Open Source Sorta Kinda Rocks

I've been pretty busy recently not only at work but I've picked up enough stuff to keep me plenty busy outside of work with my involvement in cfConversations, mxUnit stuff, Fusebox and OpenBD. In all honesty this all has taken a bit of a toll on my blogging. I feel like I had been doing pretty well (or at least improving) with my blogging up until a little after cfUnited. As I look through my recent posts I realize I have given any blog time to one of my first public involvements, OpenBD.

The buzz has settled and we are all still standing! Adobe still exists, the CFML community as strong (dare I say stronger than ever), and we are slowly growing our community with more and more developers from other platforms with interest in CFML (wether it OpenBD or Adobe or even the future Railo OS effort). We (OpenBD) never made a big deal about it but Kirk Pepperdine a Java Champion and Server tuning wizard joined OpenBD Steering committee a couple of months back.

I think OpenBD still has a ways to go before folks in the CF community will begin to adopt it fully for use in projects. This is not to even suggest it is not a solid product as is (really it is an awesome product as it stands) but it does lack a couple of things that I feel are important for folks in the CF community. I think we'll see more adoption once we establish an official version number (and version schema/road map) and public facing documentation, I swear a wiki has been on the way for months now. I also am under the impression people are still a little weary about this whole WAR deployment, something Adobe's ColdFusion has done a very good job shielding us from for years now. Oh and finally that whole lack of a GUI for the admin might scare off some folks as well. I can happily say that folks are in one way or another working on all of the above. This is exactly why open source sorta kinda rocks. I think most people would agree Matt Woodward is an awesome developer and thanks to OpenBD you get his code running in your enterprise for the exact price of nothing, though a thanks is always appreciated. Alan Williamson is an elite, recognized, Java developer and you get his work, again, free!

If you want proof positive that OS rocks check out this thread on the OpenBD mailing list. Suggestion to alpha released jar in something like <72 hours. You just will not, generally, see this in a commercial product. Really you should not expect it since Adobe has big incentives to hide their new features until release. Thanks to the completely open nature of Open Source projects there is nothing to hide. If we are working on something I can guarantee that you, and everyone else, will know about it right quick. No need to be an exclusive beta or alpha tester, just drop by in your spare time and ask "Hey whats up?" Some enthusiastic user or developer will usually be more than happy to point something out.

CodlFusion 9 Feature Request

I like Mark's java Loader it's nice but I feels hacky using it. Not saying anything in it is wrong or otherwise not grade A. I just feel like I am hacking something together using it. It'd be nice if this was just built into the engine, I was thinking something like createObject("java","com.package.Class",ClassLoader). This would allow ColdFusion to search one additional classloader that I create, presumably with UrlClassloader. Now I understand that this one might be odd since, as far as I recall, this would be the first you'd ever feed a Java object into a CF method so maybe we could just pass in a URI string, createObject("java","com.package.Class","/path/to/class.class")? Anyrate my whole point here is we are seeing more and more integration with Java and there is, obviously, a need for folks to load in Jars at runtime*. Many do not have access or know how to add jars in the defined classpaths, or add classpaths to jars.


* Yes I know Shared hosts would most likely not like this but the fact of the matter is we can already do it, and Mark has made it super easy. So since we can do it we should just add it to the language instead of some external CFC.

Hello Guangzhou

I was checking out my traffic this morning and saw some folks from China had visited. I was curious where in China so I drilled down to see more details. I was thrilled when I saw I had visitors from Guangzhou. Why you ask? Well a friend of mine, well she would say co-worker, is from your Guangzhou, which I still struggle to pronounce correctly. I thought it was cool to see someone from her home town checking out my blog! I think China is a very interesting country and the culture there is fascinating, its very similar to Americans on some levels then miles away on others. Maybe someday I will get the opportunity to visit China so I can experience it myself. Before I do that I need to get a lot better at Chinese, maybe I'll pick up that software they advertise on TV. Any rate from me to you and everyone else in China, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and many other foreign places I can only hope to visit some time in the future hello and thanks for stopping by!

Speaking at bFusion

Bob Flynn and is once again hosting bFlex and this year has added bFusion! bFusion is an awesome 1 day FREE(!!) event at Indiana University (Bloomington Indiana) followed by a 1 day FREE event for Flex. I won't get into the sales pitch just check out the site. I do want to pimp my 2 sessions though both of which are very near and dear to me. First is Open Source CFML Engines and second being Headfirst TDD.

In my Open Source CFML session we'll explore the open source business model and take a deep dive into how open source CFML engines will help shape the future of CFML development. There is a lot more to Open Source than just the free cost aspect we'll explore this for a brief while. We'll also discuss the differences between Platform and language. I think its just as important to recognize the value of ColdFusion as it is to see the value in CFML. At the end of the session you'll walk away armed with the knowledge you need to make a conscious well informed decision if open source CFML is the right option for you!

My second session, Head First TDD, is pretty much what the title describes it to be. We'll be diving head first into how to start developing with Tests in mind. The cool part is the Head First TDD will be hands on. I won't tell you how you should do TDD you will follow me and work with others and PRACTICE TDD. In the 1.5 hour session there might MIGHT be 20 minutes worth of presentation the remainder of the time will be used to explore TDD together with, hopefully, non-trivial examples. Since this is hands-on and interactive you'll need ColdFusion (or Railo should work), Eclipse, cfEclipse and mxUnit installed. If you'd rather you can just use pulse and get my profile, which I have talked about before. You'll still need to install a CFML engine and have mxUnit's CFML code downloaded and preferably running in ColdFusion. You'll also need an open mind and bring a little extrovert along b/c you will be working with others! You'll also need to download some CF files for the hands on but the examples I have are very boring and I am trying to come up with new ones, ones I have not finished yet. Most likely that will be done the week of the bFusion as I procrastinate and have a lot on my plate. I'll post them as son as I am happy with them.

Welp that's all I have to say for bFusion, I can't wait to see you all there!

Eclipse Plugin for Fusebox (re: Marc Esher's Comment)

Marc Esher, someone I've grown to call friend over the past few months, left a question in my post yesterday inquiring if Kroger would be donating an eclipse plugin for Fusebox. What Marc knows but others do not is we have built a plugin at Kroger to help kick start project start up. The plugin is a fantastic help to driving consistency and help get a project's code base off on the right foot. The short answer to Marc is no. But I didn't want to leave that sort of comment in my comment trail as that's the short answer. The longer answer goes something like this.

The plugin we have inside Kroger is pretty Kroger specific and reaches far beyond the boundaries of what Fusebox should offer/dictate, in my opinion. Beyond that it is mixed and jumbled up with a large amount of Java web app generation as well. There is also the added complexity of competitive advantage that might keep me from being able to release it. I have not asked so I am not sure where that would take me at this point. All in all the plugin would force way too many things on developers and most would probably find it's restrictions more problematic than it is worth. That being said the concept of the plugin is rather nice and I think I maybe have even mentioned to Marc at one point about making a plugin available. It would not be the Kroger plugin but instead a separate one that I build with lessons learned from inside Kroger. In fact as I think about it what I'd really like is to create a plugin that allows additions to be added, so I can use it internally as the core/seed to Kroger's plugin and externaly folks can use it as the core for Fusebox project creation or Model-Glue generation. In all honesty the plugin does little more than what a nicely written ANT task can do, it just feels cleaner and has a slightly nicer flow to it inside Eclipse. At the end of the day I am one person though and I have to make a decision on what is worked on. Personally, as I said before, I think Fusebox itself is in a happy place right now, it is stable and has reasonably good functionality. So chances are I'll probably work on things like this before picking up the core and flopping it around too much. In short no Marc Kroger's plugin as it is today will not ever be released. After some refactoring some of it, it might be release. There's still the the whole getting permission to do it that may or may not work out.

Hello Team Fusebox

I've been very busy lately with many projects so my blog has been quiet, though I hope Bill Shelton, myself and Marc Esher (among others) can pimp some of this stuff we are working on soon. I did want to take a minute to make mention of the announcement that was made in the cfConversation's round table. It's now official, I am the new developer in charge of the Fusebox core files. Check out the announcement for my brief statement, also check Sean's blog (like you haven't already). Expect me to think out loud a lot on my blog about new features and changes to Fusebox in the future. I do want to thank Sean for entrusting me with the core as well as his kind words, I appreciate the opportunity.

In all honesty Fusebox is in a happy spot right now and aside from bug fixes I am not planning on touching the core much right away. I've heard some rumblings about getting full support for Fusebox 3 and I'd relly like to hear why, and see how many want this. Over time as I get more comfortable with the core files I might try to achieve full Fusebox 3 compatibility but that will take time. Intially I think I am more interested in experimenting with speeding up the core, small enhancements to the no XML features, and providing more definition to layouts (more on this soon this is very much an incomplete thought). So what do you hate about Fusebox?

ColdFusion 9: Server.cfc

I have been pretty quiet about ColdFusion 9, aside from a few comments here and there. I wanted to take a moment to comment on Server.cfc. I'll be blunt and say that in it's current described form I think it will be useless. First let me describe Server.cfc. Server.cfc will provide users the ability to hook into the server start up and shut down events. This will be done by creating a Server.cfc. With this you can now react to onServerStart and onServerEnd.

Sounds promising right? Here's the problem, you can have 1, yes 1, Server.cfc per ColdFusion instance. How many of us deploy 1 application per ColdFusion instance? I know we certainly do not do this, heck we generally deploy 30+ apps to one CF instance. So now if I want each application to be able to do something at start up I have to constantly add functionality to Server.cfc for each application. This seems like a monumental mistake. I'd rather see the server hooks added to Application.cfc and the server scan for Application.cfc files on start up. ColdFusion has come so far to make application self sufficient (mappings, session control, settings override) making one Server.cfc would be a huge step backwards if you ask me.

Improve Code Quality: Peer Design

As I work on my presentations I enjoy sharing some of my thoughts along the way. This will be the first of a series of entries that talk about concepts I plan to cover in my presentations. This is mostly a practice of thinking out loud but I think, or maybe hope, they will make a good series of blog entries. Of course, my opinions might change as I collect more and more empirical data, I'm very pragmatic, but I just have to share this knowledge pent up in my head!

What I am about to say may well change the way you think. You might think I am am a blooming idiot for saying it but I hope it helps folks improve their code's quality. Unit test do not improve your code's quality. Pause for a second and let that sink in, unit tests do not improve your code quality. They measure and verify code quality but they themselves do not improve the quality of your code. Think about it, running unit tests over and over again will not improve code's quality. I'm not intending to undervalue unit tests but it is important to realize unit tests improve the application's observed quality by ensuring properly functioning code. Unit tests do not improve your code's quality and more importantly maintainability.

Once you come to accept this fact the question you may be asking yourself is how does one improve the code's quality? Coding standards provide a good quality baseline and may serve to enforce some code quality, TDD can help improve the code quality (a node to unit tests), code reviews could certainly help improve quality, and design up front might help code quality as well. The truth is we all have different techniques to improve the quality of our code and I will discuss each one of the aforementioned topics in the future, and in my presentation.

Today I wanted to spend some time discussing peer application design. XP advocates may be keen to note I left off peer, or pair, programming from the list techniques to improve code quality. I did this with good reason, I do not like it. In my experience it is a waste of a developer, I'm not saying it is a bad technique for everyone but I am not an advocate. The reason for my lack of enthusiasm towards peer programming is I favor peer design. In my experience peer programming really turns into peer design only with lots of code being written and rewritten. Peer application design is when a group of developers/architects, not necessarily limited to only the developers of the system, have a design burn down of how the domain(s) should be modeled. It certainly does not need to be limited to the domain(s) but since at Kroger we have a fairly standard framework stack most of the design discusses focus in the domain modeling and not other aspects of an application. Peer design forces us to use our whole brain as we must first internalize our rationals then verbalize, and often times defend, our rationale with others. At the same time, or near same time, we are internalizing others' concepts and mapping them to our own. Peer design has the added benefit of cross training, since we are including peers that are not planned developers on the system in design. Peer designs, just like their big brother JADs, do not generally just happen; they need coordinated and a strong facilitator ensuring the flow and guiding decisions in the correct direction. This is not to say you can not do a quick peer design with one other person at the bar on a Friday night but generally they are slightly more organized than that! Generally the output of a peer design session(s) is some sort of map for development. The map could be as simple as a cave drawing on a bar napkin or as sophisticated as a set UML diagrams. The diagrams, whatever form they come in, are much easier to change and morph than large chunks of code that you will get with peer programming. In a future entry I will talk about code reviews these diagrams can be very important in code reviews.

Hello Adobe Feeds!

I'm glad to get aggregated by MXNA err no Adobe feeds. Hopefully it will expose the blog to some new readership! Being on the Steering Commitee for Open BlueDargon I was thankful to see Adobe still pick me up. I love ColdFusion and I love CFML even more, I think there is room for both open source and commercial, though I wish Adobe would open source ColdFusion I suppose we can't have everything. Right before Adobe Feeds started to aggregate my blog I had an excellent post about the cost of ColdFusion and justifications for that cost. Some have complained about my misleading title but it really is all about how ColdFusion's platform IS worth the price, for some people.

ColdFusion Costs too Much

That's a pretty common phrase I hear from folks looking at ColdFusion for the first time. Even scarier I hear it from folks inside the community! Don't get me wrong I love open source and I think there is plenty of room for open source CFML engines/platforms but when it comes down to it ColdFusion's platform for what it offers is a great deal. I get tired of hearing CFML developers tout the RAD of ColdFusion this used to be an okay mostly valid sell but the market has changed yet CFML developers montra hasn't. With a good framework and IDE Java can be pretty RAD these days, besides no one has ever quantfiably proved how much faster ColdFusion, or CFML, really is for development. What follows is an exceprt of a response I sent to a certain "journalist" when confronted about Open Bluedragon, he opened stating ColdFusion's (Standard) price at a mere 1300 was "unbeleivable":

... I'll be the first one to pimp the open source offerings but I also think there are some misconceptions of costs for ColdFusion. If you consider what the Adobe ColdFusion platform offers this [$1300 price tag] is pretty reasonable. What you or anyone needs to ask themselves, especially now with other CFML engines is, "Does the ColdFusion Platform offer me the features I need for the cost?" It seems more and more folks answer no to this but let's think about this for a second. Can Java produce a PDF? Certainly. You can use Java libraries and generate a PDF just fine. Without a bit of work though and a couple layers of abstraction generating an HTML equivelent and a PDF is tedious and can be costly when supporting an app long term. ColdFusion offers you a very simple and elegant way of generating a PDF based off purely the HTML you are already generating. Any pure Java shop can do this too but they need to either modify some open source HTML parses, write thier own, or purchase icesoft's parser (cost: nearly on par w/Adobe's ColdFusion). So with this feature alone all costs, never mind productivity gains of CFML, are nearly negated. Also consider JMS integration. Once again I could develop a nice abstraction layer in Java no problem but then my team is responsible for integration testing, regression testing, and support for this abstraction layer. Not nearly the same if I just use ColdFusion and it's JMS & ActiveMQ integration points. Testing is a real cost and relying on a commercial product is a huge cost saver. A final example to consider is ajax. Have you ever looked at how much a pain it is to refactor from ExtJS 1.0 -> X.X, or jQuery with the UI widgets? The api for ExtJs (and other js libraries) constantly changes and backwards compatibility is becoming a cost barrier to upgrading on large applications. By using ColdFusion's ajax tags you never have to pay a developer to upgrade your codebase to work with the latest version of ExtJS. Adobe is taking care of that for you behind the scenes. Now lets bring this full circle, these are only 3 examples I thought of off the top of my head, there are numerous other cost saving and value adds in the ColdFusion platform so the question really is are these worth it to you? Maybe they are (we certainly take advantage of some of these at my company) maybe they are not. If all you are generally interested in CFML and not the ColdFusion platform, great there are some awesome alternatives now through some open source offerings like OpenBD, Railo and, to a lesser extent, Smith Project. Each OS offering offers their own platform stuff, Open BD for example has a plugin for JMS. Railo, for example, has some very cool integration with Amazon's S3. ... ColdFusion's price point is very valid in many instances for many folks. I am an advocate for open source CFML, no doubt, but I am also an advocate for ColdFusion as it has solved many problems for the company I work for and done it at a huge cost savings.

Hopefully this spurs some good discussion and ideas on how ColdFusion is a money saver and not just from a RAD standpoint.

Pulse2 now with mxUnit

In the past I've blogged about Pulse2 and I have to say it really has grown on me over the previous month or so that I have been using it. I've decided the $6/month is worth the investment as it does save me time and hassle as well as preconfiguring some of the "extra" plug-ins. On the free side though Pulse2's catalog has grown and that includes listening to my previous post and adding mxUnit for all the CFML developers out there! Finally, with this plug-in added I have posted a public profile for anyone that wants to give eclipse a try but have been intimidated by eclipse setup. Check out Pulse2 and use my public profile. Everything you'll want is packaged in there (add Aptana with a freelance account for an ever better development experience). Pulse2 is an awesome tool and something I definitely plan to demo very briefly in my Be Lazy, Use Ant session at cfdevcon. Don't wait for me to demo it though it is dog simple check it out today:

Speaking at cfDevCon

Its an odd place to start my presentation tour (or I hope it becomes a tour) but I plan on submitting presentations to many conferences moving forward and cfDevCon will be my first presentation stop, though I did lead a BOF at cfunited. My topics, at cfDevCon, will not get you any further along with using your favorite framework and chances are you won't see a whole bunch of cool CFML code snippets either. I figure there are plenty others out there that can do that better than me, maybe in the future I will consider some of those topics. Instead I'll enjoy talking about topics that are applicable across languages, and really thats where my core focus lies these days. In my current role my programming has taken a back seat to my mentoring and training and honestly I spend some of my time with projects that are not even CFML based projects. Many of the concepts I will be presenting on are 100% applicable there too!

My first session will focus on automation, I am all about being lazy and ANT is a perfect way to enable my laziness. This session first started out as setting up a developer IDE and I quickly learned that each person has thier own way of doing things and trying to show just one way of doing it will leave attendees with only a specific solution that works well for me and my company. Instead I plan to focus more on how to use ANT as a tool to not only automate redundant tasks like builds and deploys, but how it can be in integral part of your daily development life cycle. We'll cover things like test driven development and working with mxUnit's ant tasks. We'll touch on how to attach builders to eclipse projects, how to write ANT tasks to run tests, and, inspired by Marc Esher, a good overview of ANT's general syntax. There is a lot of content to cover and it will be fast paced and example heavy. We'll dip into CFML for a short bit to show off mxUnit but most of the examples will be ANT scripts!

The second presentation (yep I have 2 at cfDevcon) will be all about improving code quality. We'll spend a good amount of time talking about code reviews, the different types, how to introduce them in your company and how to be success with conducting code reviews. Code reviews are only one aspect of quality improvement, additionally we'll take a look at mentoring (and how mentoring and code reviews intersect) and JAD sessions. Improving quality is 100% language agnostic, if you have Flex, Java, CFML or .Net background come and check it out, everyone can learn something. If you are already successful with code reviews or mentoring come and share your ideas we'll have plenty discussion points so everyone can share! I'm really looking forward to sharing my success and failures with folks through my presentations, if anyone ever has topics they would like covered let me know I am always looking for other ideas for exciting topics to explore.

cfUnited BoF

I wanted to thank everyone that attended my BOF at cfunited. I had a great time sharing my experiences and leading a GREAT conversation with all of my peers. The BOF was only a success thanks to the endless participation from the audience. If you enjoyed the BOF you might be interested to know I have a tentative plan to present this type of material at some conferences in the future (maybe even cfunited 09???). Nothing for sure yet but I am working on the possibility. As promised here is the mind map. I will try to capture some of the conversation and more on this Mind map in future posts, maybe when I am running on more than 4.5 hours of sleep!!

If you click the image it will get bigger.

cfConversations is a Go!

Last Friday night I had the opportunity to take part in the next chapter of CFML podcast history, taking part in the first cfConversations podcast. Lead by Brian Meloche and joined by Rick Mason, Aaron West and Jeff Coughlin, we had an hour long round table about all the happenings in the CFML world recently. Admittedly it started off a little slow but I think we really got a good stride after just a short while. I learned something valuable in this first round table, think about what I am going to say and write down notes. A couple of times I found myself wondering to much when I talked. I look forward to working with Brian more in the future on cfConversations round tables as well as interviews. While we're discussing interviews we have quite a few lined up to take place at cfunited including Mark Drew, Sean Corfield, Adam Lehman, Ray Camden, Peter Bell and many others maybe even including YOU. That's right you, if you plan to be at cfunited and would be willing to sit down and talk for 15 minutes or so leave a comment with some contact information.

Polyglot Programming and CFML Developers

For those that do not know what Polyglot Programming is allow me to introduce you to the term! It really sounds fancy but when it comes right down to it Polyglot Programming is the utilization of multiple languages to complete a task. We all are more or less polyglot programmers; using CFML, ECMAScript (Javascript or Actionscript), CSS, HTML, and (some of us) Flex/Flash. So for this discussion we'll refine Polyglot Programming down to using multiple server side languages to accomplish a task (as this is the really discussion going on most of the time these days). I think ever since CFML was available on the Java platform many of us began to be partial polyglots (I know this literally would mean we are each programs written in multiple languages but I'm going to use it to describe ourselves instead). As a point of reference one of my first projects I worked on with ColdFusion MX I used Java to zip content. The reason I say partial polyglots is I didn't really write Java I just used CFML to execute a couple of Java objects. Looking beyond a CFML developer barely learning enough Java to dip down into the Java layer, what is the typical growth path of a CFML developer?

CFML is such a high level language the only level above CFML right now would be frameworks, or a custom DSL. I get the feeling that frameworks is where the average CFML developer interested in growing spends his/her time, learning frameworks. This is a good practice as one can learn a great deal from frameworks, not to mention the benefit of using frameworks in many instances. The problem I see here is the average CFML developer is not learning CFML's foundational language, Java*, and not really wandering that far from their comfort zone. Sure frameworks might force you to learn a new technique or push you into a new paradigm but you are still working in CFML. ColdFusion has done a spectacular job hiding the java underpinning behind a curtain. While that lowers the barrier to entry, which is a good thing to grow a community, I think it is a shame too. A CFML developer can blissfully develop code without ever understanding how it is their application works. On one side that's exactly what one would want to look for in a platform. From another perspective, when it comes to developer growth and incentive to grow, this may not be the best thing. Where is the incentive to learn how a war is deployed to a app server? How many CFML developers know what a context root is or how it might affect their application if the context root is not /. I am going to guess the average CFML developer may not even be familiar with what a many of the terms I just talked about are, and even the terms that sound familiar many may not truly understand how they fit together. Without dipping a little further into Java the typical CFML developer can not realize the true power of polyglot programming that can be leveraged on the Java platform. A superb example of someone that has found, for him, a great balance of polyglot programming is Andy Powell. His presentation at cf.O outlined how his projects leveraged Java (with Hibernate and Spring) and CFML. At Kroger we use Spring Security in all of our [new] CFML application as well as an ever growing library of Java classes that allow us to share IP with the Java side of the house. Another good example of polyglot programming, with an added bonus of a lower barrier to entry, would be cf_groovy, Barney Boisvert's project. I've not had the time to look into much yet but the few blog entries Barney has posted have been fascinating. If you are interested in learning more about Java and the JEE environment that most CFML engines run in but don't know where to start leave a comment/question. Let me know if you will be at cfUnited. If there is enough interest I will setup a late night pow-wow in the Lafayette room to introduce folks to Java/JEE.

* maybe .Net for those on BD.Net

OpenBD, The Comminity and How I See it

This is a direct response to Andy Powell's blog entry but serves as a general statement of my opinions on the matter as well. I understand my comments might be perceived differently due to the fact that I am on the Steering Committee and I appreciate that but I hope folks can look past that for a second and read my rather long but thought out commentary. Besides these comments are mine and certainly do not reflect that of what others on the Steering Committee think.

OpenBD has been loosing momentum since the day it was announced w/ speculation and bad blood strewn about. It really sucks Vince is the way he is and that OpenBD suffers from the New Altanta stigma. The migration stuff is a gimmik, a shitty one but a gimmik non the less, to sell licenses. Alan is not part of New Atlanta and licenses BlueDragon to NA. If Vince was truly converting and not selling BD licenses wouldn't you think Alan would be a bit pissed off ? After all if Vince is converting and not selling licenses Alan is not making as much money. Is Vince eating away at Adobe's license sales? Probably not much he's claimed to be focusing on folks still on cf5 that have "abandoned the platform." Am I just being fed a spoonful of crap or the truth I don't know. I tend to believe him, maybe because I want to but also because I work for a large enterprise that nearly signed a deal with New Altanta a few years back and had nearly abandoned the platform (we were still on 5 at the time) and I know plenty other large companies in the same boat.

There have been some bad misconceptions and double standards applied the OpenBD project to get OpenBD to where it is. For example Adam Lehman says OpenBD only served to eat away at Adobe's customer base. Folks agreed and disliked OpenBD claiming OpenBD does not want to grow the community it simply wants to cannibalize it. While I never thought this was true based on the NA stigma I can understand where that was coming from. Then Alan is shone in a light by Sean (slightly out of context but a fair depiction of the conversation really) that says Alan doesn't care about the CF community and wants to focus on the Java community. All of the sudden OpenBD is looked upon negatively b/c it doesn't care about the community. Seems like a hard place to win honestly. If OpenBD focuses on the community its cannibalism if OpenBD doesn't focus on the community it doesn't care about the community and is against it.

As for Railo being more open, I vow right now to each and everyone that reads my blog and/or comments on the various boards I will be open and honest about what OpenBD is doing and make sure it is communicated. I'll also do my best to help folks differentiate between my own words and those that are coming from the steering committee. I have had an open dialog with Adam Lehman on email in the past and I plan to continue to seek his honest feed back in private as long as he is willing to listen. I'm also always willing to listen to anyone in the community I don't care if you are a high profile person like Joe or Sean or a lurker that has never spoken out before like Chris Weller. If you have an opinion and want to share it I am listening.

What I think needs to happen. I think Vince needs to donate NA's Admin to the project as a sign of good will. I also think the comunity needs to realize that Alan's target is not the CF community and never was, that is why folks like Sean, Matt and Mark were on the committee to ensure the community was fairly represented. I think Adobe should continue being Adobe selling an awesome product and evangelizing ColdFusion. Finally I think OpenBD needs to refine the license, I'd love to see Alan step up to the plate and release under LGPL as well. Will that happen? Not Likely, but a Classpath exception would be a step in the right direction. OpenBD is not New Atlanta and I hope New Altanta drops BlueDragon JEE all together and only focuses on selling support for OpenBD.

In an effort to be completely honest, had I know Railo was going open source I may have stayed out of Open BlueDragon. I didn't know and now I made a commitment. My commitment was not only to OpenBD but to the community to make sure we were represented appropriately. I've listened so far and brought up points like better licensing and concerns about perception. Posts like Andy's are rough, they make me doubt if I am doing the right thing but at the end of the day I think I am and I appreciate the open and honest feedback.

Like I said else where OpenBD should succeed or fail on it's technical merits not some emotional attachments. Technically its a good solid engine with plenty of potential and I would hate to see the OS offerings dwindle because some folks can not look past the history of New Atlanta's BlueDragon and look forward to the future of what OpenBD can offer.

Railo going Open source

Sorry I am late to the blogging party on this one. I've been so busy with work and OpenBD I haven't had a chance to welcome Railo to the open source community thought really they only announced it they have not "arrived" yet). Being big fan of JBoss, though I will say that has waned a bit after Redhat took over, I am really glad to see them teaming up together. This gives a great backing for Railo and for the first time ever we have more open source CFML engines than closed source engines. I smell standardizations on the horizon, course I have a horrible sense of smell so it might be something else.

cfunited fun

What are you looking forward to most?
Hanging out with folks in the community. And mostly meeting new folks in the community.

Which speaker will most likely end up on your camera?
I don't take many pictures and not a big fan of photography but if there is one possibility it might be Mark Drew after visiting the Tattoo place.

What do you plan to do outside conference time? (Clubbing/Bar Hopping, DC Tour, DC dinner cruise, Museum, Fine dining, Live Band shows, etc.)
See above.

Fill in the blank: I will mainly be around the bar booth.

Do you have a new project you are working on and will reveal it at CFUnited?
Revealed no but I will be talking about OpenBD.

Leading the OpenBD BOF

I was originally slated to lead the Improving Quality through Code Review and Mentoring. A twist of fate happened and OpenBD was pitted at the same time in another BOF, originally lead by Vince. Unfortunately Vince from New Atlanta will not be able to make the Open BlueDragon BOF. So now Mark Drew has agreed to take over my original BOF so I can lead the OpenBD BOF! Long and the short. I am leading the Open BlueDragon BOF at cfUnited (with plenty of help from Matt Woodward and Sean Corfield of course)! Leave comments on what you would like to see/discuss in that BOF!

JavaOne Treasures

My company sent 6 folks to JavaOne and today was the first of many recap/regurgitation of JavaOne goodness. Mylyn a tool the CFML community has already been introduced to by some fellow bloggers is, of course, making a big splash in the Java community as well. Since I have had a large amount of experience with it I got the chance to help present the plugin to everyone, which was fun to see it get a bigger response. Next my Java counter part talked about JSF and blabbered a bit about the JSF2.0 spec, hype or real we'll see I suppose.

The next recap was of a tool that everyone, EVERYONE, should have in their toolbelt. The tool is best used with Java 6 but can hook in with Java 5 and even 1.4 a little. The tool is free; VisualVM and can, with Java 6, visually show you all sorts of stats on what is running in your JVM. It can get down to how many of what classes you have in memory. Its also plugable and they already have a cool plugin to show a histogram of your GC which can be very interesting! The tool is at RC1 right now and is a must for anyone doing any sort of development on the Java platform.

Next Hot topics/Buzz was presented. It was cool to see Flex get a mention, gave me a chance to pimp ColdFusion as well as talk about BlazeDS. Groovy was of course brought up and we had a short discussion of it. In the same light Ruby and other dynamic languages (funny not CFML) were brought interesting missing from the list was Scala which I thought had some buzz at JavaOne from other accounts. Selenium got a mention and seems to be growing as an accepted tool in many communities now, again a good thing to see. I was really hoping JavaFX would get more than a 5 second mention but I expect much more about JavaFX over the next couple of months, again vapor or reality...we'll see. Finally 2 debugging tools were talked about Fiddler, and Omniscient. Omniscient looks particularly interesting as it essentially records your applications stacks and allows you to replay something to allow you to do intensive root cuase analysis on a bug, very cool stuff.

Overall it was an excellent recap with loads of good tips and information and I am really looking forward to playing with Omniscient and VisualVM as I start doing more and more with OpenBD.