Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

I am not sure if this news has spread through the CFML community, but a couple of weeks ago I stepped down from the OpenBD steering committee. Rather than going into all the details here I am just going to post my resignation letter that hopefully explains my reasons behind it.

Dear Gentlemen I have realised that since joining as a member of the steering committee I have contributed bugger all. This should not come as a shock to people that know me, since I am a lazy bugger but I think its inappropriate for me to take up space on the committee that could be assigned to someone more intelligent and vocal to contribute. I have a number of projects (outside my 9-6 day job) that I need to concentrate on, some that you know and some that you will hopefully know soon enough but this leaves me little time left to give OSBD the attention I would like to give the project. Rather than sit around like a silent lurker on the list I am going to make space for a better (not handsomer) person to take my place. Of course, I shall keep on lurking in the background... and probably looking at the code going "aint that clever.. yessum!" and wishing the project the total success it needs! Finally I would like to thank you for having though of me highly enough to invite me in the first place! And sorry that I couldn't make a bigger contribution

As some people out there might have noticed, there has been rumours of BlueDragon going Open Source. I was asked if I would like to contribute to the project by Andy Allan and Alan Williamson a few weeks back and finally the announcement has gone through (in case you hadn't noticed of course!) Alan asked me to write a few words on my involvement, which you can see over at his blog. http://alan.blog-city.com/interview_markdrew.htm A very exciting time for CFML developers!

I just read over a Vince Bonfanti's blog that BlueDragon/J2EE is going Open Source! This is great news for the future of CFML as the barrier to entry has gone for people wanting to host and developer CFML based applications. Read more over at Vince's blog http://blog.newatlanta.com/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=EABF951D-453A-486E-9647E2825D1E6F39

If you are reading this blog via RSS you wouldnt have noticed but over the weekend I upgraded my blog to Ray Camden's BlogCFC 5. I had been scraping my heels all this time, but its nice to upgrade right? For you users, I dont think there is anything new, but its nice to have a separate admin. Also it means that I can write stuff, look at it properly and then post it when it needs to be posted. I put a new look to it, let me know what you think and email me any errors if you see any!

Thats right, we have a sponsor, in a very real "hard-cash" kind of way from New Atlanta, makers of BlueDragon.

New Atlanta sponsored the ability to have multiple tag dictionaries (including of course a Blue Dragon one) and choosing different dictionaries per project.  A  very useful feature indeed and just the kind of sponsorship that propels development of CFEclipse. This means that per project you get validation of your code against a version of CFML that you have chosen for that project. This will highlight any errors that you have with your code for that version of ColdFusion

This means that finally we have some hard-cash that will be well spent on the project (watch this space and cfeclipse.org for more news in the next couple of weeks) and promoting CFEclipse.


Very exciting news indeed!


PS. sorry about the multiple edits, I havent upgraded to the latest version of blogCFC so I cant write drafts!