Empowering CFML Developers
Preamble: While I am a Volunteer Community Manager for Railo, the opinions expressed in this post are my own.
Kind of sad that I have to preamble my own opinions isn't it? :) I was reading Ray Camden's blog post on YQL (Yahoo Query Language), it inspired me to get off my ass and write this blog post I've been meaning to for awhile. I meant to do it with Ray's maze example (thus creating <cfmaze>), but the YQL post was even better because it was something that was immediately useful and hopefully this will show Yahoo that we're still here. Grant Straker recently posted Why Railo kicks butt for ColdFusion based SaaS and I couldn't agree more. This is the kind of stuff that has me excited about CFML. This is the out of the box thinking I want to keep pushing. This is the kind of stuff that enables me to explain why I'm so passionate about my language of choice.
While the language should continue to evolve, there's no reason why we can't put more tools in front of us, the CFML developers that drive this language. You have the chance to be a tag developer without the need to settle for your tag being "just another custom tag." Your code has a potential future to be the 'glue' of something bigger. With all the open source engines available at the moment, you should be able to pick up one of them and extend the language. If you know Java, great! If you don't you should not feel as if you're being excluded from the CFML tag soup party. Railo enables you as CFML developers to create built-in-tags and built-in-functions using... CFML!
Matt Woodward recently announced that he's working on CFPOI. I realize that CFSpreadsheet is built into Adobe ColdFusion 9, but here's a chance for anyone to get involved with Matt and expand this even further for those of us that aren't on Adobe ColdFusion. Yes, we should abhere to the standards that opencfml.org is creating, but we should also feel empowered to INSPIRE and INNOVATE.
As a developer, if I created a worthwhile extension to the cfml language, I should feel as if I have the choice to approach the community representives of opencfml.org which at the moment looks to be Rob Brooks-Bilson, Ray Camden and Peter Farrell. Propose the tag, show it off (using custom tags or mock-up the whole thing in Railo as a built-in-tag). You can and should get involved.
Are you into APIs? Facebook? Twitter? The Gazillion APIs available around us? You could be developing <cftwitter> or <cffacebook> right now! Todd Sharp, creator of SlideSix, recently announced the ability to put a widget on your website (example on Ray Camden's blog). He also created an API for SlideSix for anyone to tap into. What's stopping anyone from creating <cfslidesix>?
Certainly not Railo.
Andy Sandefer wrote on 09/11/09 12:30 PM
I for one am glad that you "got off your ass" and wrote this. You've inspired me to start thinking about the code I've written over the last few years so as to find something useful that I've done in CF that I can turn it into a project to post on RIA Forge. You're absolutely right in that you never know when something that you took the time to figure out will end up helping hundreds of other developers. We should all really take an objective look at our respective bodies of work and attempt to find something that could help out the entire community and then post it!
Paul Klinkenberg wrote on 09/11/09 2:09 PM
Hi Todd, great post! You're absolutely right about trying to get cfml-devers to share and contribute more, in a way which makes cfml broader and stronger. Coldfusion rocks!But, one side point, I always try to write code (and have colleagues do it as well) which is platform-independent and cfml-engine independent. Therefor, <cfmaze> etc. would not be my choice of writing, but instead <cfset maze_obj.getMaze() /> or something like that. But that's just a side-note; I can always pull the cfml from the cf-tag's code ;-)
See ya at the railo list!
todd sharp wrote on 09/11/09 11:16 AM
I completely agree with the spirit of this post Todd. I really think people should do more to contribute - even if it's open sourcing something you've done and posting to RIAForge.I'll also add that CFBuilder can easily be extended with CFML via extensions. There is huge potential in that - and I can't wait to see what people come up with!