The Bentaur hits London
by Neil Middleton 12:19 am Thursday, 23 April 2009.
On Tuesday night the UKCFUG had the pleasure of Ben Forta, Mr Evangelism at Adobe, coming over to give us all a run-down on the latest news in the ColdFusion world, and what’s up and coming in the long awaited next version of ColdFusion, Centaur (or 9 as it will more likely be known).
After a late-in-the-day, but necessary change of venue we had 140+ ColdFusion developers descending on the Sway Bar in Holborn, London (also the future venue of the London leg of “Scotch-on-the-Road“). From mine and Nik’s memory we reckon this places this single meeting in the top three in terms of attendance (and that’s a history going back around a decade). This goes to show, that while we might not be the most communicative or vocal community, there are a lot of us, and interest in the platform is still high.
Starting off, Ben talked about the features that are still not a well known fact in the current ColdFusion 8. This focused largely on the built in LiveCycle Data Services and the related Flex integration, but a load of people present honestly appeared to not realise this stuff was built into the product.
After a short break, Ben then moved onto the main event, a preview of ColdFusion 9 and the new ColdFusion Eclipse based IDE, Bolt.
Nothing in either of these products,from what I recall, was described as definite but there were a number of notable features that appeared to get people excited. First up was talk about being able to write CFML as CFSCRIPT across the board (CFC’s and all), and then was coverage of the ColdFusion Exposed Services Layer (CFESL) which basically allows third parties to directly call services built into ColdFusion, such as PDF generation or database querying. This single feature provides a whole load of opportunities for developers – for instance, you could have a dedicated PDF generation server called by other servers, or even generate those documents directly from a Flex app without writing any CFML code.
Then Ben went onto talk about the new built-in ORM based on the Hibernate persistence framework. This is a long awaited addition to CF, with the community having had to roll their own versions in the past. Again, details were sketchy, but from what we understand you can create a CFC based off a database table, and a whole load of magic happens in the back end which allows you to query and interact with your database without having to worry about any SQL.
Finally, Ben talked about Bolt. Bolt is the completely new IDE for ColdFusion. Bolt is essentially an Eclipse plugin, allowing elements of CFML code completion and insight. Additionally there were features around code generation and wizards, all of which are aimed at making the CF developers life easier – the underlying ethos of the ColdFusion product.
All in all it was a fantastic night for all, with free drinks and nibbles supplied by Hostway and Adobe (who also provided some raffle prizes for a few lucky attendees.
We’re busy planning the next UKCFUG, so hopefully we’ll see you there!
ColdFusion ranked in top four application servers by developers
by Neil Middleton 2:16 am Saturday, 21 March 2009.
Adobe announced today that ColdFusion has been announced one of the top four application servers available just behind Websphere, Geronimo and Windows Server. Those are some pretty well respected and prolific servers right there, so it’s good to see ColdFusion kicking with the big boys.
This report is the latest in a series of hints that ColdFusion is growing as a technology ever since version 8 came out in July 2007, after some ‘dark times’ recovering from the reputation left by it’s ancestor versions.
At Monochrome, we’re seeing more interest in ColdFusion too which is certainly proof in the pudding, so to speak. ColdFusion is definitely not as visible in Europe as it might be in the states, but it certainly looks like that is changing. Hopefully with the release of the next version of ColdFusion ‘Centaur‘ and the new ColdFusion IDE ‘Bolt‘ we’ll start to this continuing.
If you’re looking for a development tool that will let you create web applications, and back-ends for RIA’s, ColdFusion is definitely worth a look.
UKCFUG Meeting on Tuesday 13th January – Topic: Railo
by Niklas Richardson 5:03 pm Friday, 9 January 2009.
Don’t forget next week’s UK ColdFusion User Group meeting in London, UK. Our main speaker will be Gert Franz from Railo presenting on Railo! This time we’ll bring a projector!!
We also have a couple of other guests joining us and Gert for the CF Doc’s podcast in the second half of the meeting. I’m pleased to say that Andy Allan and, all the way from New York, Peter Bell will be joining us!
As always send us your questions either to Mark Drew or call in your question via skype (UKCFUG).
This will be an event not to be missed and as you know seating is limited so get in early by emailing your attendance to reservations at ukcfug.org
For details about the event and how to get there, check the ukcfug.org site
Comments (0)Comments on the future of ColdFusion
by Neil Middleton 12:46 pm Wednesday, 17 December 2008.
Earlier today, via the comments of an earlier post, we received a comment on the recent announcement that Jason Delmore of Adobe was made redundant in a recent set of cutbacks.
“Do you have any comments on the Product Manager for Coldfusion being made Redundant at Adobe? I have been developing in Coldfusion for over 10 years and have always been sceptical of people say CF is dead and no one uses it anymore (Well apart from the CF5 era but lets pretend that did not happen) however with the Product Manager leaving this suggests rumours of Adobe either Selling, Making open source or dropping investment in CF to have some truth behind them. And Mr Forta saying they will get a new Product Manager cannot be factual as a Reduntacy is different from a layoff/sacking etc, they legally cannot replace him.
‘Sargent Major’ ”
So, in short, ColdFusion is not going anywhere anytime soon, it’s properly here to stay. ColdFusion 9 is in the works, alongside the new IDE, Bolt, and Adobe have already published a timeline about the future of CF over the next two years or so. OK, so CF doesn’t have a specific product manager at the moment, but a replacement will be forthcoming – it just takes time to fill the slot. Jason is a pretty hard act to follow.
As for current usage, there are plenty of people out there using ColdFusion, at Monochrome we find ourselves meeting up with new groups of people who use ColdFusion nearly every day. It would seem that ColdFusion developers, on the most part, keep themselves to themselves, not being nearly as noisy as some other communities out there such as the PHP or Rails guys.
So worse case scenario, let’s say ColdFusion is dead (which I will say now in simple clear language – it’s not), what’s the big problem? We already have alternatives available. Open Bluedragon is out and about in the wild and some people are using that quite happily, but if that doesn’t quite float your boat, there’s always good old Railo from Switzerland which will be open sourced under the LGPL early next year. Let’s say Adobe does bin ColdFusion (as in the product) what’s the big issue? No-one will turn up and take the existing product away from you, and your CFML skills won’t be lost into the ether. You’ll be good for at least a few years.
With regard to the redundancy law, I’m pretty sure the US is a lot more slack on this than the UK where we are not allowed to re-fill the slot for six months.
Comments (1)Why Monochrome use ColdFusion
by Neil Middleton 10:45 pm Monday, 8 December 2008.
We are increasingly being asked by customers of ours what back-end technology we use for our applications. Why this is we aren’t entirely sure, but it would appear that people are doing their homework a little more than they used to before asking or agencies such as Monochrome to pitch for their work – a good thing.
So, when asked the above question, we always say ColdFusion, mainly due to the fact that CF is our development tool of choice. Now, a lot of developers out there would question this – why are we using a costly proprietary technology that considered may be considered by many to be long since dead. Why are we using a technology that many consider to be well past it’s sell-by date?
Well, in essence, simplicity. We use ColdFusion because it enables us to do a wide plethora of things without needing to look at any other tools – it’s a veritable toolbox of things that we web developers need day to day. It gives us image manipulation, it gives us PDF capabilities, and with the upcoming ColdFusion 9 next year, it gives us Hibernate, the ORM tool, out of the box. All of this is wrapped up in a tool that allows us to make use of the Java platform, whilst writing code in an incredibly simple to learn tag based format. I have had experience of other web developers converting to coding effectively and productively in CFML in a matter of days. From the point of view of Rich Internet Applications, ColdFusion gives us unparalleled support for things like AMF, the native transport protocol for the Flash player, enabling us to have full speed native transport with Flash out of the box with no additional changes to the code – a great winner for productivity.
Day to day we find ourselves dealing with CFML every day. Unlike some of the many individuals out there who claim to be an agency, Monochrome have a team where every single member is versed in CFML and has many years of experience – four of the team have 45-odd years experience between them, which makes us one of the most, if not THE most experienced CFML shop in the UK. You name it, we’ve most probably done it. We’ve also taken this to the point that Monochrome form half of the management committee of the UK ColdFusion User Group based in London and have done since 1999.
So what about the alternatives to ColdFusion? Well, I’ve spent a large chunk of time over the last year or so looking into what else is out there (as is the pragmatic thing to do), and have reviewed lots of alternatives including Python, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, Groovy & Grails, PHP as well as a couple of others. As yet, I’ve not found anything that lets us build our applications as quickly and easily as ColdFusion does, although Ruby on Rails is definitely a strong contender with it’s productivity gains and neat packaging.
So, moving forward, what’s happening with ColdFusion? Well, Adobe are currently in the process of developing ColdFusion 9 which people were given some sneak peeks of at the recent Adobe MAX conferences, and to sit alongside this is the new ColdFusion eclipse based IDE – Bolt. Railo is also out there, a free and open source up-coming alternative to ColdFusion looking to support much of the same functionality. So, going forward the future for CFML is looking rosy, and we at Monochrome are more than happy with that.
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