Packt Publishing has announced their 2010 Open Source Awards. This is the fifth year for the awards, which started life as the Open Source CMS Awards, so I strongly encourage everyone to participate by voting for your favorite open source applications.

The current phase of the awards is the nominations phase, and you can see all the categories and make your nominations here. Nominations are open until September 17, then voting runs September 27 - November 5, and the winners are announced on November 15.

Particularly in the CMS category CFML can make a really strong showing if as many people as possible nominate Mura as best Open Source CMS. I've used a lot of CMSes in my time and in my opinion Mura stands right up there with better-known solutions such as Drupal or Joomla, so let's get Mura on everyone's radar!

For more information about the 2010 Open Source Awards you can visit the web site or read the full press release here.

A few quick tips if you find yourself having to access a network drive from Apache and Tomcat on a Windows Server. This is all pretty much old hat but since I still get questions about this fairly regularly and was just setting up some things on some servers this weekend, I figured I'd write this up.

In my situation we're running an application on three VMs behind a load balancer, and users can upload files from the application. Since I didn't want to set up a process behind the scenes that copied uploaded files between all three servers (though it would have given me a chance to take another run at using Unison), we have an uploads directory living on a SAN. This way no matter which VM the user is on, the uploads all go to and are served from a single file system.

On Windows Server, by default services run under the Local System Account, which doesn't have access to network resources. So if you install Apache and Tomcat as services and expect to be able to point them to a UNC path for some of your content, that won't work out of the box. You need to be running Apache and Tomcat under an account that has network access. In most environments in which I've worked this type of account is typically called a "service account," because you'll end up getting a domain account just like your typical Active Directory user account, but of course it won't be associated with a human being.

Once you have that account in place, you go into your services panel, right click on the service, click on "Properties," and then click the "Log On" tab. You'll see by default the Local System Account radio button will be checked. Click the radio button next to "This Account," enter your service account information, click "OK," and then restart the service. At this point your service will be running under the service account and will have access to network resources. Note that you'll have to do this for each service that needs access to the network drive, which in my case meant doing this for both Apache and Tomcat.

That takes care of the web server and things at the Tomcat level in terms of basic access, but you'll likely be configuring an alias of some sort to point to the network drive. In my case I wanted /uploads to point to \\server\sharename\uploads, which meant setting up an alias in Apache, a Context in Tomcat, and a mapping in OpenBD. This is where a lot of people get confused, so I'll go through each of these settings one by one.

The necessity for a web server alias is probably pretty obvious. If you're serving an image directly from your web server, e.g. http://server/uploads/image.gif, if /uploads doesn't exist under your virtual host's docroot, then Apache will throw a 404.

Allowing Apache to access the network drive involves (depending on how you have Apache configured) using a Directory directive to give Apache permission to access the directory, and then an Alias directive so Apache knows where to go when someone requests something under /uploads. So the following goes in your virtual host configuration file:

<Directory "\\server\sharename\uploads">
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>

Alias /uploads "\\server\sharename\uploads"

You may have other stuff in your Directory directive as well but that's the basics of what will allow Apache to see /uploads as the appropriate location on your SAN.

The next layer down will be your CFML engine. Remember that if in your CFML code you want to read or write files to /uploads, even though Apache knows what that is now, your CFML engine will not. I'm emphasizing that point because it's such a common source of confusion for people. If things are happening in your CFML code, it won't be interacting with Apache at all, so it won't know about the Alias you set up in Apache. Simple enough to solve with a mapping; just go into your CFML engine's admin console and create a mapping that points /uploads to \\server\sharename\uploads and that handles things at the CFML level.

Lastly comes Tomcat. Depending on how you're serving files, you may be proxying from Apache to Tomcat, so if Tomcat needs to know where /uploads lives, since it's not in the webapp's base directory Tomcat will throw a 404 unless you tell it where /uploads is located.

Tomcat doesn't have Aliases in the same way Apache does, but what you can do in Tomcat is configure multiple Contexts under a single host. So in Tomcat's server.xml (or in a separate host config file if you prefer), you simply add a Context that points /uploads to the network location:

<Host name="myapp">
  <Context path="" docBase="C:/location/of/my/app" />
  <Context path="/uploads" docBase="\\server\sharename\uploads" />
</Host>

So now you have things set up in such a way that Apache, your CFML engine, and Tomcat all know where /uploads really lives.

Another point of confusion for people on Windows is the concept of "mapped drive" letters. A lot of people think that if you map \\server\sharename to a drive letter of let's say D:, than in your code you can then access the uploads directory we've been using as our example via D:\uploads.

The simplest way to explain why this doesn't work is to point out that mapped drive letters are associated with a Windows user account. They don't exist at the operating system level. While you may remote into the server using your credentials, map to a network location, and assign that to drive letter D:, another user logging in won't see that mapping, and services running on the server under various user accounts definitely won't know anything about mapped drives.

This is why in all the examples above you see the full UNC path to the network resource being used. You have to use the UNC path in order to get this all to work correctly because that's the only way services running under a service account will be able to address the network resource.

Hope this helps eliminate some of the persistent confusion I see around this issue.

BFusion/BFlex is coming up on September 11 and 12, 2010 in lovely Bloomington, IN. You need to be there, and here's why.

• $30 for one day or $45 for both days is one of the best deals you'll find in the conference world. (No, I'm not missing a zero at the end of those prices!)
• BFusion/BFlex is all hands on, all the time. This isn't a passive event by any stretch. You come armed with your laptop and you get to learn from the best people in the business.
• Multiple all-day classes in both CFML and Flex are available. On the CFML side you can learn Mach-II from the great minds behind it (namely Peter Farrell and Kurt Wiersma), you can learn CFML from scratch from the great Adobe instructor Matt Boles, if you're a programmer already but want to learn CFML you have none other than Simon Free at your disposal, and if you're an open source junkie like me or just want to learn more about the free CFML engines, I'm giving an all-day in-depth class on that.
• Great for all skill levels, from pure beginner up to advanced developers. There's literally something here for everyone so you don't have an excuse not to come. Just check the BFusion and BFlex schedules and tell me you don't see something interesting!
• It's a nice intimate environment where you can corner speakers or other attendees and get whatever help you need.
• Indiana University is a great venue with great facilities. Power and Internet for all!
• Bloomington is a great town with tons to do.

I've been invovled with BFlex/BFusion since the first year and it's one of my favorite conferences. I'm particularly excited this year to be able to help people delve into the open source CFML engines, so I hope to see lots of you there.

Great training, great price, great location, and great people. What are you waiting for? GO REGISTER NOW!

Job details below--contact ckotova@sidonline.com for additional information.

----------------------------------------------------

Computer Programmer IV

Systems Integration & Development Inc., an IT solutions provider located in Rockville, Maryland is currently seeking a Computer Programmer IV to perform programming services. The successful candidate will have experience with developing web-based applications using ColdFusion, Javascript, and SQL, and Oracle databases. This is a full-time position located in Washington DC. US CITIZENSHIP IS REQUIRED. Roles and responsibilities include:

• Performs programming services, converts specifications (precise descriptions) about business or scientific problems into a sequence of detailed instructions to solve problems by electronic data processing (EDP) equipment, i.e. digital computers; draws program flow charts to describe the processing of data, and develops the precise steps and processing logic which, when entered into the computer in coded language (COBOL, FORTRAN, or other programming language) to cause the manipulation of data to achieve desired results.
• Tests and corrects programs, prepares instructions for operators who control the computer during runs, modifies programs to increase operating efficiency or to respond to changes in work processes, and maintains records to document program development and revisions.
• Applies expertise in programming procedures to complex programs; recommends the redesign of programs, investigates and analyzes feasibility and program requirements, and develops programming specifications.
• Plans the full range of programming actions to produce several interrelated but different products from numerous and diverse data elements, which are usually from different sources; solves difficult programming problems, and uses knowledge of pertinent system software, computer equipment, work processes, regulations, and management practices.
• Develops, modifies, and maintains complex programs; designs and implements the interrelations of files and records within programs which will effectively fit into the overall design of the project; works with problems or concepts and develops programs for the solution to major scientific computational problems requiring the analysis and development of logical or mathematical descriptions of functions to be programmed; develops occasional special programs, e.g. a critical path analysis program to assist in managing a special project.
• Tests, documents, and writes operating instructions for all work, confers with other EDP personnel to secure information, investigate and resolve problems, and coordinates work efforts.
• Performs such programming analyses as: investigating the feasibility of alternate program design approaches to determine the best balanced solution, e.g., one that will best satisfy immediate user needs, facilitate subsequent modification, and conserve resources.
• Assists user personnel in defining problems or needs, determining work organization on typical maintenance projects and smaller scale, working on limited new projects, the necessary files and records, and their interrelation with the program or working on large or more complicated projects, and participating as a team member along with other EDP personnel and users, holding responsibility for a portion of the project.
• Works independently under overall objectives and direction, apprising the supervisor about progress and unusual complications and modifying and adapting precedent solutions and proven approaches. May function as team leader or supervise a few lower level programmers or technicians on assigned work.

Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a relevant computer-related field or 8 years equivalent experience.
• At least 6 years of experience with the design, code, and maintenance of complex web-based applications using Adobe ColdFusion, JavaScript, and complex SQL queries.

This may seem like it's a topic that's been beaten to death since there are several examples of how to do this, but none of the examples I found quite fit my exact situation. And since URL rewrite rules are all about getting the exact right characters in the exact right order (pesky computers), I thought I'd share my situation in the hopes of saving someone else some time.

First, in case some of you aren't using Mura but are reading out of general interest in URL rewriting (get a life! ;-), let's take a look at Mura URLs. Mura URLs are in the format http://server/siteid, where 'siteid' is an actual physical directory on disk. Since Mura is built on CFML it uses a directory index file of index.cfm, so when you hit http://server/siteid it's the equivalent of hitting http://server/siteid/index.cfm. The presence of a .cfm file is what triggers Apache to hand off the processing of that file to the CFML engine. This is rudimentary stuff I realize, but that index.cfm bit is important in this case since that's what we're going to be eliminating from the URL.

Pages other than the site index page in a Mura site have URLs along the lines of http://server/siteid/index.cfm/page-name, and the 'page-name' bit is not a directory or file on disk since all the Mura content is contained in the database. So if my site ID is 'foo' and my page name is 'bar', the URL for the 'bar' page would be http://server/foo/index.cfm/bar What I'd like my URL to be for that page, however, is http://server/foo/bar, so I want to eliminate index.cfm from the URL.

The solution for this is to use URL rewriting in your web server, which in my case is Apache and mod_rewrite. Using URL rewriting I can have the web server match certain URL patterns and translate these patterns into something different behind the scenes so things still work properly. So in this case I need a rewrite rule that will take the URL http://server/foo/bar and treat that as if it were http://server/foo/index.cfm/bar. Otherwise, Apache would be looking for a directory 'bar' under the 'foo' directory, which of course doesn't exist, so it would throw a 404.

Many of the URL rewrite examples I came across were designed for Mura sites that are also eliminating the site ID from the URL. This is all well and good, but since I'm working on an intranet site we want to keep the site IDs in the URLs (e.g. http://server/department), so that meant most of the examples I saw weren't quite right for my needs.

The tricky part (at least for me as a relative mod_rewrite amateur) is that instead of being able to say "take my server name, add 'index.cfm' to that, and then tack on the rest of the URL being requested," I had to take the first part of the URL being requested (the site ID, which again is a physical directory), then insert index.cfm, then tack on the rest of the URL being requested (i.e. everything after the site ID in the URL).

This is actually pretty easy if you want to create a rewrite rule for each site ID on the server, but that would mean additional Apache configuration and an Apache restart every time a new site is added to Mura. That seemed like a maintenance nightmare to me so I decided to try to come up with a solution that would handle eliminating index.cfm regardless of the site ID.

What I ended up doing was cobbling together several of the other great resources linked above for many of the other considerations with rewriting for Mura, and then came up with a rewrite rule that will leave the site ID in place, then add index.cfm, and then tack on the rest of the URL being requested.

Quite a lot of preamble for a one-line rewrite rule, but here it is in all its gory glory:

RewriteRule ^/([a-zA-Z0-9-]{1,})/(.*)$ ajp://%{HTTP_HOST}:8009/$1/index.cfm/$2 [NE,P]

Translation:

• Create a backreference match for alphanumeric characters and hyphens in the URL up to the first / (these are the allowed characters in Mura site IDs)
• Create a second backreference for everything else in the URL
• Proxy this to port 8009 on the server (since I'm using AJP proxying with Tomcat), but make the URL backreference 1 + /index.cfm/ + backreference 2
  

The backreference stuff wound up being my savior here. Basically whatever you put in parens in the regex of your rewrite rule becomes a backreference, so whatever matches that pattern gets assigned to a placeholder. That way when you want to do the rewriting you can refer to pieces of your URL using $ and the position. So in this case $1 refers to the first backreference (the Mura site ID), and $2 refers to the second backreference (everything in the URL following the site ID).

There are a few other rewrite rules involved to get this all working when you take into account things like image files, etc., and as I said above I'm standing on the shoulders of giants (thanks guys!), so here's the full set of rewrite rules:

  ProxyRequests Off

  <Proxy *>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from 127.0.0.1
  </Proxy>

  ProxyPreserveHost On
  ProxyPassReverse / ajp://your-host-here:8009/

  RewriteEngine On
 
  # if it's a cfml request, proxy to tomcat
  RewriteRule ^(.+\.cf[cm])(/.*)?$ ajp://%{HTTP_HOST}:8009$1$2 [P]
  
  # if it's a trailing slash and a real directory, append index.cfm and proxy
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} -d
   RewriteRule ^(.+/)$ ajp://%{HTTP_HOST}:8009%{REQUEST_URI}index.cfm [P]

  # if it's a real file and haven't proxied, just serve it
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} -f
  RewriteRule . - [L]
 
  # require trailing slash at this point if otherwise valid CMS url
  RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9/-]+[^/])$ $1/ [R=301,L]

  # valid cms url path is proxied to tomcat
  # MUST COME AFTER ANY OTHER FIXED/EXPECTED REWRITES!
   RewriteRule ^/([a-zA-Z0-9-]{1,})/(.*)$ ajp://%{HTTP_HOST}:8009/$1/index.cfm/$2 [NE,P]

Note that you can put the rewrite rules in a .htaccess file or in the virtual host configuration file. I prefer having the rewrite rules be defined as part of the virtual host, so in my case I have all this in the <VirtualHost> block in my virtual hosts config file. (I have a bunch of other stuff in the virtual host configuration as well but I left everything other than the parts relevant to the URL rewriting out to avoid any confusion.)

That's it! I hope that helps others looking into doing this with Mura, or that you at least learned a few things about mod_rewrite along the way.

(download)

Dallas TechFest was last Friday and although I was sad to be missing the final CFUnited, TechFest was a blast. It was incredibly refreshing to see 400+ CFML, PHP, .NET, Java, and Flex people all in the same place at the same time for some geek cross-pollination. This doesn't happen nearly enough so thanks to all the organizers of the event, all the great speakers, and to Dave Shuck for inviting me to speak.

The talk I gave was entitled "CFFree: Building and Deploying CFML Applications on a Free Software Stack." This was a 90-minute introduction to developing, deploying, testing, and monitoring CFML applications using Tomcat, Open BlueDragon, Railo, and a plethora of other free software applications and tools.

If you didn't make Dallas TechFest this year and are interested in this topic you're in luck! I gave everyone who attended my session a VirtualBox VM that has all the free CFML goodness installed on Ubuntu 10.04, and you can download the VM from my Dropbox (2.5 GB).

You can also check out the presentation slides above (view or download PDF). My apologies that the speaker notes get cut off in the PDF version, but I created the presentation in Google Docs and as far as I can tell there's no way to control the font size of the speaker notes in the PDF. You can also view the presentation directly in Google Docs; just make sure to click "Actions" at the bottom then "Show Speaker Notes" to view the speaker notes since the slides alone don't tell you all that much.

As always if you grab the VM or read through the presentation and have any questions about any of this feel free to contact me. I'm considering doing a couple of screencasts on this topic because due to time constraints I had to breeze over some of the configuration details, not to mention some of the free software goodness I didn't get to show at all.

If you want to learn more about free CFML in person, next up on the calendar is a full day hands-on session that Adam Haskell and I will be doing at BFusion in September, and then of course three full days at OpenCF Summit in February 2011. Hope to see you at one or both of these events!

Dallas TechFest is a great multi-technology event that's coming up on 7/30. There are tracks on Java, Flex, PHP, .NET, and most importantly CFML, so it's not only a great place to get your CFML fix, but also to engage in some all-too-rare cross-pollination between technologies. (The tech community doesn't do nearly enough of this sort of thing in my opinion.)

The CFML track doesn't have details on the track page unfortunately, but when you check out the speakers page you'll see the following great CFML speakers:

• Adam Presley
• Billy Cravens
• Dan Blackman
• Dave Shuck
• Jeff Lucido
• Matt Woodward
• Seth Bienek
• Steve Good

I don't know what the specific topics for some of the speakers are, but I can tell you that I'll be speaking on Building and Deploying CFML on a Free Software Stack, Jeff Lucido is speaking on Open BlueDragon for Google App Engine, and I'm pretty sure Steve Good is speaking on Mura. With this lineup I'm sure all of the CFML topics will be great!

UPDATE: Steve pointed out in the comments a big oversight on my part--you can check the Agenda page to see all the details of all the tracks.

There are also some big names from other technologies at TechFest as well, such asScott Davis (Grails guru extraordinaire), Ted Neward (.NET developer and consultant), Mark Piller (Midnight Coders), and Craig Walls (SpringSource) to name but a few.

Sounds excellent, right? Well, today's your lucky day. If you haven't registered yet there's still time, and there's a big discount to boot! Register now and use the discount code coldfusion to get in for only $25. That's right, a mere $25 for all this geeky goodness.

See you there!

Since Adam doesn't have comments open on this post (what's up with that?), I feel compelled to clear the air and discuss the probable ending of the CFML Advisory Committee from my perspective. (And yes, all are welcome to comment on this post.)

I really regret having to spend the time writing this since in a lot of ways it will be airing dirty laundry. But since Adam is grossly misrepresenting a great deal of what went on during the effort of the CFML Advisory Committee and what led to its eventual demise, I think it's only fair that people don't take Adam's version of the story as gospel. It's far from it.

Preamble

First, I'd like to get some semantics out of the way. I can't bring myself to refer to this now-defunct effort as "Open CFML" because it's such a huge misnomer. Frankly, we never referred to the committee as "Open CFML" so I suspect the use of that term in Adam's blog post is merely FUD/scare tactics that suit his purpose. (Saying Open CFML is dead sure has impact, don't it?)

The CFML Advisory Committee was anything but open. There was no communication with the CFML community as to what was going on with the effort, there was no way for the community at large to participate, and suggestions by myself and others to update the wiki regularly with our progress and have an open mailing list that anyone in the community could at least read were continually shot down. Given all this it's not surprising the effort ultimately failed, because openness always wins in the end.

Now for the timeline of the CFML Advisory Committee and why things went wrong from my perspective.

In the beginning ...

When I was invited to join the CFML Advisory Committee I was excited because I originally thought the effort was important for the future of CFML. The CFML landscape changed dramatically with the introduction of two open source CFML engines, so it seemed logical that the interested parties would want to get together and discuss a certain level of standards for the language. It's also something that the CFML community was clamoring for, at least initially, because of concerns over code portability between the various engines.

After getting up to speed on things and having discussions via the closed mailing list as well as a couple of conference calls, it became quite clear to me that the effort wouldn't be able to survive the politics. Even given my valid pessimism, I decided to continue on in earnest, hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

Here comes a bit of dirty laundry, but I think it's necessary for people to understand what was really going on behind the scenes. Adobe's participation and level of effort during their involvement with the committee was incredibly lackluster. The committee had conference calls monthly in the beginning, but after Adam didn't show up for three calls in a row, it seemed rather pointless to continue to schedule them. The email traffic on the closed mailing list would go in fits and starts, and in many cases months would go by with no traffic at all.

To cite but one example of Adobe's lack of effort, the way the committee was attempting to organize the language was to use a Google spreadsheet, with columns for the CFML tags and functions on the left, and then a column for each engine indicating whether or not it had the tag or function. There were then columns for each member of the committee to indicate if they thought the particular tag or function should be "core," "extended core," or "vendor specific" as far as the eventual language specification was concerned.

As you can imagine simply organizing the spreadsheet took a great deal of time and effort, to which many members of the committee contributed. Each vendor was tasked with entering their engine's tags and functions. OpenBD and Railo provided their information quite promptly, and I think it was Rob who did the Lion's share of getting things organized initially, but Adobe's column was incomplete for weeks. Finally I took a day or so and added/corrected all the Adobe functions and tags. That at least got things to the point where we could vote.

When it came to voting, Adobe failed to complete this effort as well. To put things in perspective voting took about an hour, but Adobe couldn't seem to find that hour to input their votes. First it was the CF 9 release, then it was MAX, then ... who knows. Bottom line is it never got done. Everyone involved with this effort is incredibly busy, yet everyone but Adobe made the time to vote.

Lack of Accountability Means Lack of Commitment

After weeks turned into months and the voting was still waiting on Adobe, I believe it was Peter who made the modest proposal of setting deadlines for votes. If someone didn't meet the deadline then we'd simply indicate the person didn't vote and proceed with the votes we had. Everyone paid lip service to having deadlines, but even while discussing deadlines Adobe reserved the right to ignore the deadlines if they were "busy." Again, we're all busy. Either the effort is worth your time or it isn't.

I also suggested repeatedly that the whole specification and voting process be open to the public. The members of the committee were selected to represent the CFML engines and the CFML community, but we don't necessarily have all the best answers, and at a minimum the community at large should have been able to see the process as it unfolded. But that would have meant both commitment and accountability on the part of everyone involved, and in the case of certain members of the committee the commitment clearly wasn't there. Having accountability--let alone public accountability--wouldn't work in their favor.

In the end the incredible lack of progress led everyone to agree to simply codify what was in Adobe CF 8/9 so we could get past the voting roadblock and move on. (Keep that decision in mind; it backs up an important point I'll make later.)

Conspiracy Theories Debunked

Here's where things get really bizarre, so please don your tin foil hats and try to stay with me.

Adam mentions the CFML Conventional Wisdom group in his post, which is an effort Alan Williamson started in order to foster public discussion of the CFML language. Personally I think an open discussion list should have been an arm of the CFML Advisory Committee from the start.

To quote Adam's post, "At the very least, this explained why Peter so abruptly resigned." I'm not going to speak for Peter, but this is not why he resigned, and his resignation wasn't exactly abrupt. He debated it for a long time, but to call it abrupt reminds me of a scene from "Fletch":

Why Adam chose not to take Peter's eloquent resignation email at face value, but instead drums up yet another conspiracy, only serves to further his agenda.

Back to our story. So why didn't I mention the CFML Conventional Wisdom list to the committee? Two reasons.

First, it's a public mailing list, and I found out about it like everyone else did, on a blog post or Twitter or who even remembers where. Alan may have even sent me an email directly to make sure I was aware of it, but it wasn't a big secret. There were no back-room dealings on any of this. Alan saw a need, created the group, and then announced it publicly. Simple as that.

Second, and more importantly, I saw this as a completely separate effort from what the committee was doing. The committee never had a public forum to discuss CFML, and the powers that be on the committee didn't want one. So this provided something the committee didn't, and giving the community a voice in helping to define the language they use is something vitally important in my opinion. Ultimately the Conventional Wisdom list could even serve as a benefit to the committee. Loose ideas could be hashed out, sample code usage could be created, and the results could be submitted to the ivory tower that was the committee.

And a bonus reason: at the time when the Conventional Wisdom list started, the committee was in no way, shape, or form in the business of discussing enhancements to the language. We weren't even able to codify what was already in the language, so for Sean, Peter, or me to bring a CFLOOP enhancement discussion to the committee wouldn't have made sense. The committee wasn't the time (or the place, frankly) to have those sorts of discussions.

The way Adam phrased all of this makes it sound like Alan, Peter, Sean, and I got together and were all conspiring against the committee, and maybe Adam even believes against him personally. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sean, Peter, and I found out about the Conventional Wisdom group when everyone else did, and since people on the committee are supposedly aware of what's going on in the CFML community, I assumed everyone on the committee would have seen it as well. The implication that we were keeping a publicly announced, publicly available list hidden from the committee simply doesn't hold water.

As for my better mouse trap header above, ultimately I think having an open discussion group is the way things should have been from the start. Why not seek input from the community at large? Why not have the discussions out in the open? Seems like a no-brainer to me. If Adobe wants to have enhancement discussions with their customers and among the members of their private programs that's great for Adobe, but that doesn't let the legions of CFML developers in the wild participate in the process.

Again, openness always wins.

Where I Agree

Adam did make a couple of points with which I agree.

"In the end, the community isn't losing much at all with the demise of the OpenCFML board."

I completely agree with this statement. Though I was honored to be a part of it I questioned the effort from the beginning because at the end of the day, Adobe ColdFusion sets the de facto standard for the language. I made that point in my last email to the committee list (which for a very long time was the final email on the committee list), and I don't think anyone would disagree.

I take issue with Adam's follow-up to this statement, but life's too short to nitpick every last detail of what he said. The real beneficiary of this effort was supposed to be CFML developers, but somehow that ideal got lost along the way.

Bottom line here is that CFML developers don't have anything to fear due to the loss of the committee, because the practical value of the end goals were rather dubious from the start. It's in the best interest of the open source engines to be largely compatible with Adobe CF, which they are. We haven't had an official CFML standard before and the world hasn't come to an end, so the cf_apocalypse won't come now.

"Innovation and progress in CFML is driven exclusively by the ColdFusion community."

I suspect Adam and I have very different ideas of what constitutes the "community" and what community really means, but ultimately this is correct. The odd thing here is that before the Conventional Wisdom list was started, there was no single public forum where members of the community at large could discuss what they want to see in the CFML language. So if innovation and progress in CFML is truly driven by the community, they now finally have an outlet.

Setting the Record Straight

Now, for the corrections.

"Matt claimed the OpenBD team was too unorganized to submit tags like CFJAVASCRIPT and CFSTYLESHEET (tags I had hope to include in CF9)."

Pure FUD on multiple levels. I may have said something along the lines of "These tags were added on a whim last week," but that's how open source projects work. If Alan or Andy get an idea, or need something for a project they're working on, they'll create the tags and release them in a nightly build. We then get feedback from people actually using the new features and refine as needed. That in no way means the OpenBD team is disorganized. It differs from proprietary software development, sure, but calling that process "disorganized" would be the equivalent of me calling Adobe "lazy" because they only have a new release every two years. Apples and oranges.

CFJAVASCRIPT and CFSTYLESHEET were added to OpenBD, and Adam's response when he found this out was apparently to take it as an affront because we didn't run the idea by the committee first. Adam seemed to continually and conveniently ignore the fact that OpenBD is an open source project, so Adobe or anyone else can see what we're doing every step of the way.

Furthermore, it was agreed upon by all members of the committee that tags and functions developed in specific engines would be brought to the committee only if their creators wanted the language enhancements to be considered as "core" in the CFML specification. We didn't consider CFJAVASCRIPT, CFSTYLESHEET, and some of the other innovations in OpenBD as "core" CFML, so we didn't officially submit them. But again, the source code is open. If Adobe saw something in OpenBD they thought made sense to be core to CFML or to add to ColdFusion, they could have brought it up and we could have discussed it.

And let's talk about what "submitting a tag" to the committee even means. I'm not sure what exactly I was even supposed to "submit"--the tags were out there in the OpenBD source along with documentation as to how they are used, so wouldn't it make sense that if Adobe was interested in considering those tags for ColdFusion they could read the docs and ask about it on the committee list? If you get the sense from Adam's post that there was some rigorous formal process that OpenBD was somehow subverting, don't. There was no such defined submission process in place.

Finally, the "tags I had hope[sic] to include in CF 9" bit is completely bogus. Yes, Adobe did make some changes to CF 9 (specifically CFSCRIPT if I remember correctly) based on the committee's recommendations, and I applaud them for that, particularly given that CF 9 was nearing the end of development at that point. They ignored plenty of other recommendations, and the reason for that--the real bottom line here--is that CF 9 was largely baked by the time the committee was even having these discussions. So to point a finger and say CFJAVASCRIPT and CFSTYLESHEET didn't make it into CF 9 because I failed to make an official submission to the committee is false on numerous levels. We didn't consider them to be core to the language, the code and spec were available from day one, and adding this new functionality to CF so late in the development process likely wasn't going to happen anyway.

"Sean claimed that Railo wanted to wait a version (or two) to see how new Railo tags were accepted by the community before making a formal recommendation."

Again, this is how open source projects work. Did Adobe expect that the open source engines will stop following the process that is best for their projects and users, and hit the brakes on the rapid pace with which new features are added, to ask the committee's permission before making enhancements to their engines? Does it not make sense--and ultimately benefit Adobe--if the open source projects introduce new features to CFML and let the community kick the tires before finalizing the feature? That saves Adobe time in the future if they decide to implement these features, because a lot of the questions surrounding the new features and how they should work will already have been answered.

I'm at a loss to see what the real issue is here. OpenBD and Railo are both open source, both have nightly releases, both have public roadmaps ... everything's always available for anyone to view. I think ultimately this comes down to a culture clash between open source projects and proprietary products, which was probably partially to blame for the failure of the committee's efforts.

"As a community, we never needed the OpenCFML board to guide or document feedback."

I give this one a "thumbs sideways." We didn't need the CFML Advisory Committee specifically to serve this function, but I don't see Adobe doing anything to foster open language discussions in a public forum either. Perhaps that isn't their job; they focus on finding out what their paying customers want, and no one can fault them for that. In similar fashion the open source projects get continual feedback from their users and make changes accordingly.

I do think it's important that there be some avenue for people to discuss CFML as a language in an engine-agnostic way, however, but that was as simple as creating a Google Group. It's a much better solution and will yield far better results than the committee ever would have.

"I really want to thank Ben, Rob and Ray for the work they put into the OpenCFML."

... but no one else. Not Sean for making valiant efforts to keep things going even when the committee was at its lowest points, and not any of the rest of the people who participated far more than anyone from Adobe, and particularly Adam, ever did. If anyone questioned Adam's real attitude towards the committee that statement pretty much sums it up for me. He was never interested in setting politics aside and working collaboratively to create a CFML language spec, and apparently the only efforts that matter are the ones made by the people in his camp. "You're either with us or you're against us" has been proven to be a very divisive attitude, and it's one that ultimately isn't good for the community as a whole.

"As far as I am concerned, the ColdFusion ACPs will be the CFML Advisory Panel for ColdFusion X and beyond. We'll be asking them to review and sign-off on all of our language enhancements (very soon)."

So this at least defines what "community" means to Adobe, and helps to illustrate that they never had any interest in helping to define CFML as a language outside of their own product. That's fine, and makes perfect sense coming from a proprietary software company, but leads me to the conclusion that the CFML Advisory Committee was a PR stunt to begin with. Adobe's heart was never in it, they were just trying to get out in front of the open source CFML revolution.

In Summary ...

The goal of Adam's post is patently obvious: to blame everyone but himself and Adobe for the failure of the CFML Advisory Committee. His rhetoric sounds almost McCarthy-esque. Get people focused on a common enemy--real or imaginary--and they'll become oblivious to little things like logic and the truth.

Let me be clear: Adobe's lack of participation and paranoia over the supposed malfeasance of Railo and OpenBD are, from my perspective, a massive part of what killed the CFML Advisory Committee. I'd have a lot more respect for everyone involved if we could have collectively decided to end the effort, made a joint statement, and parted ways amicably. But for Adam to post a truth-challenged version of events out of the blue, while not surprising, is in very poor form.

And That's All I Have to Say About That

I've said my peace and then some at this point. Feel free to comment, and if you have any specific questions you think I can answer, I'll be happy to do so. If, however, your comment is of a "he said/she said" nature or intended solely to inflame the situation further, don't be surprised if I don't respond. Adam gave his version of the story, I've given mine in abundant detail, and everyone can continue to speculate on what went on behind the closed doors of the committee. If you care to, anyway. I'd certainly hope you have much, much better ways to spend your time. ;-)

To me, it's not worth dwelling on all of this. The CFML Advisory Committee will go down as an interesting side-note in the annals of CFML history, and people looking back will wonder why we even tried in the first place. I've been asking myself that very question for quite some time.

I ran into this today while working on ColdTonica, and since it's something I'm still surprised people forget (including myself) I thought I'd share.

ColdTonica is a CFML clone of StatusNet (formerly Laconica), which is an open source PHP-based microblogging service similar (although vastly superior) to Twitter. As you might imagine, those simple 140-character notices you spend way too much of your day posting go through a lot of transformations before reaching the final form in which they are displayed, because the notices need to be parsed and manipulated to add things like links to tags, links to @ replies, shortening URLs, and so on. Honestly when I started studying the StatusNet code and saw what all goes on behind the scenes for such a seemingly simple service, I have to admit I was a bit surprised.

All the text manipulation of course involves a lot of regular expressions, and since for ColdTonica we're porting the PHP code over to CFML, it saves us a ton of time since all the regular expressions have already been written. Unfortunately there are some syntax issues with the regular expressions that render them incompatible with CFML and even Java, so it did take a bit of research and help from a friend of mine to start to unravel and convert them.

One of the issues I ran into while moving the PHP regular expressions over to CFML is that CFML doesn't have Unicode support in regular expressions (some nice info about Unicode in regex here, although the information about Java is dated), at least not without first converting Unicode to ASCII values and wrapping them all in Chr(). This is what I've discovered while messing with this at least; if this isn't correct I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Since the PHP regular expressions use the Perl syntax of \x{hex_value_here}, which CFML doesn't support, converting the regular expressions was getting a bit messy. Java, however, does support the \x syntax (though it didn't used to), but with a slightly different syntax. You can read more about Java regex syntax in Java 6 here.

During the course of this I was reminded of the fact that under the hood, CFML strings are Java strings, which means that rather than using functions like REReplaceNoCase() in CFML and converting the hex codes into something usable by Chr(), I can simply use Java's replaceAll() function on the String class. This lets me keep the PHP syntax more intact and do a lot less conversion research.

So the original PHP looks like this:

$r = preg_replace('/[\x{0}-\x{8}\x{b}-\x{c}\x{e}-\x{19}]/', '', $r);

And the CFML version using replaceAll() on the String class looks like this:

r.replaceAll("/[\x00-\x08\x0B-\x0C\x0E-\x19]/", "");

At least I think that's right. ;-) I still need to test all of this out, but as I convert the rest of these it'll be much simpler to go this route and keep things in hex as opposed to converting everything to CFML-compatible Unicode regex syntax.

The moral of the story is you can do a lot in CFML by leveraging the underlying Java functionality, and this doesn't apply only to the String class. So if you run into things that are a bit weird to try and accomplish in CFML check the Java docs and see what additional functionality you have available. You'll probably be surprised at what you learn!

This is long-delayed after cf.Objective() 2010, but here is a zip of the sample app and the presentation PDF from the presentation Peter and I gave on running CFML applications on Google App Engine.

We also gave this presentation at the CFMeetup a couple of weeks ago (you can watch the recording), and are doing it again for the Mid-Michigan CFUG on Tuesday, June 8, at 7 pm Eastern US time.

To use the sample app create a new Google App Engine project in Eclipse, then copy the unzipped files into that project.

If you need help getting up and running with GAE on Eclipse, check this blog post on the Detroit Area Adobe UG's blog, or check the GAE for Java page. The MMCFUG may also be streaming this meeting live so I'll post again with a URL if that happens.

I didn't add this to the PDF or code before I uploaded them, but both are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

(download)