To kick start my reading of blogs I've started listening to podcasts again.
I used to listen to ColdFusion Podcast and Weekly, but unfortunately they are now deceased, so I had a bit of a search and asked around on Twitter. Here's the podcasts I'm now listening to and a few thoughts.
This blog round up is somewhat later than I had intended, but for good reason. I've been waiting for a couple of blog posts to emerge into the public domain, so that I could include them in the round up. I can't impress upon you how important it is to read these posts.
Sorry..... Its been a very very long time since I posted a blog round up.
I recently moved my blog from hosting on my PC at home to extremely cheap Coldfusion 8 hosting with Hosting A to Z and I've updated to MangoBlog 1.4 with a new site theme, so I've decided its time I got my act together and started posting again.
Previously I wrote a number of weekly blog round up of the 100 or so blogs I'm subscribed to, but I've let it get all out of date and I've not been reading as much as I should.
Ack! I really should keep up with these things. I've been reading through a couple of new blogs, looking at extJS and playing with Sun's GlassFish as a possible alternate java server for ColdFusion.
Well, Gary Fenton joked that I should change my blog slogan to "I read 100 blogs so YOU don't have to!", now I actually do read 100 blogs! Well 102 to be precise! hmmm make that 103... No idea why, but Adam Lehman's blog wasn't on my list!
Errrmmm... Happy New Year! :D Sorry for not keeping up with my blog round-ups.
I've been looking at my HUGE back log of blog entries and thinking I should do a round-up and then being too daunted by the task. So finally last week I decided to go back to the 26th of January and only read those blog entries and round-up from there and then mark everything as read!
Now that have a sensible number of blog entries in Google Reader I'm finally starting to read them again, so here goes nothing!! ;)
The marathon blog round-up! 390 blog entries to have a read through!
A lesson in never leave a job you should be doing today/tonight until tomorrow!
I'm never going to be able to go through all those posts in one sitting so I'm going to start with the batch of software releases that have been going on the last few weeks.
So lets dive in!
Matt Woodward notes that Open Office 3.0, which I mentioned previously in my round posts, has been released.
Nathan Mische has updated ColdFire on RIAForge fixing a few bugs and an extension for a problem with json. I'd love to know how he comes up with his version numbers. :)
Ray Camden released version 1.5 of SpoolMail with a couple of feature enhancements. If you don't know what SpoolMail is - its handy for when you're developing email feature in application and need to see what is going into the mail queue without them actually have to be sent to real people.
Ted Patrick announced the release of Flash Player 10 and gives a quick overview of the new features. Matt Woodward notes that the Linux edition of FP10 was actually released at the same time, which is a rare event!
Transfer 1.1 Final was release by Mark Mandel. If you're stuck with a pre v1 copy of Transfer you really must get updated to the 1.1 version. The performance enhancements are superb, along with the addition of new features such as cache monitoring and object proxies and the stack of bug fixes makes this release a must. If you're on the transfer list you may have noticed me making a bit of a tit of myself, but finally something has clicked and I've spent the last few days having the most fun doing development than I have in a while. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy writing CFML, but its always nice to do something that is different to your usual routine and makes you feel all warm inside. ;oD I should probably note here that Mark Mandel has done a CFConversation with Brian Meloche.
Are you an open source developer? Do you work with databases? Then you might be interested in Aqua Data Studio 7. Todd Sharp notes that they offer free licences to open source developers.
The chaps at Broadchoice have been busy releasing and updating their very cool looking AIR application "Workspace". I really should sign up for a beta account. I wonder if it comes with free "more hours in the day". ;)
Ray Camden must be making use of those "more hours in the day", because in his relentless application development he's released an update to Lighthouse Pro along with everything else he working on.
Adobe have released a hotfix for ColdFusion 7 and 8 that adds multipart support to cfhttp to support changes with the Google and YouTube APIs.
Well I think thats about all the software releases I can find. My blog entry count is down to 318 and my head is swimming. Time to get some sleep. Please let my son sleep the night through so I get more than 4 hours sleep!
Tomorrow night - "Blog Round up 5 Nov 2008 - In other news". ;)
I keep forgetting what the number of my next round up is, so I've decided I need to change the title. Hopefully it'll be generally more useful that #1 to n. It also means I can let my Friday lunchtime deadline slide a bit. I'm on the train coming back from Edinburgh and Andy Allan's stag do! Before you ask - typically, I made it up to Edinburgh, I had a couple of drinks and some food, but then had to cry off because I was suffering from a 24hour stomach bug. But I'm told lots of beer and fun was had.
First of all I added a new blog, Bob Silverberg, to my Google Reader this week. I saw a post by Bob on the CFCDev group regarding Object Oriented Validation that interested me given that I validation is one of those things you always have to do but gets in the way of doing the fun stuff. Bob's created a framework agnostic validation framework that will flexibly generate validation code for your data objects. Take a look - he explains it better than I can in a few words and there are also CS/Transfer examples available.
Ray Camden released an update to Sounding on RIAForge this week. Apparently its just a bug fix release with some user submitted UI improvements. Wish I'd spent the time to install Soundings for a survey recently, rather than use the free survey monkey account.
If you like a good book for learning tech from, then Ted Patrick is plugging Alaric Cole's new Flex Book - Learning Flex 3. Flash Player 10 is in the works, so Ted also has a post reminding us all to update our flash player detection.
Andrew Shorten has announce free one day flex training courses in London and the UK speakers for Max Europe
Kev McCabe has posted that Fusion Debug has released a beta update in their labs section for version 2.0.2.
While we're on the subject of editors, its nice to see that I'm not completely insane when it comes to setting up my development environment and that Scott Stroz from Alagad has an almost identical set up to me.
Legacy code is always a nightmare, and I'm sure most of us have left some classy snippets lying around, but it looks like Todd Sharp's friend has got their work cut out for them with stuff like this. Todd did show me some other gems.... It doesn't get any better! Along similar lines, John Whish asks "Refactoring - good or bad?" It all kinda rings a bell with me at the minute as I'm rewriting some code I wrote ages and ages ago, because I need to add some features and discovering that its just not that easy to do without the rewrite. If only I could wave a magic wand and replace all this dodgy old FB2 code with shiney new ModelGlue code.
A couple things that I've picked up off of BetaNews this last week that might be of interest. First is IBM's Bluehouse web collaboration service has entered a free public beta phase. Imagine Basecamp, but more. The other item that grabbed my attention was the review of Open Office 3RC4. I quite like OO, but I struggle with the transition between MS Office and OO. Perhaps its time to give it another look.
Well thats about all for this week, apart from noting that time flies when you're having fun. I've been writing ColdFusion applications since 1996, search engines have gone and been replaced in that time and A List Apart has been around for 10 years.
This week I wrote the round-up in ScribeFire and posted up to Mango Blog. Only flaw in the plan is I have to remember to manually add an excerpt to the top of the round-up and double check the categories. (I just noticed that ScribeFire/MangoBlog some how dropped some of my selected categories) This weeks round-up has ended up with 3 distinct threads, Source Control and all that goodness, ColdFusion frameworks and Open Bluedragon updates. So lets crack on...
Subversion Branching Preso Online
Sean Corfield has posted his SVN Branching presentation from A Wee Dram. I didn't make it down for the one day event and would have liked to have seen this presentation, but having read through Sean's presentation it looks like I work with svn the same way as Sean anyway! Alway nice to know you aren't completely insane! ;)
While I'm adding an svn related link - here's another Terry Ryan has created an unfuddlecfc to help with backing up their svn hosting at unfuddle.com
Also, if you're hosting your own SVN/Trac installations and you're using TOCMacro on your trac environment you need to upgrade this plugin. Take a look here for why : Trac sporadic hang solved
Well this round-up seems to be taking a bit of a source control and ticketing theme to it, so here's another related post! Ray Camden has released a much updated Lighthouse Pro 2.5
Moving on from source control and bug tracking - Congrats to Mark Mandel for his first post on Adobe Devnet with his An Introduction to ColdFusion frameworks article. Even if you know what CF frameworks are out there, this provides a neat summary of the general features and design patterns behind each of them, as well as helping provide a clear distinction between MVC frameworks, dependancy injection and data persistence.
For more information on frameworks, while Sean Corfield was over in the UK for A Wee Dram he also gave a "Design Patterns" presentation at the Devon CFUG and Tom Chiverton will be presenting on ColdSpring for the ColdFusion Meetup Group on the 16th of October.
It would seem that my round up this week has some very definite threads! The next blog post of interest is also on ColdSpring! Scott Stroz has a interesting post on using Coldspring Interceptors with Remote Proxies.
Moving away from frameworks, Matt Woodward has posted a couple of updates on what has been going on with Open Bluedragon. Lots going on with Open BlueDragon and Digging Deeper into the Java Underpinnings of Open Bluedragon
And finally, to end on a humours note - take a look at a slice of life at Alagad and Andy Jarrett's Friday Joke.
Hmmm 250 blog entries in google reader! Whoops! Time I caught up with my reading and posted a round up! So here goes! ColdSpring 1.2 released along with a shiny new website Web Inventor launches new World Web Foundation Peter Bell - Introducing "the CFArgument" with Brian Rinaldi Peter and Brian's second cfarguments is : DAOs are a waste of Time CFEclipse Dictionary Generator released. While on the topic of CFEclipse dictionaries - Andrew Mercer has been tinkering with the CF8 dictionary - fixing a few problems that have been around for a while. ColdFire Update Released ColdFusion Evangalism Kit Ben Forta notes that AIR 1.1 is now available for Linux Mark Drew, having taken over the Reactor Project from Doug Hughs comments on the Future of Reactor. Jeff Chastain (Alagad) - What is a DSL? Adobe announced CS4 back on the 23rd of September with a release date some time at the end of October. Terrance Ryan - Squidhead Still Swimming On the 25th, Andy Allan and Kev McCabe hosted A Wee Dram down in London. Here are some of the write ups from this one day conference. Well there are a stack more blog posts to go through from this week, but I'll save them for the end of the week... Oh yeah... I bought Star Wars The Force Unleashed for the Wii at the weekend! Its lots and lots of fun :D
http://www.coldspringframework.org/
Sir Tim Berners-Lee's initiative to bring the web to the 80% of the worlds populous who don't have access to it.
Their first cfargument is "The iterating Business Object". Something I've been meaning to find out more about of late, but never had an opportunity. This CFArgument helped me understand IBOs better.
Daemonite, the developers of Farcry CMS, have released a dictionary generator that will parse a directory of components and tags and then create an XML file that you can use with CFEclipse projects. Looks to be very handy and shortly I'll be running it against some of the internal libraries here at work.
If you're already running Firebug in Firefox - coldfire is a hand add on for debuggerising your ColdFusion applications.
Ever find yourself need to sell ColdFusion to a client or even to your boss and colleagues? Then you'll probably find the Evangalism Kit that Kristen Schofield has posted handy. Containing C-Level Exec quote, Key stats, Recent awards, product roadmaps, measured results of CF Usage and much, it should give you more than enough measured ammo to support ColdFusion and counter the "its a dying language" and "can't scale" 'arguments' against it.
What is a Domain Specific Language!?! Another one of those questions that I've been asking myself answered.
Terry announced that Squidhead is getting some additional assistance in the shape of Nathan Mische and Dave Konopka. If you don't know what Squidhead does, its basically a DAO and scaffold generator for MS SQL Server databases. Not something that I have a great deal of use for as we use MySQL, but all the same a neat project and pleased to see it get some more resource.
