Flex-Docs.com on the Flex Show
by Neil Middleton 4:24 pm Thursday, 27 March 2008.

In this weeks Flex Show podcast you’ll hear that Flex-Docs.com has been mentioned by the hosts Jeffry Houser and John Wilker.

If you haven’t listened to the Flex Show yet - you should, it covers all Flex related stuff.   If you’re a CF developer you should also listen to the Coldfusion Weekly.

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Flex-Docs.com Flex 3 coming soon
by Neil Middleton 3:08 pm Tuesday, 25 March 2008.

A few of you have emailed me pointing out that Flex-Docs.com only includes the Flex 2 API at the moment (which I was already aware of).

So you know, I’m currently talking to Randy Nielsen, the Flex Documentation Manager @ Adobe to get the current API’s from them, in order to compile the source files I need for Flex 3 support. Once this has been done and the files have been sorted out, you should see Flex 3 coming to a site near you real soon.

Aside from that, any additional comments are welcome as always.

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Making sure your Flex is initialized
by Neil Middleton 5:26 pm Thursday, 20 March 2008.

I’ve just banging my head against a brick wall for the past half an hour trying to work out why a bit of Flex MXML was crashing as soon as it was loaded. I had a situation whereby a label component was coming back as null once called from an event handler. Dipping into the debugging view confirmed this.

The issue? Well, the event was fired as soon as it’s parent component was loaded, which was also before the Label had started to load (note that the order of nodes in your MXML does make a difference). Consider the following code:

[viewcode] src=”2008/03/initialized.txt” geshi=xml[/viewcode]

By using this.initialized you are able to check that the parent node has loaded (in this case, the Application, but sometimes the containing component), and therefore run your code relatively safely.

I guess best practise would say that you should always check for initialization signatures regardless - better safe than sorry.

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New Flex Documentation Site
by Neil Middleton 12:22 pm Wednesday, 19 March 2008.

Yesterday I set myself a little challenge.  How much of a website could I build in an hour.  It had to be finished and production quality.

The answer?  flex-docs.com.

Flex-Docs is a Flex documentation lookup tool of a similar veign to good old CFQuickDocs.com.  Currently it only contains Flex 2 stuff, but over time will change to Flex 3.

flex-docs.png

Check it out, it might be useful to someone out there.

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There is no silver bullet
by Neil Middleton 3:26 pm Tuesday, 18 March 2008.

I’ve been a little late to this party but I thought I would post my thoughts on the recent announcement by New Atlanta that they were making their Bluedragon J2EE product open source.

There’s been plenty of people commenting on this already covering pretty much every opinion there can be ranging from wholehearted enthusiasm to nothing but negativity.  There’s also been a couple of posts whereby people have completely misunderstood and thought New Atlanta were pulling out from the CFML market altogether.

So, what are my thoughts?  Well, in a nutshell it’s got to be a good thing for both us as CFML developers, and New Atlanta.  For them it’s undoubtedly a marketing exercise to produce a viable appealing alternative to CF8 that can act as a loss leader into the other NA CFML products.  Overall, awareness of Bluedragon has already increased, and will again once the infrastructure is in place to deal with the product being moved into the community.  More people will check it out to see if they can reduce their software costs, whilst others will take a look purely out of interest.

An interesting option that is raised is that of bundling.  It is now possible, assuming that all the licenses align properly, of bundling CFML products in with a web server, J2EE container and CFML engine - for no cost.  This could give rise to loads of virtualisation options with regard to things like Amazon EC2, as well as pre-baked CFML appliances.  Basically imagine where you are currently using CFML and think how you could change your distribution / pricing models by giving BlueDragon a shot.

But, so far, I’ve only talked about the fact the software is free (as in beer), rather than the fact that people will be able to browse and contribute to the codebase.  How will that effect the community?

In short, I don’t think anything will change in the slightest.  CFML developers are normally not Java developers and therefore pretty much unable to contribute - and all the Java developers out there don’t really have a vested interest in developing a CFML server, they’re gonna go for something that helps them directly such as Eclipse as Tomcat.

This has already been very much proved via the Smith project, a purely open source CFML engine.  At the time of writing this has roughly 60% language coverage coming from only a very small handful of developers.  This signifies that as interest from the CFML community goes - there is none.  Nobody seems interested in developing the platform in it’s open source nature, only the no cost.

So, why is this?  Well I can only think there’s two arguments here.  Firstly, the one of pricing.  Although CFML is very productive and pays for itself in the long term, there must be a number of low cost apps out there that sit behind firewalls that simply aren’t pratical to write in CFML.  For instance, take an app worth a couple of grand.  Why would anyone want to pay out another grand for the software - why would they not use something else?

The second argument is that of people adopting CFML.  There appears to be a line of thought that suggests that if CFML were free to all, then people will come flocking from other communities to use CFML.  Now, I hate to be blunt here, but they won’t.  A free CFML engine (as good as CF8) will make virtually no difference.

Why?  Well, think about it.

Put yourselves in the shoes of a PHP or ASP.NET developer.  What reasons would you have for moving for CFML? Why would you dump a platform that does everything you need for another?  There’s just not really any reason to do so.  These people are happy with what they have, they are happy with the size of the community and the help it gives, and they are happy with the number of jobs available to them.  For them, I don’t think CFML solves any problems.  Look at it the other way - why would you move to PHP?

Something I’ve noticed over the years as a CFML developer is that every six months or so, there’s a conversation across the whole community as to where CF is going.  Is it dead or not?   Is Adobe going to kill CF off or not?  How can we get more people using CFML?

To be honest, does any of it matter?

At the moment, CFML is a stable environment, and serves it’s developers well.  It isn’t a one size fits all solution, and there are things that other developers can do, which we can’t - but at the end of the day we all end up the same.  After all, there is nothing binding us to CF, we don’t have to use it for everything.  There is not some sort of sworn allegiance to CF that prevents us from using PHP/ASP.NET once in a while.

You simply must use the best tool for the job at hand.

There is no silver bullet.

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