I have been working on yet another code generator for ColdFusion for the last six months. I have learned a lot. When I am done.... it will read a databse and using the metadata and it will create a working app using the ENTIRE database. It is like a mini Ruby on Rails.

You point it to the data source and a destination dir, press enter, and you have a working app. You can go from zero to working admin for a 20 table database in about a minute.

It also:

• Generates client side validation based on the data type (string, numeric, float, date, etc.).
• Generates time and date pickers for date/time fields.
• Generates inline wussywig text editors for Text fields
• Automatically generates and populates drop down boxes using foreign keys .
• Has optional secondary validation using key words in the column name (like email, phone, fax, zip, etc.).
• It is almost entirely Object Oriented and uses a very simple MVC methodology.

I am pretty pumped and have been working on this every chance I get. When I get it done, (It really snow balled from what seemed to be a very simple idea), I will be able to crank out a working app, with a couple of clicks, in a matter of minutes.

And yes, I will be releasing it open source.

I loved firefox at one time. She had everything I wanted and needed, and more, from a browser. She was fast, nimble, extensible, she had and did everything I needed. And I do mean EVERYTHING. She was HOT!!

Then we got married. She put on a lot of weight, she became very sluggish and started to really slow me down. She uses all of my resources and will sit there and do nothing for long periods of time so I cannot do anything else but wait for her.

It is over baby. You are a fat, sluggish, resource hogging glutton that is taking more than you give.

I still love you, but I have to move on. And even though I will be dating your red headed step sister I will still want to see you from time to time so I can use firebug.

Open Source used to be so sexy. What happened to you? Are you becoming like Britteny Spears?

I have been fighting it. The FUD, the slim job market, the abuse. But I have given in again to the lure of CF.

I have played with and or made production apps with PHP, ASP, C#/ASP.NET, Java/JSP/Groovy, Ruby, ROR, PERL and so on.

And the one thing I have noticed is that for a lot of the above languages writing a simple app (say in Java/JSP) is like swatting a bug with a sledge hammer.

With ROR, you have to know a bazzion hand shakes to do something that is SUPER SIMPLE. Like trying to group output by category:

http://instantbadger.blogspot.com/2008/02/i-still-miss-cfoutput.html

Or with PHP where everything is odles of noodles spaghetti.

HTML is spaghetti, SQL is spaghetti, dynamic JS is spaghetti.... You will go blind trying to debug dynamic JS generated by PHP.

ASP? As Sid said in '78: No future for you!

ASPX/C#? Code behind? Poor excuse for OO. It never made sense to me. ASP.NET is smart and well designed but the whole Code behind thing gave me a rash.

I do like the VB and C# syntax. Especially C#

BTW JS browser issues irritates me to no end. i.e. "GODDAMMIT just FARKING WORK!!!!"

But CF? It is so simple, so smart, so damn easy. The easy stuff is idiot proof, the harder stuff is a cake walk compared to other languages. And the hard stuff? Do you even have to ask?

You need to do something? Chances are there is an out of the box tag or function for it. Need to do some heavy lifting? You have COM, the entire Java and .NET library at your command. Not to mention most any Java class including most everything at Apache.org and Source forge. Or you can roll your own.

What else you need? AJAX? Done. Frameworks? Done. ORM? Done. Code Generators? Done. Scaffolding? Done. Unit Tests? Done.

Ever update a database record with one line of code using three variables?

I didn't think so.

God has taught me that difficulties can be overcome by following my passion (and getting off my ass and doing something about it).

I would tell you more but I would have to kill you. ;)

If you are a CF developer (or web developer) and you are still using DreamWeaver or Homesite or CF studio and not using Eclipse or any other of the advanced IDE's like Komodo, Visual Studio, Aptana, NetBeans etc, *you literally have no idea what you are missing out on*.

If you use F1 on DreamWeaver, Homesite or CF studio as a primary source of information about programming, CSS, HTML and your available options you are also missing a HUGE piece of information .

I have been using Eclipse for about 9 months now and the one thing it has taught me is how little I know. When I first fired up CF studio some 10 odd years ago I looked at all the CF related buttons and the options and felt clueless.

By using various Eclipse distros like the one provided by Pulse I feel even more clueless than I did 10 years ago. AND I have a working knowledge of web development and client and server side languages like JS, SQL, XML, XSL, HTML, XHTML, CSS, ASP, PHP, RegEx, CFML etc under my belt. As well as being exposed good doses of VB, ASP.NET, C#, ROR, Java, PERL, Python etc over the years.

The one thing I am finding out that I don't know shit.

At FSU the is an engraving on Dodd Hall that reads "The half of knowledge is to know where to find knowledge"

Now I know the other half of knowledge is making sure that you are being exposed to *new* knowledge on a regular basis.

If you explore Eclipse it will end up teaching you more than you can possibly imagine.

Literally.

I ran into it here.

http://www.barneyb.com/barneyblog/2008/02/11/barney-and-the-holy-grail/

Sean Corfield wrote on it

http://corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/Grails__a_first_look

I have been looking for a replacement for CF for some time now. I am not taking any chances and started learning Java. As you might know Java is huge and it is going to take a while to get up to speed with it. I have played with ROR and and Jruby I am not fond of the syntax or the development process

Enter Groovy and Grails. Grails makes some pretty complex and advanced techniques ridiculously easy to do. And the language is similar enough to CF and CF script to make the learning curve and barrier to entry not as steep as say Ruby or Java. And since it creates Java Byte code it should (in theory) run side by side with CF (That is this weekend’s science experiment). Basically to lets you write Java apps with out having to actually write Java.

http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2006/10/introduction-groovy-grails.html

http://groovy.codehaus.org/

http://grails.org/

I was a HUGE fan of Homesite and CF Studio for years. I thought that I would never find a replacement. I mean never ever. I never liked Dreamweaver and I have long admired MS's Visual Studio but developing strictly for windows was never really an option for me.

The current crop of IDE's that I have been using to do Java development (NetBeans and Eclipse) make Homesite look like a child's play thing. Homesite (and CF Studio) is a great text editor. A true masterpiece in it's time. However, the difference between CF Studio and Eclipse is far greater than the difference between CF Studio and Notepad.

In that light, I can say that in the last 5 years ColdFusion has not had a good IDE. I love CFEclipse but it is not so much the CF part that I love s much as it is the Eclipse part. Hats off to mark Drew and Crew, I am deeply indebted to the CFEclipse team for what they have done. But Mark is one guy. The other IDE's have armies of developers. CFEclipse is not nearly, not even remotely, close to the tools available to MS, PERL, PHP, Ruby, Java, etc. developers.

Perhaps the CF community is happy or content with DW and CFEclipse. I am not. I know there is better and that bothers me.

I am in search of the perfect application stack. There are many things about the above app stacks to love. I like them all. I have used all of the above to varying degrees. I have been on the Java train for some time and have been trying to get my head around it for the last few months. I wrote a couple POC apps in ROR to see what the hype is about and have been using PHP for years. And CF has been by my side for the last 10 years or so... A while back I was giving jRuby a spin using GlassFish and NetBeans and I really liked it. I liked it a lot. I also liked working with Java in NetBeans.

The thing is, I can't get them to play together all under one roof.

CF runs on Java so that is a given. PHP can play with Java a and ROR has been ported to Java via JRubyy. CF can talk to PHP and Ruby. I just wish I could get the all to run together, on the same machine, on the same web/app server, on the same port.

So I tried to install CF 8 as a WAR file on GlassFish and it worked. But CF 8 Enterprise is $7500, so I tried installing Railo and that is running fine. I am about to see if I can get JRuby and php/Java bridge to run as well.

If I can get all of these to run on the same server (on the same port) I will have the perfect platform. The RAD capabilities of CF and ROR, the bazillion OS PHP web apps out there and the power of Java (and bazillion prebuilt Java apps and tags as well).

I just got a new 4 GIG USB stick and I am trying to avoid having to tote my laptop home for the holidays. So I am setting up a portable development environment.

I did this before using Railo and while Railo is a good CF engine I am developing a new business to run on CF 8. I was reading up on Running CF on JREE and noticed that that the Coldfusion installer created a WAR file that you can deploy CF on a JREE server, specifically JBoss. Then I remembered that JBoss runs on Tomcat. Light bulb! So I tried it out. I created a WAR file and deployed it on Tomcat. It did complain about "Error [Thread-26] - Java heap space", but it worked.

So here is the setup.

Download the following:
ColdFusion Server Evaluation version.  /http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/
XAMPP standard ://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html#641
XAMPP Tomcat plug-in. http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html#644

Optional: You can snag the Java runtime buy downloading one of Railo servers that come with the Java Run time. Look for “with-jre-“ in the file name. This will save you from having to install the Java runtime on any computers that don’t have Java installed. You may have to experiment as to where you need to put it. Most probably the root directory of the drive, or under the root of tomcat. I forgot how, I did it but I did get it to work before.

http://www.railo-technologies.com/en/index.cfm?treeID=224

Instructions:

Run the CF installer and Choose the JREE version (third option) and create a WAR file and save it to disk. I did not try to install the .Net, ODBC or Search services (You are on your own on this).
Unzip XAMPP. I recommend using the ZIP archive or the Self extracting 7-ZIP archive to avoid having to install it.
Unzip XAMPP Tomcat plug-in on top of XAMPP.
Run the setup_xampp.bat fond in the XAMPP root.
Run the startup.bat EX: F:\XAMPP\tomcat\bin\ startup.bat

Point you browser tohttp://localhost:8080/ and go to the “Tomcat Manager”. The default User/Pass is xampp/xampp.

Near the bottom of the Tomcat Web Application Manager page is the “WAR file to deploy” section Use the “Select WAR file to upload” to upload the WAR file you created. You can upload the RDS.war as well. I have not tested this yet.

I recommend that you put a copy of XAMPP on a local hard drive and deploy the WAR file your local hard drive and then copy the contents of the “C:\XAMPP \tomcat\webapps\cfusion” dir to your thumb drive. See below for the reason why. I was not able to deploy CF to the thumb drive. It hung for about 20 before I got sick of waiting.

After this point your browser to http://localhost:8080/cfusion/CFIDE/administrator/ to finish the installation.

Notes:
You can run the other bat files like tomcat_service_install.bat if you want to install it as a service and all that.

You can change the port to 80 by editing one of the xml files. I forgot which one. Look at the docs or Google it.

USB sticks are *slow*. It takes a long time to copy directories with lots of files. XAMPP took a good 10 min or so copy to the USB drive.

The intranet I work with at work is a nightmare. I hate it. It is the spaghetti monster from hell. I have written some crappy code in the past but this thing takes the cake. When I first started I thought that I just didn't "get it"... that the guy before me had some mojo I just couldn't get my head around. Now I know he was a bad coder and a horrible architect.

Smart? yes. talented? Sorta. Good? no.

Both my boss and myself DREAD having to deal with his code.

My second thought:

I want a mentor. There is no one that I work with that can bring me to the next level with Coldfusion. My boss is a gifted programmer but he is a VB Jedi and is still learning CF. He has taught me a lot but I want an Andrés Segovia type mentor. Someone who will not take no for an answer, whip me into shape, and teach me the ways of the code warrior.

I am truly ready, willing and able.