October 2006 Archive

CFDevCon - The UK ColdFusion Developer Conference

I’ve been meaning to blog this for ages, and now I’ve had a chance. Don’t forget to buy your tickets for CFDevCon- The UK ColdFusion Developer Conference.

The conference is being held on 9 November in Croydon (South East London).

We have a great line-up of speakers including Andrew Shorten from Adobe, Mark Drew, Charlie Arehart and Vince Bonfanti.

For more details and to buy your tickets check out the website at http://www.cfdevcon.com/.

If you are interested in sponsoring the event please check the sponsorship page.

See you all there.

Posted by Niklas Richardson on 12 Oct 2006

The anti-MAX club

So, who's not at MAX then?

Posted by Neil Middleton on 23 Oct 2006

Do you rails?

I’ve been looking into other technologies recently as part of some research I am doing, and finally managed to take a look at Ruby on Rails.

In a word, Wow. If you thought CF was simple, check out Rails.

It is at this point that I should probably point out a difference. Ruby is not Rails and Rails is not Ruby. Rails is to Ruby what something like Model-Glue is to Coldfusion – a framework. You do not Rails to build Ruby web apps.

So what does Rails do? Well in a nutshell it lets you build simple data driven web apps remarkably quickly by simply removing a whole lot of the repetitive stuff from you, whilst still be able to code in a nice simple language that almost reads like psuedo-code. It handles requests, MVC layout and database access amongst others

Now, I know a lot of people say “Coldfusion is so like Ruby – what makes them different?”. Well, in my eyes, Ruby code is a lot simpler than the equivalent CF (once you have your head around the syntax) and the performance seems to be leagues ahead (on my laptop anyway), probably due to not having to include the JVM. Also, it is probably more powerful than CF in terms of it runtime options (web, command line, tcl/tk) etc and it’s capabilites via a league of libraries extending functionality. However, it doesn’t appear that anyone has built anything very big in Rails yet (e.g a mySpace etc) so the scalability and “enterprise-ness” of the tool are not yet known. If anyone knows otherwise, please keep me posted.

Now, I am well aware CF is proven in the Enterprise, and it has the power of Java lurking underneath (or .NET for you BlueDragon folk) but Ruby seems to make you look at your code and not need anything complex somehow…it certainly makes you look at statically typed strict OO languages such as Java or C# and think….why?

It’s about now that the CF devotees (of which I am one) will probably flame me, but hey, a healthy discussion is always a good thing! ;)

Posted by Neil Middleton on 23 Oct 2006