Category: Open-Source CF


ColdFusion Open Source Update - July 6, 2010

Posted on Jul 06, 2010

Two new projects and six updates this week in ColdFusion open source. This update actually covers more than a week (again) but I think the warm summer weather hasn't been conducive to open source coding. Nonetheless, I expect to hear some announcements coming before this year's CFUnited, which you probably heard by now will be the last one ever. There's still time to register, so if you can attend, you should! While you're at it, don't miss the early bird rate for RIA Unleashed 2010!

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The Personal and Professional Benefits of Contributing to Open-Source

Posted on Jun 24, 2010

It struck me the other day that I have greatly missed contributing to open-source projects on a more significant scale than I have managed lately. Part of what hit me was that, while I felt that I had learned a lot from a technical knowledge standpoint in the past couple years, I hadn't grown as a developer as much as I'd hoped and I think a good chunk of that can be attributed to the change in the nature of my personal open-source contributions. It turns out that while you can read books and develop projects at your particular place of work, there is no substitute, in my opinion, for contributing to some of the community open source projects in terms of what they can teach you. Let me explain.

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ColdFusion Open Source Update - June 21, 2010

Posted on Jun 21, 2010

Five new releases and six updates this week (or so) in ColdFusion open source. I am sitting in the jury pool as I write this - what fun! It's been a busy week, clearly, in ColdFusion open source but also personally as I have been busy getting speakers, sponsors and workshops confirmed for RIA Unleashed : Boston 2010. I'm really excited about this year with the two day format including a day of hands-on training (each day can be purchased independently). If you are into ColdFusion (which, by reading this, I assume you are), you'll want to catch speakers including Raymond Camden, Adam Lehman, Terry Ryan, Simon Free, Marc Esher and more. Oh, and if you do Flex or AIR there will be tons for you too...sorry to ramble on, just excited, but enough about my conference...

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Connecting Mura CMS to an ORM Application

Posted on Jun 17, 2010

Some of you may be wondering, based upon the title of this post, why you would want to connect a Mura CMS application to ColdFusion ORM. Let me give a long-winded explanation. Unless your site is entirely content driven you will often have large portions of your site that are not contained within the CMS (we'll refer to this as an external application). Mura makes it easy to connect the CMS portion of your site to another application (this is especially easy if the other application uses a front-controller framework). However, you may often need to display some portion of data from your non-Mura external application in the content-driven portion of your site. For example, let's imagine a site like Twitter (another clone perhaps) whereby the informational content (i.e. home page, about us, documentation, help and so on) may be CMS-driven but we'd also like to display a list of top tweets on the home page that are pulled from outside the CMS.

So, that's the background on why you might need Mura to speak to an outside application. However, now imagine that outside application has services that rely on ColdFusion 9 ORM. In the case of my Twitter-clone site, I can't just directly call tweetService.getTopTweets() from my Mura driven home page because the Mura application does not have ORM enabled. You could use a remote method and call that via Ajax or a webservice since a remote call would mean the method call is instantiated within the external application's application context (i.e. it has ORM enabled) but that isn't always a desirable solution. Thankfully, as of a recent update, you can easily connect your Mura site to your external ORM application. I will show you how to do this by instantiating the ORM context within Mura thereby allowing you to directly call ORM-dependent service methods like tweetService.getTopTweets().
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Adding Solr Search to Mura CMS

Posted on Jun 15, 2010

The best thing about Mura CMS is that much of what you need to build a typical content managed site is already built-in. However, the second best thing about Mura CMS is that anything that isn't built in can generally be added in using its extensibility without breaking your upgrade path. In the case of my application, one of the requirements was that we use ColdFusion 9's new Solr-based search engine to index all of the site content. By default, Mura uses a standard query based searching, in part, I suspect, because its designed to run on the other CFML engines should you choose to. I am running ColdFusion 9, so I want Solr! Here's how I did it.

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About

My name is Brian Rinaldi and I am the Web Community Manager for Flash Platform at Adobe. I am a regular blogger, speaker and author. I also founded RIA Unleashed conference in Boston. The views expressed on this site are my own & not those of my employer.