:neil_middleton

At the time of writing, it would appear that the Adobe weblog aggregator has exploded in a big mess, and is being moved to some new servers:

It is currently looking like it will be down for some time.  Well, so you know, Feed-Squirrel.com is still working fine and aggregating a lot of the same content, so check it out.

Adobe have published some information on what’s up and coming in the future Flex 4 release (codenamed “Gumbo”).

Although caked in a fairly thick layer of mar-bollocks (marketing bollocks), there’s a load of interesting information in there.

For a start it looks like Adobe are going to try and move away from the default Flex skin that nearly every single app seems to be released with.  This is understandable, as currently it’s easy to spot a Flex app vs that of Silverlight, or POF (Plain Old Flash – just made that one up).  This will be achieved via some changes to the skinning architecture whilst maintaining backwards compatibility to Flex 3.

Other details are still to be released, but at the moment sit under the headings “Accelerated Development”, “Horizontal Platform Improvements” and “Broadening Horizons”

There’s very little there, but expect some form of code generation tool, possibly some form of frameworks integration (Cairngorm?), possible cross-runtime features (export to other runtimes potentially?) as well as a general spit and polish throughout.

Flex 4 has no dates yet, but as always you can keep up to date on the Adobe Open Source website.

To replace a previous drop-out from the Scotch lineup, I’m now doing an additional session at Scotch on the Rocks 2008 in June. This additional topic will be covering unit testing with ColdFusion using tools such as MXUnit as well as touching on automation.

So, now my session lineup is as follows:

JQuery in a nutshell
Unit Testing  and Automation with Coldfusion

If there is anything that you would like to see covered in either of these sessions, please let me know and I’ll try to incorporate it. If you haven’t yet got Scotch tickets, get some now, before the early bird ends on 30th April

I’ve just come across FlexCover over on Google Code – which looks like an absolutely fantastic project.

Brought to be by Joseph Berkovitz, FlexCover provides code coverage instrumentation, data collection and reporting tools for Adobe Flex and AIR applications.

To quote the description on the site: “Flexcover is a code coverage tool for Flex, AIR and AS3. It incorporates a modified version of the AS3 compiler which inserts extra function calls in the code within the SWF or SWC output file. At runtime, these function calls send information on the application’s code coverage to a separate tool; The modified compiler also emits a separate “coverage metadata” file that describes all the possible packages, classes, functions, code blocks and lines in the code, as well as the names of the associated source code files.”

The site mentions involvement from Alex Uhlmann from Adobe Consulting, which should give the project a massive PR boost.

If you’re unit testing with Flex  - and if not, why not?  You should check this out.  There’s no point in getting 100% of your tests passing if you’re only testing 10% of your code.

Just a quick footnote: I’ve not had a chance to try this out yet, so haven’t commented on it’s current development state.  This is very much an early release – so you will probably find issues.

Now, I’m not wanting to start yet another “CF is dead, moan moan moan” thread running here, as frankly, I think they are a waste of everybody’s time and achieve nothing.  However, I would like to reproduce here a post that Scott Barnes, Product Manager at Microsoft for the Rich Client Platform Team, and Mr MossyBlog, has posted on the CFAussie list talking about improving the CF Community:

“Yes, I did get promoted and thankfully no more Evangelism. I find the Evangelism scene, political, annoying and if i have one more heated debate with the competitors over something minor and trivial, I’ll retire and go paint landscapes..

My new role is Product Manager in the Rich Client Platform Team (WPF/Silverlight).

Now that’s out of the way.

Let me share some of my learned experience around technology adoption (specifically in Australia/New Zealand), and specifically brand awareness. Right now the benefits around why Coldfusion aren’t there, in that they may technically be there but the fact is there is limited marketing around the product and not just the product but also the community surrounding the product.

My previous role was an Evangelist, and i bet if i asked anyone on this list what does that mean, I’d get various answers. An Evangelist role within Microsoft is simple, help folks with new emerging technology not by ramming it down their throats, but simply connecting them to people. In that, it wasn’t my job to make you buy ASP.NET or adopt Silverlight, but if you showed an interest I’d connect you with some folks whom can either pay you to do the job, help you learn the technology or provide you with some overview/understanding of what the technologies we had offer could do. I’d also promote the new technology and with our team, do presos etc.. that and travel the world and attend really cool parties (but thats boring right). Evangelism is crucial to keeping technical communities alive, as it’s not only a contact sport but it’s one that scales quite well – if architected correctly. Find generals in the field, help them, support them, provide as much as you can to enable them to scale. Right now you folks don’t have Coldfusion Generals.

I mentioned at last years WebDU that Adobe should consider MVP programs or similar nature (I did myself no favours by doing this) and got laughed at, as if i was spreading some FUD around or something. MVP programs are extremely successful inside Microsoft communities, we ensure these folks are kept in the loop as much as possible and can call on the evangelists etc anytime should they need anything, some would say they are almost blue badges themselves. They also have no issue with beating us around the head should we screw up – some have and done really good job of it – we don’t punish them for it, we instead fix whatever the heck we stuffed up on and apologise (should it be our fault) as to punish them would cause 20,000 times more pain for us then the original problem causes (basic math right).

Some fun facts about MVP’s todate:

Worldwide there are more than 100 million participants in technical communities.
Of these participants there are only 4,000 MVPs located across 93 countries, spanning more than 30 languages and more than 90 Microsoft technologies. There has been a 10 percent to 15 percent MVP audience growth in countries such as China, Russia and Korea Over the past few years new regions with MVPs include the Republic of Congo, Ghana, Nepal, Macedonia and Macao In recent years, a handful of MVPs have been awarded in new categories such as MSN, Xbox, Visual Studio Tools for Office, Microsoft Dynamics and Visual Studio Team System.

MVPs are a diverse group that includes accountants, teachers, artists, government workers, engineers and technologists. Now, who’s laughing? I’m not. It takes a lot of work to get someone into the MPV program, and just because your the most popular guy/girl on a mailing list doesn’t automatically make you an MPV. It’s not whom you know, it’s what you know and I can say outloud, the paperwork internally to get someone on this program is an effort – but worth it in the end. My point is really raw and simple. Call it FUD, i don’t care – in fact i’d prefer to keep the politics out of this one. I spent a lot of years waiting for the Coldfusion scene to pickup. I like most of you at times took the crappy jobs while the market picked up, I also waited for Macromedia to finally get some budget to market and so on.. we got told a lot of promises and fast talkings at WebDU/MXDU’s of past and yet nothing much has occurred. Year after year the Coldfusion question would come up, same or similiar responses would pacify us for only so long…

I raise this point simply to say guys, enough. You have got realistically limited choices:

- Start acting like a community and foster better relationships. Don’t bring in the same muffin eaters, look for new ones.

- Understand what motivates adoption in today’s market.

- Older generation developers switch to languages simply due to boredom, perception of no work and last but most important of all, lack of support by the brand whom owns the language. 

- WebDU should be bigger each year, but this year we’re not even attending simply because I couldn’t get an ROI story out of it. I’ll be honest, year on year we attend, we really get low value out of attending. We’d rather focus our energy on events like WD07, BarCamps etc as these folks are not only agnostic but open to technology discussion, less about brand politics. 

- Put more pressure on Adobe to get the budgets or better programs in place. I’m amazed that we in Australia have 13 Evangelists whom are kept busy 24/7 and Adobe has 0. One Evangelist for APAC? – how about you have your own local Adobe celeb to lead you instead of waiting for the US guys to fly out once a year? 

If you think this thread is doing my employer any favours, think otherwise and i’m sure i’ll get some feedback for it (Today is my last official day as Evangelist so i have a small amount of free reign here). I leave this as simply a parting gift to you folks before I head over to the US. I loved working in the Coldfusion space for many years, despite our petty email squabbles and thread wars – Taco Fleur, you’re still cool – there have been some real quality friendships made out of this community (actually most of my best friends are Coldfusion Devs from past) I’d hate to see that die off, but perception = reality and remember that. You can sit there and take it or whine about Microsoft all you like, but we didn’t create this problem and more importantly there was a reason why i simply down tools and went over to Microsoft not knowing a lick of .NET and it wasn’t to get one up on the Adobe/Macromedia crew.

That being said, my inbox is open to any whom wish to adopt .NET

–
Regards,
Scott Barnes
http://www.mossyblog.com”

Any thoughts or comments – especially from Adobe, gratefully received…

Just a quick note to say that there has been a few additions to my Ultimate ColdFusion Tools List as submitted by Richard Rein.  The additions are all in the frameworks area, namely: MXUnit, Model-Glue, Mach-ii, Transfer, Reactor, Coldspring, Coldbox and Fusebox.  See the list for links and more information.

As always, if anyone can think of anything else, please let me know and I’ll add it.

Since upgrading to Wordpress 2.5 last week (which, incidentally, is excellent), my administrator dashboard has been somewhat broken returning the error:

Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in /path/to/blog/wp-admin/index.php(101) : runtime-created function on line 1

Well, I’ve been looking at this tonight and sussed the problem.  Let’s take a look at line 101 (ignore the word wrap):

$num_widgets = array_reduce( $sidebars_widgets, create_function( '$prev, 

$curr', 'return $prev+count($curr);' ) );

Now, from what I can tell, this line is figuring out how many widgets to show, and thus figure out the HTML etc required to do so.  However, in PHP, array_reduce() will return NULL if nowt is found, and an initial value argument is not passed in.  Passing in an initial value fixes this (0 being that default):

$num_widgets = array_reduce( $sidebars_widgets, create_function( '$prev, 

$curr', 'return $prev+count($curr);' ), 0 );

Stick that in your code, and all should be running smoothly.

At the moment Adobe are giving out a whole load of JIRA love, the bug tracking system available from Atlassian (and quite understandably, it’s a cracking product) with the presence of their Flex bug tracker, and now, their Flash player system.

After a quick twitter conversation, it would appear that there is a lot of demand for a ColdFusion bug tracker, so we, the community, can communicate our issues and ideas back to the developers as we need.  The end result can only be a better, more robust, stable, and capable product for all.

Historically, these trackers have only been available during product alphas and betas, using the old mmbeta.macromedia.com system, which to be honest, is a pile of cack.  However, regardless of how bad the tracker, that communication was still in place.

So, come on Adobe, give us a bug tracker.  Transparency is the key.

If anyone agrees, please leave a comment below – consider this a petition.

I’ve just been nosing through some of the feeds I am subscribed to and was pleased to see that ColdFusion 8.0.1 got a mention on the Macworld.com website.

Although the article appears to be aimed at the not-so-tech savvy and even if it does smell of an Adobe authored press release, it’s still nice to see it out there being put in front of people not so familiar with the product.

The more people aware of the new evolutions the product is going through at the moment the better.

Last night, Google launched their Amazon EC2 competitor, App Engine.

For those of you that don’t know – Amazon EC2 is a system whereby you can upload a machine image that you can then create literally hundreds of virtual images from for very little cost.  Accompanying this is the Amazon S3 service which is essentially a huge virtual storage device in the cloud – priced in a very reasonable pay-as-you-go style.

The cool thing with EC2 is that it is all controllable with an API – so, for instance, you could potentially have a web application that monitors it’s own load, and scales out new servers as required fully automatically – you only pay for what you use.  This is great for new start-ups who aren’t really sure if their new super-duper social site is actually going to get no visitors, or become the next Facebook.

Google App Engine is a little different.  With this, you are given a pre-prepared machine image which is basically a web server rigged up to use Python (with other platforms potentially coming soon) and a Google driven data-store, which is bound to be a bit speedy.  Initially this might seem a little annoying as a CFML developer until you check out the free account.

As a non-paying App Engine subscriber you are somewhat limited on what you can do – but as Google describe it, you have enough for half a gig of storage and around 5 million page views a month.  Now, thats a pretty busy website in my eyes.  So, if you have a busy static website, a load of files requiring storage, or are handy with Python it’s worth a look – you could end up with a free web server.

On the other hand though, as a CFML developer, you’ll need to look at EC2.  With the advent of the open-sourcing of Bluedragon, we are now in a position where we can build a no-cost server image (comprising of Linux, MySQL, Apache, Tomcat and Bluedragon) which we can then deploy to EC2 and scale for very low cost and end up with a supremely scalable, and performant cluster of servers.  Best of all, if you don’t use it much – it doesn’t cost you as much, unlike having a rack of under used servers somewhere in a data-center.

So, come the revolution, we can all be building our infrastructure from nothing but the cloud, and scaling as far as we want, and best of all, for no cost but still using CFML.  Obviously Amazon EC2 is the only choice at the moment for cloud CFML computing, but I’m sure Google will make their system a little more customisable over time.

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