Brian Meloche's Blog I'll blog about ColdFusion, weight loss, podcasting and life with too many pets! :-)

I never blogged about it, but episode 13 of CFConversations was a good one! And, with episode 14, we have another good one, so I guess I'll blog about both of them now.

For episode 13, Brian Swartzfager was able to interview one of the legends in the ColdFusion community, Hal Helms.

On Sunday night, episode 14 came out. Adam Haskell interviewed Mark Drew. Of course, most of you know of Mark as the lead developer of the CFEclipse project, and, of course, CFEclipse is discussed, but Mark and Adam talk about a lot more during this interview, including Railo, ColdSpring, conferences, tattoos, cooking, a little about bendy buses, and a couple of things you might not know about Mark.

Listen to them both!

We're going to be starting a new round of interviews in the next couple of weeks, so if you would like to be interviewed and we haven't spoken about it yet, please email me at podcast at cfconversations dot com, and we'll try to get you on the schedule.

With CFUnited quite a few weeks in the past and 10 episodes under our belt, it was time for another roundtable! We brought it back in style we've gathered 8 stellar participants including:

• Sean Corfield
• Adam Haskell
• Rick Mason
• Mark Mandel
• Bob Flynn
• Jeff Coughlin
• Richard Goodrow
• Brian Meloche (me)

We had a lively podcast this time, with some great content that covers a wide range of topics.

Bob Flynn announced bFusion and bFlex, where you can get two days of free hands-on training in Flex and ColdFusion at Indiana University. We also discussed the educational licensing and whether or not Bob and Richard (from Gallaudet University) thought it would make a difference at their schools.

From education, we moved onto the hiring space. As you probably know, Sean's company, Broadchoice has been hiring several top developers recently, including Ray Camden, Joe Reinhart, Nicholas Lierman and Brian Kotek, and Sean shared his technique for hiring top talent that appears to be working. Note: This was recorded before it was announced that Brian Kotek also joined Broadchoice).

Next, Sean talked a bit about the CFML Advisory Board. I announced that a new vendor-neutral site to promote the CFML language is in development. I pulled the domain name from the podcast because, well, we're not quite ready to completely open it up to the general public yet (the basics are up). If you are really interested in helping out, use the contact form and I'll tell you more.

We asked Mark Mandel how he felt about ColdFusion 9's Hibernate functionality vs. his Transfer ORM. We all chimed in about other ColdFusion 9 functionality, and talked a bit about alternative editors and search tools.

We also covered the hot topic of SQL injection, including a free tool from HP called scrawlr and a project called Query Param Scanner.

We did a "final thoughts on CFUnited. Some of the things we had covered on previous roundtables, but there were a few new things.

We also talked about the Railo 3 beta (now in Release Candidate) and progress on Open BlueDragon releases.

Sean and Adam closed out the episode with a fairly big announcement that should have been made by now, so we sneaked it in! You'll have to listen to the podcast to know what it is.

Find the episode here.

Run time: 1:36:37

In case you missed it, CFConversations Episode 10 was released yesterday.

On Day one of the CFUnited conference, several of us sat down with Gert Franz of Railo, correctly pronounced "Rhy-low" (not "Ray-low"). Railo, a Swiss company, sells an alternative CFML engine, also called Railo, which has been getting a lot of attention in the CF developer community in recent months. During Gert's keynote at the Scotch on the Rocks conference in early June, it was announced that version 3.0 would have support for CFVIDEO and Hibernate, which had been getting a lot of attention in the CF blogosphere, especially since the cf.Objective() conference in early May. Furthermore, Gert announced that Railo version 3.1 would be released as open source under the LGPL license, with support from JBoss and hosting from Jboss.org.

The Railo open source announcement was enthusiastically welcomed throughout the CFML community, as has been documented on several previous episodes of CFConversations. Even key Adobe personnel such as Ben Forta and Adam Lehman were enthusiastic about the announcement.

Also, during Adobe's keynote at CFUnited, it was announced that Gert was one of the members of the CFML Language Advisory Committee.

In this episode, we talk about all of these things, some of Railo's history, and a little about Gert himself, who's a warm and very approachable person, with an interesting history that I think you'll enjoy hearing about.

This was an interview that a lot of people wanted to be a part of, or just listen to in person. Also in the room were: Peter Bell, Sean Corfield, Mark Drew, Adam Haskell, Jeff Coughlin, Joe Reinhart and Rick Mason, and most of them get involved in the interview at one point or another. This interview was one of my highlights of CFUnited, so I hope you enjoy it.

This was the first podcast recorded at CFUnited, and we didn't have access to the Blue Snowball microphone we used for most of the interviews and round tables. This interview was recorded from three Macbook Pro built-in microphones, although one of them produced a recording that was unusable. The interview itself required substantial post production editing to make it listenable, so the quality may not be as good as episodes six through nine. However, I think, it's now in a listenable form.

Due to the difficulty in editing this episode and the timeliness of other episodes, this episode got pushed back a couple of times. Ironically, this worked out, as Gert is doing a U.S. user group tour that starts on Monday, July 28th, which coincides with the release of this episode.

This is the first episode where my inserts are recorded via the new headset, courtesy of Marc Esher. If you liked the new music track, it's from a band called spineCar, from the Album Up From the Mud, and the track is called "Smoke". I'm thinking it's going to be the podcast's theme song. What do you think?

Run time: 56:47

Some of you may remember by Promoting ColdFusion Birds of a Feather at MAX 2007 last year.

I am revisiting that topic today, in a similar format to last time, except we should have more of the materials we need to make this brainstorming session a success, AND, even more importantly, MORE TIME.

This is an all audience participation brainstorming session. We're going to figure out what our community needs to do to grow CFML outside our own community. If you are at CFUNITED, I hope you'll plan to attend.

We need "recorders" for each of the breakout groups in the session. If you are planning to attend, and are willing to just "record" the details of your breakout group, please see me before the session (as early as you can today), or email me at brianmeloche at gmail dot com. I'll send you a link to a Google Doc to record your group's findings.

No, I don't have anything to do with it, but in a Google Alert, I found an entry about Sava CMS, a new open source content management system built on ColdFusion.

Blog entry

Although I heard about it from this press release, I hadn't seen anything about it before that, although I now see that Gary Gilbert blogged about it yesterday.

They seem to be pushing the CMS as a self contained solution. They have an Express version, bundled with Railo and Jetty. I would think they'd bundle Open BlueDragon at some point, although I see they are GPL 2 where as Open BD is GPL 3 (not much of an open source licensing guy).

I haven't had a chance to take a look at it, but I thought I'd blog about it anyway, to get it out there for others to look at.