CFUnited Blog

Adobe ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder

Thank you Adobe and Adam Wayne Lehman for sending the list of topics today. We look forward to meeting the CF team!!

ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder Track and Topic Descriptions

Schedule of Topics:

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 1:30:00 PM
"ColdFusion 9: What's New" Adam Wayne Lehman

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 4:15:00 PM
"ColdFusion 9 & Flex 4: Application Development" Ryan Stewart

Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 8:30:00 AM
"ColdFusion Builder: Getting Started (Bring Your Laptop)" Bhakti Pingale & Dipanwita Sarkar

Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 9:45:00 AM
"ColdFusion 9 & AIR: Developing Offline Applications" Praveen Gupta

Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 2:00:00 PM
"ColdFusion 9: An Introduction to ORM" Terry Ryan

Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 3:15:00 PM
ColdFusion 9: Advanced ORM" Manju Kiran Pacchhipulusu

Thursday, August 13, 2009 - 4:45:00 PM
"ColdFusion 9 & LiveCycle ES: SOA Development" Greg Wilson

Friday, August 14, 2009 - 9:00:00 AM
"ColdFusion 9: JavaScript & AJAX Driven User Interfaces" Bhakti Pingale

Friday, August 14, 2009 - 10:15:00 AM
"ColdFusion 9: Working w/ MS Office, Sharepoint and Exchange" Hareni Venkatramanan & Terry Ryan

Friday, August 14, 2009 11:30:00 AM
"ColdFusion Builder: Building Extensions with CFML" Adam Wayne Lehman

Friday, August 14, 2009 - 1:30:00 PM
"ColdFusion 9: An Insider's Guide" Hemant Khandelwal

Friday, August 14, 2009 - 4:15:00 PM
"ColdFusion 9: Server Administration" Mike Collins


The plan is to definitely have these topics recorded via Connect for attendees to view at a later time so that you don't miss out on all the great topics.

Thank you Adobe!!

CFUnited Manager Guide

This is the Ultimate Manager Guide for CFUnited 2009.

If you do anything today, print a copy of this document and hand it to your manager. It has great information and I hope they realize that CFUnited is the place for you to be this year.

http://cfunited.com/images/CFUnited2009_managerguide.pdf

*Also, please tell your friends :-)

1yr FREE shared hosting for registering before March 31st

As proud sponsors of CFUnited conference 2009 Media3 is offering registered attendees 1 YEAR of free CF shared hosting.

(see http://www.media3.net/shared/cfcomp.cfm)

And 20% our CF Enterprise Hyper - V VPs'

( see http://www.media3.net/vps/CFVPShostingplans.cfm)

Both use the latest technology. Dell 900 servers with network storage running Window 2008 data center edition. This is 64 bit architecture and resides on a gigi bit switch network in our new SAS70 data center!

Important: This offer requires that you register by March 31st and you must contact liz (at) cfunited.com to take advantage of this offer. (Those who are already registered can contact Liz now)

The minimum saving is just under $300.00 effectively reducing your cost to register significantly.

See you at the show.

Bob Hayes

founder and CEO Media 3 Technologies

Working while at CFUnited

We understand that it is difficult to take time off for almost an entire week to attend a conference. While the event and learning is very useful, we all still have to maintain a proper work flow.

That's why at CFUnited we have created several work stations which provide a quiet and private area for attendees to work. All provided for FREE.

This is not an internet cafe, instead it is supplied with power strips, tables, seating, coffee, snacks, and excellent wireless Internet. We've upped the expectations this year.

If you have to check in to work and get those billable hours completed on time and under budget, we want to make sure we help you keep your end of the deal.

We are focusing on your needs and your companies needs.

Please register today you have everything to gain.

Areas highlighted in Orange are designated work rooms for multiple work stations.

Profile Picture, Baby!

Someone recently tried out the new profile picture feature on the Edit Registration page, uploading a 2MB photo of a baby, only to get an error page after clicking save. Doh!

This seems to be particularly noticeable on large files. If you attempt to delete the source image immediately after the resize you'll get an error message like:

ColdFusion could not delete the file D:\Inetpub\wwwroot\Sites\cfunited-register\public\uploads\3aa33aec20c440-CBCB50D9-15C5-E0D8-8AA0B3D9C8746D18-39825.JPG for an unknown reason.

The CF 8.0.1 Hot Fix solves this problem. (Thanks Jeff Coughlin)

Anyway, I'm not sure which attendee this profile picture belongs to, but the baby sure is cute.

(PS. BlogCFC ate the previous post, as in it vanished after I hit "Save", so sorry about comment removal and a repost!)

Uploaded Baby Photo

Issues in making CF9 ECMAScript and XML Compliant

Lately there's been a lot of talk about what to do in CF9 and what features developers really want.

For some time there's been this push to make CFScript more powerful, and fill in it's deficiencies compared to CFML. Now that we close on CF9, and developers have had a taste of the new operators in CF8, I'm starting to hear about making CFScript "ECMAScript Compliant" from quite a few people, or even more extreme, implementing AS3 instead of CFScript. Another request I'm starting to see pop up is making CFML "XML Complaint." These requests seem to stem from a significant amount of confusion about what those compliances really mean.

So lets start with CFScript...

CFScript can never be ECMAScript compliant. ECMAScript is a very long, and quite specific standard. It specifies everything from how math should work, to how expressions are evaluated, to how parsing should happen, and quite a bit more.

So what would it take to make CFScript actually ECMAScript complaint?

Well that would involve a completely different prototype based object model, different casting rules, different math rules, different function names, different binding rules, different operators (+ for strings, & is not valid), different type names, different syntax for structures... which wouldn't be structures, but rather Objects, a completely different closure and context system in the runtime, anonymous functions, optional semicolons, different regexp syntax, ... the list goes on.

All of this is totally at odds with CF's current runtime and how it works, and what CF code compiles down into. If it was done then every existing CF application would break. So what if we did it by doing something like embed Rhino? While this would give us JavaScript, it could never replace CFScript. And assuming we did do this, now you'd have two radically different object and language models to deal with. The CF one, and the ECMAScript one.

Okay, so what about XML?

XML compliancy would require very significant language changes as well. When many people think of "XML Compliant" they think of the short hand close tags (the NET feature) that XML uses. This is really a quite small set of what XML really is though.

So what would it take to make CFML XML compliant?

First we'd need to fix cfif, cfelse, cfelseif and cfreturn so that we weren't putting expressions in the tag itself, but rather in attributes. This would make the new struct and array syntax rather odd, and make assigning strings even more odd:

<cfset expr="variables.string = &quot;Why do you want XML?&quot"/>

Doing this is quite against best practices for XML schema design, so something like <cfset name="variables.string" string="Why do you want XML?"/> might work better, but now we're really deviating from old style syntax.

The next issue is that XML documents all need a root element. So we'd need something like <cfpage> that wraps every cfm file (cfcomponent would work for cfcs), to meet that requirement.

Then we need to deal with cfimport and prefixes. These are namespaces in XML, so we'd need to alter the way you import tags significantly. Essentially removing cfimport and replacing it with xmlns attributes on the root.

Now there's issues of dealing with code that uses > and < in script and expressions, so we'd probably be required to wrap all script code in cfscript in CDATA blocks. Worse is that if we really wanted valid HTML entities, they'd need to be double escaped to something like &amp;nbsp;. We'd also end up with &amp; to concat strings, provided we didn't ditch that syntax and go with the ECMAScript redesign discussed above.

Conclusion

I hope this makes it a little more clear what reformulating CFML and CFScript into these standards would mean. The result would be far from the CF we know (and love) today, and not even remotely backwards compatible. I'd imagine it would take a significant engineering effort to totally rewrite CF like this, and what we'd end up with wouldn't really be CF anymore, but some kind of new language entirely. I'm not going to argue if the language would be good or bad, but it certainly wouldn't be anything like CF8 on almost every level from syntax, to semantics.

So here's my big question... what's so wrong with CF as it exists now? :)