ColdFusion Open-Source Update - May 7

What a week, with huge announcements relevant to ColdFusion open-source both at cf.Objective() and elsewhere. This week alone we have four new projects and seven updates. In fact some of the most interesting announcements covered items that don't fit nicely into my update format, so let's cover those first.Probably the biggest open-source related announcement this week was that Mark Drew has released his Project Unity: CF Frameworks Explorer (for more coverage of this see Dave Shuck's discussion). This is an add-on available separately from the CFEclipse update site that automatically discovers your framework configuration XML files and makes it very easy to add, modify and remove them. Mark emphasized in his presentation that adding support for a new framework is a simple process and requires no java coding.

Teratech announced that they are sponsoring a ColdFusion Open Source Code-off which will be hosted by Ben Nadel. This contest, which ends on June 5th, is offering one unspecified "special prize" in addition to free CFUnited admission to the winner.

Lastly, I wanted to mention my discussion of Open-Source Content Management in ColdFusion simply because it didn't fit nicely under one product (it covers Katapult, Speck and Gerobase) and because I spend forever writing this damn report, so I can plug my own stuff if I like ;)

Anyway, here is the rest of the week's open-source news:

New Releases and Updates

New Project: Bytespring CMS
Bytespring CMS Released as Open Source
Jason Sheedy has released his content management system built with Model-Glue as open source under the LGPL. This happened as I finished writing my CMS overview discussed above, so I am looking forward to reviewing this one as well.

New Project: Memcached Client for ColdFusion
MemCached Client for CFMX - alpha version
Mark Lynch has written a ColdFusion wrapper for the Memcached project which he describes as a large RAM cache that can be distributed across a network, allowing multiple servers to share it.

Centralized Caching for CFMX
Michael Long covers some of the benefits and drawbacks of using a tool like Memcached for centralized caching.

New Project: Stubbie
Initial Release
This project by Greg Stewart creates stub test objects based upon components found in your project. The generated stubs support both CFUnit and CFCUnit.

New Project: sosXML
Initial Release
This component by John Farrar is intended to simplify interacting with XML in ColdFusion.

RbMan
RbMan2 - Open Source Resource Bundle Editing in Flex
Jason Sheedy has updated his resource bundle management tool with a Flex front-end.

LightWire
LightWire Bug Fix - Please Upgrade to 0.66
Peter Bell has fixed a small bug found by Paul Marcotte that caused some lazy loading issues.

ColdBox
Case sensitive OS Updated
Luis Majano has fixed a case-sensitivity issue in his MVC framework.

ColdBox 2.0.1 Coming soon
Luis also says that he is working on bug fixes and updates that will be included in a 2.0.1 maintenance release.

cfcUnit
cfcUnit CFEclipse Facade updated
Sean Corfield has updated his facade for the CFUnit CFEclipse add-on, fixing a bug on CFC paths and adding the ability to run test suites.

CheckoutCFC
CheckoutCFC - the british are coming
Scott Pinkston has added some internationalization code to his Google Checkout component.

DataMgr
DataMgr 2.1 Alpha
Steve Bryant has added a number of new features to his active schema/CRUD tool including cascading and custom relation fields.

OpenID CFC
Version 0.2 Released
Dmitry Yakhnov has updated his component with easier to understand logic.

Announcements

Model-Glue
Ray Camden Joins Model-Glue
Ray Camden has agreed to become the community manager for Joe Rinehart's MVC framework. Some things Joe would like to see happen is a better list system and a better Model-Glue web site with forums.

Model-Glue:Flex?
Joe Rinehart already has a functional but experimental Model-Glue framework in ActionScript 3 for Flex.

CFRails
Two questions about generated lists
Sam Larbi requests some feedback on how to handle generated lists in his Rails-like framework.

Production quality scaffolding
Sam Larbi talks about how he is trying to make scaffolding useful in CFRails by making them not "look like crap" and also customizable.

SquidHead
Squidhead Update 5/2007
Terrence Ryan talks about a coworkers contribution that creates "business beans" for any DAO operations.

CFSSP
CFSSP is available at RIA Forge
Ryan Guill has moved his SlideShow Pro project to RIAForge.

Tutorials and Presentations

ColdSpring
Dave Ross - ColdSpring 101 - cf.objective() 2007
Matt Woodward, a man of unparalleled genius! I didn't even know Google Docs existed before you used them! ;) Anyway, here is Matt's Google doc notes for Dave Ross' presentation.

Mach II
What's New in Mach-II 1.5 - cf.objective() 2007
Matt Woodward's famous Google doc notes on Peter Farrell's cf.Objective() presentation. Matt single-handedly pushed my "well-written" posts off the aggs in a matter of minutes. ;)

Mach-II 1.5 is sweet! Notes from Peter Farrell's presentation at cf.Objective()
Dave Shuck also reviews Peter's presentation and the features he is excited about.

Model-Glue
Model-Glue and AJAX Presentation
Ray Camden's cf.Objective() presentation code.

Transfer
Lots of coverage of Mark Mandel's half a dozen or so sessions at cf.Objective() - at least the one's he woke up for :). Here are two from:
Matt Woodward
Ray Camden

FarCry
Displaying images in containers in Farcry
Stephen Moretti offers a brief tutorial on how to display images in a container through a simple change to the dmImage object.

BlogCFC
Text-Link-Ads for ColdFusion and BlogCFC
I wrote up a component and BlogCFC pod to add support for Text-Link-Ads advertising on your site, since ColdFusion code support isn't officially offered on Text-Link-Ads site at the moment.