Four new projects and four updates this week. Today is the last day to get the early bird discount for CFUnited. If you are interested in ColdFusion open source, there will be plenty of discussions about some important open-source projects there and, I am sure, no shortage of announcements. I'll be there speaking about the Mate Flex framework. So, after you read this week's open source update, go get yourself registered.
One new project and two updates this week. I am excited that the Adobe ColdFusion and Flex User Group Tour is coming to Boston tonight with Adam Lehman and Tim Buntel. I think that the new features coming in ColdFusion 9 (and with ColdFusion Builder aka Bolt) will help spur more open source development from the ColdFusion community. You can even see the start of that with the new Bolt extensions category at RIAForge which already has a number of releases.
The other day I gave a preview of my Illudium Bolt Connector and today I want to look at another Bolt (apparently now ColdFusion Builder) plugin I released on RIAForge. This one is designed to allow you to quickly and easily place the skeleton application files for a variety of frameworks into a folder. The concept is simple, but its useful and since its extensible, you can support additional frameworks or your own custom skeleton application files. In addition, I want to highlight how simple creating these plugins can be, as I was able to create this plugin in about an hour.
Four new projects and, yes, eight updates this week. It was a busy week of releases apparently. Perhaps that's because of all the time freed up now that we've finally stopped arguing with each other (i.e. OO vs procedural). Unfortunately, the more projects people release, the longer it takes to write this post. Thus I am trying to come up with a new war within the CF community to save myself some time next week. Maybe Mango vs BlogCFC?
You may have read or heard about the announcement that Bolt (ColdFusion's new IDE) will allow you to write your own extensions (Ray has talked about his extensions recently). I personally don't think enough fuss has been made about this feature, probably because people don't know a lot about them yet. To clarify, you can create fully dynamic extensions with CFML - no need to learn any of the internals of Eclipse - and then add these onto things like the file view or the RDS DataView. When I first heard about this, I thought this would be a great way to tie an existing installation of the Illudium PU-36 Code Generator into the IDE within the RDS DataView. That extension is currently available on RIAForge for anyone with access to Bolt right now or, if you don't yet have access, its there for when a public beta happens (no, I don't have a clue when that might be).
Preview video is available after the break.