Up until recently, the goings-on of what has been happening in ColdSpring 2.0 has been fairly limited to my
twitter account.
At
cf.Objective(), I did a presentation entitled
Dependency Injection Redefined - ColdSpring 2.0 Narwhal where I outlined what work had been done on ColdSpring 2.0, what was planned for the future, and where you could go for more information. (I'll also be doing this presentation at
WebDU in a about a weeks as well).
The first thing to note, is that the code name for this project is
Narwhal.
Why Narwhal? Basically because they are awesome. They roam the ocean
with a huge spike attached to their head, which can be used to impale,
seals, penguins, and apparently also koalas. See - awesome. (Who really has reasons for code names?)
The next most interesting thing to note, is that much of ColdSpring's infrastructure is now hosted on Sourceforge, as it provides a large feature set for us to leverage.
Here you can find the project page, which gives you access to the Git repository that contains the code for ColdSpring 2.0. Sourceforge also provides hosting for the Trac install that is being used to host
our documentation and
tickets and milestones. We are currently investigating options for integration with the current ColdSpring website.
I'm
not going to go into new features in Narwhal, of which there are more
than a few (I have to have some incentive for people to come to my my
WebDu Talk!), but documentation has started on the Wiki, and will be
expanding quickly in the future (If anyone wants to help with that, the
more the merrier!).
You may also note that much of the
documentation is also being generated automatically, in an attempt to
alleviate some of the burden of authoring. Now that there are XMLschemas being used, HTML documentation is being generated from them, and ColdDoc is also being used to generate API documentation for the underlying architecture.
It's still very early days for ColdSpring
2.0, but a Alpha1 does loom on the horizon. That being said, the Git
repository is public, so feel free to pull it down, have a look at what
is happening in the Unit Tests, what documentation is available, and
feel free to discuss it on the
mailing lists. Just beware - this is still pre-Alpha,
so the sand may shift under your feet as new code gets produced, bugs
get quashed and new features get developed. You have been warned!
More details coming soon!
I'm back home again from what I would like to say was, one of the
best cf.Objective()'s
I have ever been to, including the fact that I was incredibly ill for
the last day of the conference. I only managed to catch two sessions in
the afternoon, and otherwise was holed up in my hotel room either fast
asleep, or feeling particularly sorry for myself.
There are many
things I would like to prescribe the incredibly high quality of the
conference to, but the the high calibre of the session presentations
really stands out at the main contributor. I believe that when the
session quality of a conference is so high, the attendees are excited
and motivated by new ideas, which directly translates into fantastic
and thought inspiring hallway conversations, and everything continues
to flow from there.
To make a few particular references to presentations I particularly enjoyed -
Easy and Flexible Validations for Objects - Bob Silverberg
I had not previously taken the time to look at
Bob's
ValidateThis
framework, but let me just say this: It is slick! I was very impressed
by what was possible with very little configuration, and the the
flexibility that was available. My hat is off to Bob for his work with
this validation framework.
Continuous Integration with MXUnit, Ant and Hudson - Marc Esher
Marc
is always a very entertaining presenter, and this presentation was no
exception. I've used Hudson with MXUnit before, but it was still
fantastic to see Marc explain this technology in a very clear and easy
to understand manner. He also gets points in my book for using the
Hudson
Chuck Norris plugin.
Polyglot Programming - Barney Boisvert
If anyone has read
Barney's blog,
they should already know that he's a super smart fellow. This
presentation only solidified this fact, in which Barney dug deep into
the very compelling reasons a developer should potentially look into
developing with multiple languages at a time (something as web
developers we are doing already). Barney covered some really
interesting points about language design, the intent of programming
code and qualifying return on investment in regards to polyglot
programming. All great stuff!
Running ColdFusion on the Amazon EC2 Cloud - Chris Peterson
This
was a session I really wanted to attend, but unfortunately I slept
through due to illness. I wanted to make note of it, as I was told
that
Chris had a completely filled room, and I've been told it was a really interesting presentation all around.
Building Advanced Workflows with ColdSpring - Dan Skaggs
I don't believe I have had the opportunity to see
Dan
speak before this, but this presentation was an eye opener! I came to
this presentation with my 'ColdSpring Lead Developer' hat on to see
what interesting things people were doing with ColdSpring, and came
away with a new found respect for the framework itself, and the
ingenuity that Dan was displaying in his use of it. Dan walked us
through how his company was using ColdSpring to dynamically configure
application workflow and processing - which enables it to be both
incredibly flexible in its implementation and amazingly easy to
maintain.
Bob Silverberg and I also did a two day
Hands on ColdFusion 9 ORM Training
before the conference. Thanks to all our students who attended - we
had a great time teaching the program, and we hope you guys got a lot
out of it. If anyone else is ever interested in taking the training
course, please provide your contact details on the website so we can
contact you at a later date.
All in all, a great conference all around. See you all again next year!
Like
Tyra Banks giving away Vaseline to her entire audience, the attendees of
Bob Silverberg's and I's
ColdFusion 9 ORM Training, that we are running at
cf.Objective(), ever student who attends our training will also get a copy of:
Java Persistence with Hibernate!
You get a book! You get a book! You get a book! Yoouuuuuu get a Booooooooook!!!!
While this is a Java book, and hey, we all write ColdFusion, it is one of
the
books to read on utilising Hibernate within your applications. Reading
this book will give you a huge insight into what ColdFusion is doing
under the covers, which will help out a great deal when building
applications with ColdFusion 9.
So not only do you get some great training from Bob and I, you also get a fantastic reference to take home with you as well!
If that doesn't push you over the edge to
come join us, I don't know what will.
(Ordering now does not provide you with a free set of steak knives, but it will make Bob and I very happy)
