After taking a year or two off of the conference tour (I was burnt out after a few years of hitting every conference in the Adobe and ColdFusion worlds,) I'm looking forward to speaking on a topic that is near and dear to me. I have been in many organizations and I have seen success and failure with Agile Development, and success and failure with Waterfall Development. The common thread for success has always been a well thought through life cycle for software development, including the tools that support that life cycle. The common thread for failure was a lack of understanding the impact of the process and tools that aid in managing your SDLC.

The details: In this session, we will walk through the definition and implementation of a full featured Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC.) Examples will be shown using Zendesk, the Atlassian suite (JIRA/Confluence/Fisheye/Crucible,) and other technologies and tools used along the way from requirements gathering to deployment.

Check out CF.Objective or the session information, Managing your Software Development LifeCycle

Happy New Year! Jason

about.me

We need you! At FirstComp, we are growing and we need people like you. Chances are that you would not be reading this entry if you weren't somehow into ColdFusion related development.

Want to be part of a team that is taking web application development to the next level? Want to work with people that know ColdFusion inside and out? We have some people that you probably have already heard of... like Steve Erat and Sam Farmer, and then there are even more folks you may not have heard of yet but I promise you that you will someday.

We currently have openings in either our Omaha or Rhode Island offices for Application Developers, SQA Engineers, Business Intelligence Developers, and a User Experience/Web Interaction Designer. I know what some of you are thinking, I don't live in Omaha/Rhode Island. Relocation is available!

Kiplinger recently named Omaha the "Best Value" city in the United States. One excerpt: "A brand-new, 3,800-square-foot home with four bedrooms and three baths in a western suburb (still just 20 minutes from downtown) runs $275,000". Beat that Cleveland!

Read the rest of article at Kiplinger's Best Value Cities 2011.

And then go and take a look at the job openings and apply!

Cheers, Jason

I was taking a look at the CF.Objective 2012 Topic Suggestions page and it looks like not to many people have hit this yet. Proposals need to be in by November 28th! Even if you aren't proposing anything, be a good sport and vote on what you would like to see at the conference.

Go to - http://engage.cfobjective.com/index.cfm/topicSuggestions/

I made two proposals for the conference:

• Managing your Software Development LifeCycle
• Thinking of ColdFusion as Java++

There are folks that do a great job covering the other things I would be interested in speaking on, so these are all I am putting out there for now.

Please vote for the topics you want to see!!! Jason

FirstComp is looking for a Data Warehouse Specialist! Please pass it on! :)

https://careers.firstcomp.com/default.cfm?PID=1.6&inq_key=10091&action=MembersJobDescription&JobID=4034&LocID=79

Cheers, :) Jason

John Sieber contacted me two weeks ago, he was trying to use ColdFISH as a Mango Blog Plugin and was having an issue with the Toolbar not showing up. Mango didn't like the way ColdFISH was generating the Toolbar, but after a pretty minor change to the formatter component we were in business!

Checkout John's Blog posting about the release of the ColdFISH Plugin for Mango Blog.

John has posted the ColdFISH Plugin for Mango Blog project on RIAForge.

ColdFISH is now used by BlogCFC, Mango Blog, and CFLib.org. Who's next? :)

Cheers!
Jason

P.S. It's always great to see your code being used. It's even better when people volunteer to extend your work. Thanks John for making the Plugin!

I just posted an update to ColdFiSH on RIAForge. This update is mostly just spit and polish on it what is already there. I added bolding for keywords (yep, huge deal), updated the default font (hope you like it, if not, you can change it), fixed an issue with viewing the text plain in case you are in firefox and want to copy code with all the spaces and tabs in the right place, and updated the navbar a tad, and turned off line numbers by default I think it looks better without... if you like them then it is easy enough to set showLineNumbers to "Yes".

Here is the result.

As always, please give me your feedback if you are using ColdFish (and if you use BlogCFC then you use ColdFiSH.)

TGIF! Jason

Late last week, Adam Lehman announced that ColdFusion Product Management and Product Marketing would be passed on to a new team, and that team would be located with the ColdFusion Engineering team in India.

I believe my opinion on this is particularly informed/relevant and so while I don't generally like to comment on what is happening with Adobe, I feel compelled to comment in this case.

Many others have commented, some positive (Ben Nadel is making a movie of it!,) some neutral (Sean Corfield says "Reality check... these guys change Product Managers all the time" (loosely quoted... and don't I know that! :)), and some negative (John Mason says "we are all boiling to death and don't even know it!" (again, a loose quote :).) It's nice to see opinions out there. We are a community forged on opinions. Here is mine.

ColdFusion Engineering began moving to India about 7 years ago now. You may not be aware, but ColdFusion 7 was developed in large part, out of Bangalore, India. Program/Project Management was moved there about 5 years ago with the beginning of ColdFusion 8 development. Technical Support was moved to India and Canada about 4 years ago and Documentation moved at about the same time. Moving Product Management and Marketing is really the next logical step in a transition that was started many many years ago.

I believe it is unrealistic in today's global economy to think that an international company like Adobe should not and would not leverage the human resource development it has done worldwide to its economic benefit.

There have been comments that with the product team going to India, the new team will be less available and less knowledgable about the ColdFusion customer. ColdFusion is a global product, and I don't think the folks in Europe or Asia will see this as much of a change. They never had someone on the ColdFusion management team right in their city/state to call up. If they wanted to see someone from the ColdFusion product team in Europe, they went to MAX Europe or Scotch on the Rocks. So, now us North Americans are the ones that have to deal with not having ColdFusion Management in our timezone. I think most people won't see a huge change there. Maybe some of the community leaders that have known Adam for a long time, but you too can meet the new product team and become Facebook friends.

Will the new management be as good as Adam Lehman? or Alison Huselid? or how about Dave Gruber? Tim Buntel? or Kristen Schofield? These people had a lot of history and knowledge with the ColdFusion product and community. They were all experts at what they were doing and I know that they were all hard acts to follow. The fact of the matter is that people change jobs/roles all the time, and new people are recruited or promoted in to replace them. Sometimes moving on is at the choice of the person in that role, and sometimes a company decides that based on the company need. But it is unrealistic to think anyone should stay in a role forever and it is uncapitalistic to suggest that saving money is not a valid reason to move a role to a different location.

I believe this latest generation of the ColdFusion product team has put together a very strong plan for ColdFusion X, and the strategic direction that plan will take the product will propel it into a Modern Age of ColdFusion, just as Adam said. And I can only hope the folks replacing Adam and Alison will understand their customer base and deliver on that plan. I believe that Adobe management recognizes the need to keep ColdFusion strong, and if anything, I think ColdFusion will now have greater support within the Adobe political environment.

We can't tell how this change will affect the quality of ColdFusion X, and really as customers of a product the only vote we have that matters is with our wallet. I guess we will see how ColdFusion X does with sales when it comes out. Until then, I personally hope that the Community Leaders and stewards of ColdFusion will do their part by volunteering to provide feedback as this plan continues to evolve into reality. And I wish Adam and Alison the best of luck in their new endeavors!

The King is Dead, Long Live the King!

Best wishes, Jason

We just opened up a Senior Software Quality Assurance Engineer position! If you know test automation, we want you. :) We are using Selenium and TestNG for automation, and JIRA for Issue management. The opening can be filled at our Rhode Island or Omaha, Nebraska office. We have a stellar QA team that just needs more hands on deck.

Check out the job posting here!

I've been to a lot of conferences over the years, and I've always found the best are the smaller ones that are run by people that just want to continue to learn, so they decide to make a conference. Over the last couple of years, Brian Rinaldi has created the premier event for Adobe Flash, Flex, AIR and ColdFusion developers in New England, RIA Unleashed.

This year the event has expanded to 2-days including one devoted to your choice of hands-on training in areas such as Flex, Flash, Air, AIR for Android, and ColdFusion. Some highlights of day one include Scott Janousek covering AIR for Android, Mike Labriola teaching component development in Flex 4 and Bob Silverberg on ColdFusion 9 ORM.

The conference day (day 2) includes 4 tracks and over 20 sessions from the top speakers in the industry focused on Adobe technologies and development. This is the best event to get all the scoop on the announcements and releases from Adobe MAX. Speakers from Adobe include Ryan Stewart, Adam Lehman, James Ward, Greg Wilson and Christophe Coenraets. RIA Unleashed also features some of the most well known and respected members of the Flash, Flex and ColdFusion developer communities including Jesse Warden, Jesse Freeman, Raymond Camden, Charles Schulze, Brian Diette, Jeff Tapper and Chuck Freedman among others.

Registration is currently only $200 for both days including the hands-on training, conference day, Thursday night party and lunch both days. You can also just attend the conference day sessions for only $75. Tickets are limited at both prices, so get them while they're hot. :) Also, the hands-on training has limited seating, so register soon before it fills up. Keep in mind, this event sold out early last year and I hear it is well on its way this year, so register soon!

• Full details at: http://riaunleashed.com
• Register at: http://riaunleashed2010.eventbrite.com/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/riaunleashed
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/riaunleashed

Do you have a project you're working on and want to share with the world, but just aren't sure about all of this "licensing legal mumbo jumbo"? Take a look at the latest post from the guys over at the For ColdFusion Foundation.

They have posted a document with great information about open source licensing.

It's a quick read with lots of valuable information!

Cheers, :) Jason