Multiple perspectives were presented and people were receptive. A good balance between design approaches was presented. People are starting to use ORM’s and seeing value in what they provide. The basic concepts of an SOA have been introduced. Best of all, everyone seems to understand the topics that are being presented.

I’m also very excited, as you can probably already guess, about the ColdBox framework. I spoke to Luis yesterday and he’s already implemented the CFEclipse XML framework configuration options for ColdBox. He also added functionality to view the contents of a RequestContext into the already crazy debugging tools available in the framework. This guy is out of control. He’s got a huge amount of drive for the framework and a focus on making it easy to use and manageable via a cool polished toolset.

ColdFusion is still kicking and once again the community has risen to the occasion.

This wasn’t a session at the conference, but it caused me to miss a few sessions today. I wasn’t that impressed with the topic selection today anyway so this was more fun and more educational. I was able to catch up with Luis Majano for almost 4-5 hours today. I interviewed him at my previous job and really got a chance to know him better today. He humored me and gave me a full walk-through of ColdBox over an espresso. Wow, he has really found a good balance between convention and configuration I think. I really think that ColdBox has the ability to do for ColdFusion what Rails did for Ruby, or least to certain degree. Luis has built-in more tools than I can think of to help with productivity and debugging. ColdBox has framework configuration options available in XML, but the bulk of the work done by the application programmer is done by using convention. ColdBox has tools to generate a working application skeleton, a robust caching mechanism, and an amazingly sexy debugging utility. What even crazier is that ColdBox gains most of its power from the massive number of plug-ins available for the framework and the ease in which they can be created. ColdBox comes with support for Java localization and layout management out of the box and even better, if you want they can be turned off. There are tons of things I’m leaving out but I would definitely suggest checking it out. I’m seriously considering it over Fusebox after talking to Luis.

In an effort to better understand how the framework works and to help Luis with the 2.0 release, we sat down and did a domain model analysis to see if we could develop a more descriptive domain model. We made some good progress and will hopefully pick back up tomorrow.

The sheer amount of work that Luis has put into this framework is amazing. With the current documentation available for the project and Luis’ robust approach to product management, this framework is not going away. The tools alone make it worth using this framework. Definitely check it out.