ColdFusion Open-Source Update - June 19
Posted on Jun 19, 2006
Holy crap, this was a busy week! I had to start writing this on Saturday just to get it done in time. The big news of the week was most certainly the first official public release of Model-Glue 2.0 beta. However, other big news included the release of ColdFusion on Wheels v0.5, Transfer v0.5 and FuseBox 5 beta 2. Plus we also had an announcement of a new framework by Luis Majano called ColdBox. With a little over a week to go before CFUnited, it looks like the rush is on to get projects released in time for some announcements and presentations at the conference.Model-Glue
Unity Public Beta 1 Released
Obviously alot has happened with Model-Glue this week with the release of the firt public beta of Unity. Joe Rhinehart also wrote a concise Top Ten Reasons to Use Model-Glue Unity, which covered some of the major improvements. Model-Glue Unity comes prepackaged with Reactor and ColdSpring, so that it becomes more than just a great way to build applications using MVC architecture, but also automates the repetetive processes that come with using MVC (like creating beans, DAO's and Gateways). Joe gave a presentation covering alot of this during Adobe Developer week the day following the release of the beta. He has stated his intent to blog the URL for that once it is released, but until then you can get the gist of the presentation by reading my meeting notes.
ColdFusion on Wheels
Version 0.5 Available
Rob Cameron has posted a new version of his ColdFusion on Wheels framework, which, like MG: Unity, now includes scaffolding. It also includes alot of other improvements that make CFWheels definitely worth watching (especially now that it can support IIS and SQL Server). Rob also added a new demo to the documentation that covers how to create scaffolds.
Transfer
Version 0.5 Released
Mark Mandel also released version 0.5 of his ORM framework called Transfer. This version adds PosgreSQL support, enhanced caching controls, improved handling of relationships and a number of other improvements and bug fixes. Mark is asking people to download and test the software and participate by sending feedback his way.
Pet Market Example Application
Along with the 0.5 release, Mark also submitted a Transfer version of the pet market application to the cfpetmarket site.
Fusebox
Fusebox 5 Beta 2
Sean Corfield announced that the beta 2 version of Fusebox 5 was being released to the mailing list, and is also working on the updated documentation. One interesting thing that came out of the discussion within the comments of this post is that Fusebox 5 will be 100% backwards compatible with Fusebox 4/4.1. In part this also means that it will continue to support development using procedural programming for those who are more comfortable with this approach. This is obviously distinctly different than either Model-Glue or Mach II which both require CFC's and, IMO, a basic understanding of OO concepts.
Fusebox 5 in a Model-Glue Style
Sean Corfield showed the power of Fusebox 5 custom lexicons by using them to allow a Model-Glue 1.x application to run natively in Fusebox 5.
ColdBox
ColdBox Framework Announced
Luis Majano announced the upcoming release of his MVC framework named ColdBox. This is based upon a framework he developed that currently runs the Sandals online booking engine and online event engine. Some of the interesting aspects of ColdBox, based upon the release announcement, are the plugins, which there appear to be a number of them prepackaged with the framework including logging and file utilities. Also, I believe this would be unique to the framework, Luis talks about a prebuilt dashboard for maintenance and updated to the framework. There are currently no files released for ColdBox yet, but Luis has been kind enough to share the current build with me, and I hope to take a look soon and post about it further.
CanvasWiki
Raymond Camden released an update of his wiki software including Google Sitemap support that was added by Lucas Sherwood.
Lighthouse Pro
Ray also released an update to his bug tracking software. Some feature enhancements include the addition of project-based announcements, and some layout changes to the home page.
ObjectBreeze
Nic Tunney posted about some upcoming improvements to his ORM framework that enhances how OB deals with one-to-many joins. The changes are coming in the future 2.0 beta release.
CFMBB
Rick Root posted to CF-Talk that he was doing a soft-launch of an upcoming CFMBB release. He was looking for testers to try the demo to help find any bugs. The new release will add features like user-to-user private messaging and an announcement topic type.
ColdPDF
Also on the CF-Talk list, Robert Everland announced that he is beginning a new open-source project to implement the iText libraries in ColdFusion. The iText java library is used for generating PDFs on the fly. While this functionality already exists in CF 7, my understanding is that iText has some features that cfdocument does not (correct me if I am wrong). However, it also appears to be Robert's idea that this would work on CFMX 6.1 as well as other CFML implementations (BlueDragon or perhaps Railo) that do not include the cfdocument functionality.
Reactor
This isn't really news, but this question seems to come up repeatedly on several lists this week (especially now that Model-Glue includes Reactor). The Reactor site is not down. The Reactor Trac site is available at trac.reactorframework.com, but there is currently no site at www.reactorframework.com yet.
Comments
Posted By rd / Posted on 06/19/2006 at 3:10 PM