CFInsider

I'm Speaking at CF.Objective on Managing your Software Development Life Cycle!

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:57:00 -0400

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

FirstComp Job Openings - ColdFusion Developers, SQA Engineers, BI Developers, User Experience Design

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:06:00 -0400

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

CF.Objective - Go vote on what you want to see!

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:51:00 -0400

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:

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

Looking for a Data Warehouse Specialist - Omaha, NE or Providence, RI

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 15:58:00 -0400

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

ColdFISH Plugin for Mango Blog Released

Wed, 18 May 2011 08:04:00 -0400

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!

ColdFish Updated to 3.1

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 15:39:00 -0400

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

The King is Dead, Long Live the King!... Remarks on the History and Future of ColdFusion

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:43:00 -0400

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

Senior Software Quality Assurance Engineer Position, Omaha, NE or Providence, RI

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:46:00 -0400

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!

Register today for New England's Best Adobe Tech Conference!

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 13:45:00 -0400

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

Let's keep this event going strong. Hope to see you all there!
Jason

What Open Source License Should I Choose?

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:50:00 -0400

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

Serializing / Deserializing in ColdFusion 9

Tue, 04 May 2010 16:45:00 -0400

Today I was asked a question about serializing a CFC. Someone wanted to serialize the CFC for later use outside the current process. Prior to ColdFusion 9, serializing a complex object in a way that could be deserialized back to a usable object within the runtime could be done by diving a bit down into the underlying java. This could only be done with CFCs as of CF8 as the serializable interface was added at that time. For those of you not on CF9, the code below can be used to serialize/deserialize objects in ColdFusion.



function serialize(myObject) {
	  // Create the underlying ByteArrayOutputStream
	  byteOut = CreateObject("Java", "java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream");
	  byteOut.init();
		
	  // Create the ObjectOutputStream to which the object will be written
	  objOut = CreateObject("Java", "java.io.ObjectOutputStream");
	  objOut.init(byteOut);
	  
	  // Write the object to and close the stream
	  objOut.writeObject(arguments.myObject);
	  objOut.close();
	  
	  return toBase64(byteOut.toByteArray());
	}

 	function deserialize(mySerializedObject) {
	  // Create the underlying ByteArrayInputStream
	  byteIn = CreateObject("Java", "java.io.ByteArrayInputStream");
	  byteIn.init(binaryDecode(arguments.mySerializedObject,'base64'));
		
	  // Create the ObjectInputStream to which the object will be read in from
	  objIn = CreateObject("Java", "java.io.ObjectInputStream");
	  objIn.init(byteIn);
	  
	  return objIn.readObject();
	}

With ColdFusion 9, this is much simpler, but unless you've already looked at the other 200 new functions for CF9 you probably haven't seen this. With the new ObjectLoad() and ObjectSave() methods, now all you need is the following:



	function serialize(myObject) { 
	  return toBase64(objectsave(myObject));
	}

 	function deserialize(mySerializedObject) {
	  return objectload(tobinary(mySerializedObject));
	}

Heck, you don't really need the UDF's if you can remember to use two functions for this. :) Now you can easily serialize an array, CFC, query, java object, structure... pretty much any object in ColdFusion. Why would you want to do this? How about caching objects to your database to be retrieved later? Or maybe you want to store a CFC as a string in a form field... Those might be crazy, or you may have the need for something that crazy right now. You decide what cool things you want to do with this power. :) Jason

What's going on with 4CFF?

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:45:00 -0400

Many of you may have heard of 4CFF (The For ColdFusion Foundation) when we announced it at CFUnited last year, but haven't heard much about it since. Why? First, if you haven't heard of 4CFF. Check out our site at 4cff.org. The short description is that many of us believe there needs to be a neutral, non-profit, entity that can foster, sponsor, and "own" important projects to the ColdFusion Community, to ensure that those projects are always for the benefit of the CF Community. In a sense, we are shooting for an National Endowment for the Arts model... or in the software world, perhaps the Apache Software Foundation model. Anyhow, back to the question, what is going on with 4CFF? Well, many things actually, but not enough. First, we have been spending time figuring out what we really want the foundation to do. We are all busy people, so just adding more work to the work we all already have was not very feasible. So, we have decided on how we can support projects in a way that is easy to manage. We have been talking about which projects to support, and we have a few that are interested in becoming part of 4CFF and we are interested in them becoming a 4CFF project... but then something seems to get in the way:

what is the true value of being a 4CFF project?
what do we do about copyright ownership?
or in one case How much money are you going to give me for my project to be owned by 4CFF?

These have been somewhat tough questions to answer, and in my opinion it comes down to one simple answer: money. I don't mean that in a negative sense, the truth is that the world we live in operates on money. So, we have switched our focus temporarily to getting our 501(c)3 status. What is that? That is the thing that says the IRS agrees that what we are doing is for the benefit of a community of people and not just for our own benefit. By recognizing that, it allows donations to be tax deductible, which means your money is even more meaningfully applied. The Foundation gets more money, you get a tax break, it is a win-win. Recently, we have been working with lawyers to apply for 501(c)3 status. My hope is that if we can get the organization to be officialy recognized as a tax exempt non-profit, then people and corporations are more likely to open up their checkbooks. Corporations and individuals that use these projects will have a vested interest in donating, to ensure that they will have even better software in the future. And once we have some money, we'll be able to make useful grants to projects, and once we have projects we will have more people interested in volunteering and something useful for them to volunteer to... then we keep repeating so that we have spectacular software that is for the CF community, and owned and supported by the community. It is a feedback loop and we just need to figure out how to get it started. I want to be clear, everyone participating in 4CFF is doing it in a strictly volunteer basis. The ColdFusion world has already changed my life, I want to give back and I want to help make our community stronger. I know the other volunteers to 4CFF feel the same way. Those people are (in alphabetical order): Ray Camden, Sean Corfield, Sam Farmer, Rachel Lehman, Doug Morrison, Jared Rypka-Hauer, Chris Scott, Dan Wilson, and John Zhu. Thank you guys for volunteering your time. So, what are we doing? Still trying to get through the early stages of starting a new venture. Should we be further along? Yep. Why aren't we further along? A good number of reasons, but lack of dedication isn't one of them. Can we get to the next level? I hope so. Am I a dreamer? You tell me. :) We'll keep pushing for the dream and hope it comes true,
Jason

ColdFISH 3.0 Alpha Released

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:09:00 -0400

You may not know what ColdFISH is, but if you are running BlogCFC then you are using it, and chances are at the minimum that you've read a blog that does use it. Well, I've been doing some work on ColdFish due to several requests. This latest version includes:

XML based configuration - no need to get into the code to change a color or add a keyword
Keyword formatting for CFML, CFSCRIPT, ActionScript, and SQL!!!
The ability to tell the parser you are just looking for just SQL, CFScript, or ActionScript (it can't guess script based languages... it does figure out tag-based on its own)
Caching of formatted code blocks (once it's been parsed it will stay in memory until it hits the cache limit, cache size is configurable)
A toolbar that allows for viewing the code as plain text, copying it straight to the clipboard, or even sending just the block straight to a printer
A cleaner default look and feel

If you're interested in testing the alpha out you can check it out of the subversion repository at http://svn.riaforge.org/coldfish/. Feedback is very welcome! If you just want to learn more about ColdFish, check out the project at http://coldfish.riaforge.org/ Have a great New Years! Jason

10 Things ColdFusion 10 Really NEEDS

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:46:00 -0400

I was reading a ColdFusion 10 Wish List today (I am behind on my blog reading) and it is largely filled with minor tweaks that are a bit too myopic for me. I think Server-side Actionscript is interesting, particularly to Flex developers looking for a back-end, but almost everything else on the list struck me as missing a broader view. From the general list there are things like incorporating Omniture (a web analytics tool), adding message queuing (I assume this is essentially incorporating JMS directly into the language. By the way, you can do this today with the JMS Gateway), calling a CFC from Java(CFCProxy already exists too), queryparam for LDAP, multiple datasources for ORM, and NTLM support. Really??? This is what we want for ColdFusion 10!?! Well I want more from Adobe than that. I know we are all still catching up to ColdFusion 9 (maybe even 8,) but there are 10 serious changes that ColdFusion NEEDS.

Replace JRun
Overhaul Reporting
Overhaul CFDocument

http://www.icesoft.com/products/icebrowser.html

Fix Server Monitoring
Re-think Flash Forms
Fix Application Deployment
Make a Free Edition

CFML and CFSCRIPT
AJAX and Flash Forms
File Handling
XML Parsing
CFQuery (but I don't need the DataDirect drivers... all the databases provide their own)
CFMail
CFFTP
Deployment
BlazeDS (Hey it's free in supports the Flash Platform initiatives, so toss that in too)

Add real support for Instant Messaging
Update the Web Services Engine
Add a Workflow Engine

While I appreciate that there are specific needs we all have for our projects, I think the 10 items I have outlined could dramatically change the direction of the product for the better. ColdFusion has recently seen a return to being respected and watched by analysts and media, a resurgence of customers upgrading after several years of waiting to see which way the wind would turn, and an increase in the number of developers using ColdFusion overall. Now is not the time to tweak. It is time to show that not only is ColdFusion surviving, but it is done with just getting back to its former strength on a new platform and instead is now ready to go back and re-invent itself while respecting its original vision, and take on the next set of challenges. Push for greatness, go ColdFusion. Jason

Complex Charting in ColdFusion with WebCharts

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:14:00 -0400

I did a session a couple of weeks back at RIAUnleashed in Boston and one of the topics I covered was about leveraging more of the WebCharts3D charting capabilities using Java. The point of it was to illustrate how easy it can be to reach down one level into the underlying technologies used in ColdFusion, all you need to know is where they are. WebCharts3D is the underlying charting engine built into ColdFusion. The GreenPoint site has more information about the technology here. You may not know this, but ColdFusion comes with a client application for designing WebCharts3d Projects. All you need to do is go to run C:\ColdFusion\charting\webcharts.bat (change as appropriate for your operating system). They have also made a WebCharts Eclipse Plug-in freely available if you are interested in that. Running these will give you a chart type chooser that will look something like this: Select your type and you will get a great utility to help you design your chart that will look a bit like this: Once you have your chart designed, this utility has tabs for getting back the format of the XML needed "style" the chart, the XML needed to populate the chart, and even the java code needed to make it work for a jsp and even how to make it work in an applet, Swing, or SWT app. The jsp code needs a couple tweaks to make it work for CF. The Style file that was generated for you will look like:

The data file will look like:

And then the code to execute this in ColdFusion will look like:






webCharts3DServer = createObject("java","com.gp.api.jsp.MxServerComponent").getDefaultInstance(GetPageContext().getServletContext());
myChart = webCharts3DServer.newImageSpec();
myChart.width = 320  ;
myChart.height= 300 ;
myChart.type = "PNG"  ;
myChart.loadStyles(expandpath('./webchartStyle.xml'));
myChart.model= fileread(expandpath('./webchartModel.xml')); 
writeoutput(webCharts3DServer.getImageTag(myChart,"/CFIDE/GraphData.cfm?graphCache=wc50&graphID="));

Do that and you get a sexy new chart! Stock full of rollover states and all the polish you care to put on it. :) This probably looks more complicated than it is. From a developer perspective, use a tool to design any chart type you want from the WebCharts charting set (and there are many!), and then figure out how to populate some XML. Add 7 lines of CF code (with only one of them actually creating a java object), and you're done!!! Now you can create Bubble, Ring, Scatter, Gantt, Gauge, Radar, Polar, Star, Stock, Histogram, Regression, and Doughnut Charts, and you can create Maps and even Heatmaps. The charting world is your oyster! Easy peasy. Happy charting! Jason