Matt Woodward's Blog

We're proud to announce the release of Open BlueDragon 1.1. Lots of new functionality plus the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, so check the blog entry and the release notes for all the details.
I think my favorite thing about this release is that we're really starting to see a great deal of community participation, so thanks to everyone who reported bugs or made suggestions as to how we can make OpenBD better. This helps tremendously and shows the true strength of open source projects, so please keep the suggestions coming!
Comments

congrats on the release!
Posted by tony petruzzi @ 4/27/09 10:50 AM


this in great news ! congrats for the release
Posted by frasi @ 4/28/09 11:20 AM


Congratulations!
Posted by Peter Bell @ 4/28/09 11:29 AM

In case you're not on the Open BlueDragon mailing list (why not? ;-), I wanted to let people know that the initial version of OpenBD for Google App Engine (zip file) is now available. Make sure and read the README included in the zip for details. We'd greatly appreciate people helping us test out all this great new functionality!
Comments

Matt,
That's fantastic news! Were they able to get cfmail and cfhttp working like they discussed on the list?
Is there a tutorial coming? I think there are a lot of people who would like to try this out that might need a small helping hand.
Posted by Rick Mason @ 4/25/09 3:23 PM


Rick: no, CFMAIL and CFHTTP aren't working yet. Following the open source philosphy of "release early, release often" this is only the first of many releases. Look for CFMAIL and CFHTTP support in a future release.
Posted by Vince Bonfanti @ 4/26/09 8:07 AM


Yep Rick--I'll be going through a fresh setup of all this stuff myself so I'll try to do…

The work to get OpenBD running on Google App Engine has been going great, and just today we added details to the OpenBD wiki covering how to use the GAE Datastore with OpenBD. Kudos to Vince Bonfanti for all the hard work on this! We should have a downloadable GAE-compatible version of OpenBD available soon.
Comments

Hi Matt,
Since the GAE datastore isn't a relational database, the OpenBD API isn't technically an ORM (Object-Relational Mapping). It's more accurate to describe the GAE datastore as an object database, into which the OpenBD API allows you to store CFC instances.
Posted by Vince Bonfanti @ 4/26/09 8:03 AM


Hello Matt !
Reading on a Sunday about 'CFML without the ORM hassle' has made me literally cry some
tears of joy :-) ... Because my appetite for the seemingly shining 'Land of OODBMSes' has
been whetted for some while now !
But further reading and thinking about this 'OpenBD CFML GAE Datastore' thingie has
quickly have me sobered ...
What I li…

I was IMing with Corey Gilmore today about his recommendations to the CFML Advisory Committee, and as I was reading through his wish list I was surprised at the number of times I could say "that's already in Open BlueDragon."
Things like being able to var scope anywhere are nice features, but one of the big ones a lot of people may not know about is something that's been around since BlueDragon 6.2.1, and that's the ability to use named caches in queries.
In the CFQUERY tag in Open BlueDragon there are a few additional attributes as compared with Adobe ColdFusion, namely BACKGROUND, which allows you to easily run a query in a background thread, and CACHENAME, which allows you to cache a query and give the cached query a name. This allows you to flush specific cached queries much more easily.
For example, the following code would cache the query under the name "myCachedQuery" until you flush it:<cfquery name="myQuery" datasource="…

I'm working on a project with Jason Blum and he's digging into REST web services with CFML. I'll be the first to admit that REST is something I haven't had to deal with much, so I'm glad to be learning from his research on all of this.
To make something truly RESTful, apparently you should be using a simple HTTP request's body as opposed to something like form fields when you do a post to the server. (Again, I'm a moron on all this stuff so if that's way off-base, I'm happy to learn more/be corrected.)
In CFML terms, typically you'll use CFHTTP and CFHTTPPARAM to make the call to the REST service, and use a CFHTTPPARAM type of BODY. The weird thing Jason was running into is how to get at the body content since it doesn't come through in any of the usual scopes.
Jason found a comment by Dan Switzer on a post on Mike Nimer's blog that provided the answer--you simply have to call getHttpRequestData(), which returns a struct, and the…

File this one under "you can't win 'em all," or "hell has frozen over," or take your pick (though I refuse to file this under "hat eating" because it isn't a change of opinion, it's just a necessity in this case). Since I'm having to go through and set up Apache 2.2, Tomcat 6.0, and Open BlueDragon on a Windows 2003 Server, I figured I'd make lemonade and write up a step-by-step for those of you stuck in the same situation. So here's how to install all this very cool stuff on a very uncool operating system.
(If you prefer to read this in Google Docs, here's the link.)All these steps should also work on Windows XP or Vista, which is handy for development purposes if you're on a Windows box, but again I can't really verify. If you're using XP I strongly, strongly encourage you to at a minimum install Apache as your web server. The version of IIS that comes with XP only allows you to use one web site, whic…