Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

With the upcoming conferences you have the great opportunity to meet the guys from Railo at a conference near you!

So who is going to be where?

CF.Objective(), Minneapolis - April, 22-24 2010

As a Gold sponsor we will have a booth where Mark Drew and Gert Franz will be present most of the time. Sean Corfield and Peter Bell are presenting some topics.

WebDU, Sydney - Australia - May, 6-7 2010

In Sydney Australia Peter Bell is going to present and represent Railo with some talks. We try to be back as sponsors again next year.

Scotch on the Rocks, London - England - May, 24-25 2010

At Scotch on the Rocks as a Gold sponsor we will have a booth as well. Mark Drew, Peter Bell and Gert Franz will be hosting it.

In addition you will be able to meet Michael Offner the main architect behind the Open Source engine as well as Andrea Campolonghi the author of the AJAX extensions in Railo.

Mark Drew and Gert Franz will have two presentations about Railo (and Railo 4.0) and Peter will cover a project management topic.

CF United - Washington - July, 28-31st, 2010

This year we will return to the Landsdowne Resort in Washington as a silver sponsor, where this year's CFUnited will take place.
We will have a booth in the sponsor area and a couple of talks with Gert Franz and Sean Corfield.
Mark Drew shall also be attending.

We will blog about out appearances later this year soon.

We are running a great little competition that with just a few lines of code (ok, 4K total file size) you can win a ticket to cf.Objective on April 22-24, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, MN! 

There are few rules to the competition, but basically just write some code that shows off Railo Open Source server's features.

Check out the rules and some ideas over at the Railo Blog!

I am not sure if people know this (and yes, I shall get round to putting up a banner) but the guys at EdgeWebHosting have been hosting my site on a dedicated server that allows me to both maintain this blog as well as a bunch of small projects that I have for quite a while now. I have always got on with Vlad at all the conferences and the choice seemed good. 

So far the service has been stellar, no downtime etc. But normally, that is what you expect right? A true test really comes when things go wrong. 

And on Tuesday apparently they did. 

I woke up to find that I had a missing call from the USA. A bit confusing, but when I heard the voicemail, it was Dave, one of the support engineers at Edge Web Hosting that had spotted suspicious activity on my site. I wont go into all the details here of the exploit (lets say that it looked a lot worse than it ended up being and nothing was actually compromised) , but throughout Tuesday, they were the most on the ball company I have ever hosted with in keeping me up to date. 

(before you ask, it was a mis configuration I did to apache, for a quick job that I should have removed and was exploited. Let's leave it at that)

I can't recommend them enough, and even through emails updating me on the findings of the supposed intrusion including IM'ing for information etc. 

When was the last time YOU had service like that eh?

So all in all big thanks to the guys at Edge Web Hosting! 

Spotted today on twitter, a great article: Introduction to Railo Open Source by  Andrew Schwabe on http://www.packtpub.com/

It's great to see the community writing articles that spread the word about Railo far out into other communities, which surely spreads what CFML developer's have known all along that CFML and Railo just gets things done! 

The Railo Team will be at CeBit in Hanover, Germany this year (2nd to 6th of March),  myself and Gert Franz will be joining our partners Contens and Intergral at their stand.

This is the first time that I am heading to CeBit but unfortnuately I shall only be there on the Thursday 4th of March so come say hello!

The stand will be located at hall 6 stand J32

See you there!

Hot on the heels of the previous 1.3.5 release, the CFEclipse team have released a maintenance release. 

You might wonder why so many releases nowadays? Well, the team have a new release schedule, which like all nighttime coders, is based on the cycles of the moon. So what has been fixed you ask? Checkout the full listing but a summary is here:

#509    Errors with implicit structure/array creation
#106     mishandling of multiline strings        
#478     attribute validation with spaces    
#486     asking for content assist when you have a broken parse tree throws error
#496     word wrap throws null pointer exception    
#510     insert cfabort action, doesn't
#512     useSmartPaste preference default is not initialized
#513     context menu added with each file opened
#515     smartpaste preference doesn't seem to take
#516     Code Formatting splits regex onto 2 lines    
#520     syntax errors inside comments
#521     space at the end of strings/single quotes inside double quotes    
#523     Code Parsing error with cfinterface/cffunction
#504     cfdump and cfabort tags should print out their respective dump() and abort() functions in cfscript
#517     Content Format menu option incorrect display
#518     Code Parsing and formatting

An awesome job to everyone involved!

I have created a video using code_swarm to show the history of CFEclipse's development history, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! I am using this for other projects as a beautiful as well as useful way to see how a project progresses over time:

Edit: Since we moved CFEclipse from tigris.org back in 2006 I missed out the main people that worked on the Project such as Rob Rohan, Spike Milligan and Oliver Tupman (to mention a few!).

Part 1 (pre SVN with the initial commits etc!)

View Part 2  on youtube

So this is a bit of a fishing post (at least I am being honest!)

In the next few months Railo Technologies will be working on a number of projects and we are  looking to build up a good list of contractors that can work on these projects with us.

I am not posting details of specific jobs of course, but you should have a variety of skills round CFML and CFML development, such as frameworks, ORM techniques, code optimisation and  load testing etc.

Please, read carefully now, I am not looking for agents, I am sure you have wonderful contractors and reasonable rates and make coffee to die for but please do NOT contact me.

So, if you are contracting at the moment, or will be looking for contracts in the UK and Europe over the next few months send me an email with your CV, letting me know which areas you enjoy/are good at/ both/ want to get into etc.

IF YOU ARE NOT AN AGENT, email me over at mark at getrailo dot com

Finally, as previously mentioned, I shall be treating emails from agents with the contempt they deserve, so don't ruin your day eh?

The CFEclipse Project has today released CFEclipse 1.3.5.

A big thank you has to go to Denny who has done an amazing job in this build!

If you want to find out what has changed you can read the change log over at http://www.cfeclipse.org/update/web/doc/intro/doc/new.html

Of course, you can get this version simply by using Eclipse's in-built software update in Help -> Check for Updates.

As an aside you can follow cfeclipse on twitter: http://twitter.com/cfeclipse

If you find any issues with the release, sign up to the mailing list, and someone will have probably solved your issue already: http://groups.google.com/group/cfeclipse-users/

Enjoy!

EDIT: added Denny's URL and twitter URL

EDIT 2: added mailing list address

Today I was writing a little app that helps me keep up with my Todo list, since I wanted to have a web interface for some reporting into my tasks.

The issue is that my todo list is just a text file (and before you go saying there are various apps, I am happy with my text file ok? for various reasons which are not part of this post), so I built a nice web interface to it, but the problem is that since I can modify it, and whilst I was developing it I wanted a way to back this file up. I mean, whist I am coding this app, I might make mistakes and want to roll back. 

So I got thinking of a way to do this and realised I do this every day anyway, using git!. So, I thought, for every change I do to the file, why not check it into its repository.

I fiddled about with cfexecute, which to be honest I haven't used much previously but I couldn't change the working directory, so, thanks to Tim Blair's post I managed to do the following: 

<!--- since we have made modifications to the files, we need to commit them in git --->

 <cfscript>  

     // first of we set the command to call  

     cmd1 = "git add TODO.txt";  

     cmd2 = "git commit -m 'autobackup'";

     // the environment variable is empty  

     envp = arraynew(1);  

     // and we want to run from a given "root"  

     path = "/Volumes/iDisk/Documents/TODO";  

     dir = createobject("java", "java.io.File").init(path);  

     // get the java runtime object  

     rt = createobject("java", "java.lang.Runtime").getRuntime();  

     // and make the exec call to run the command  

rt.exec(cmd1, envp, dir);

rt.exec(cmd2, envp, dir);  

 </cfscript>

And that's it. Every time the file is changed, it is added to my git repo locally. Handy!