Only one new project and three relatively minor updates this week but the one new project garnered a lot of attention. That project is Oscar Arevalo's new ColdFusion based CMS and portal manager called ColdBricks. In addition, there was a great deal of heated debate on the proposed license change for the next version of FarCry and a lot of talk about the future of Mach-II and Model-Glue. Now that conference season has officially begun, it seems as though the debates are in full swing in the community!

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Just a quick note to let folks know that, while I did post session summaries to my blog, I have written my overall review of cf.Objective for Fusion Authority. You can find my cf.Objective() Wrap-up here.

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation at cf.Objective(). I know Cairngorm can be a tough sell, especially following Laura's Mate presentation, Max's Flex without a framework presentation and all the talk about Chris Scott's Swiz. Nonetheless, Cairngorm is still the dominant framework in Flex and well worth knowing, even if it's just to know what you don't like about it.

Anyway, I am attaching the presentation in PDF format. You can also download the example application via Subversion on my Google code site.

Two new releases and four updates this week (and a ton of presentation notes from cf.Objective()). Speaking of cf.Objective(), it was awesome, as expected, but more on that later. Unfortunately, I have to pass on the sad news to all the open-source developers that I will no longer be releasing updates or maintaining the open-source list. I was having a deep conversation with the world-renowned language expert, Richard Bremner (or as I call him, Morpheus), and he has convinced me that since CFML is not a language, that these were not actually "projects." Below I transcribed the quote my discussion with Richard that I think will clarify this point to people (in it he refers to me by his friendly nickname for me, Neo):

"ColdFusion is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? PDFs, Ajax integration, queries, components. The very code we are trying to save. But until we do, this code is still a part of that system and that makes it our enemy. You have to understand, most ColdFusion developers are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."

Anyway, my eyes have been opened...Thank you Morpheus (i.e. Richard Bremner).

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Mark Mandel covers the theory of caching and what problems it solves and then discusses, in detail, how Transfer addresses caching. The main problem, obviously, is that some aspects of your code can be "expensive" such as retrieving large datasets from the database or converting large data sets into components. Caching addresses this by storing information on disk or in memory so as not to have to repeat the expensive portion of the code.

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Considering that I am giving the Cairngorm session tomorrow and that I was so impressed by Laura's Mate session yesterday, this seemed like a "must see" for me. Max starts by saying that this is not necessarily a "to use frameworks or not" but focuses more on many underlying design patterns you can use (and that some frameworks already contain).

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The latest issue of the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update debuted at cf.Objective() and it includes my article "Getting to Know Mr. Wizard." This article shows how-to-use and reviews each of the ColdFusion Eclipse Wizards, including the Flex Wizard, the Ajax Wizard, the CFC Wizard and the Value Object Wizard. Unfortunately, my reviews are not flattering. I'll leave it at that for now and you can read the article for more detail. Please feel free to share any feedback by commenting on this post.

Terrence Ryan discusses how to handle bringing new ideas into a shop that isn't open to them. In many organizations you encounter significant resistance to bringing in object-oriented development practices, frameworks or new technologies like Flex. Rather than quit, he recommends some strategies to change the organization because generally this is legitimate resistance and not hostility. As he emphasizes as well, "it is not a technical problem," it's an interpersonal problem.

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The next session I will review today is by Laura Arguello of ASFusion. Mate (pronounced Mah-teh) is a tag-based Flex framework created by Nahuel Foronda that is currently in public alpha. The goals of the project waere to solve recurring problems without needing to learn a ton of design patterns while making it easy to use and making it easy to extend. The presentation was impressive and from what I can tell, anyone who uses Mach-II would feel very much at home using Mate.

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I am here scoping out a topic near and dear to my heart, code generation (also to make sure Brian doesn't forget Illudium ;). Thankfully he did not forget.

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