CFConversations - an Adobe ColdFusion and CFML podcast - Episodes

CFConversations 46, Roundtable 16 - The Duct Tape Programmer vs. The Architecture Astronaut

Sun, 23 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

In the final episode recorded at CFObjective 2010, here's one of the sessions from the conference, a panel discussion called The Duct Tape Programmer vs. The Architecture Astronaut, where we discuss the balance of getting things done without a lot of planning vs. doing a lot of planning what you are going to build before you starting building it. The emcee is none other than former co-host of the ColdFusion Weekly podcast, Matt Woodward. Our panel members are:

This session starts with a skit. I'm not in the skit. Matt's the narrator, Simon's the boss, Peter's the "Duct Tape" guy and Dan's the "Astronaut". At the end, the consultant that you hear is Mark Mandel. This panel discusses a "get'er done" kind of developer or an obsessive planner trying the architect the perfect system. The discussion soon turns into a discussion about failed projects, lessons learned and best practices each of us use (or would like to use). Over the last two years, I've had several requests wanting me to be interviewed for the podcast (and I'm willing to do that... I just haven't found an interviewer). That doesn't happen this time, but what you do get to hear a lot more than normal, since I'm not the emcee in this one, I give a lot of my own views and share some experiences. That said, I had to bleep out a few things I said in the session, but not any details that are missing from the experience - you still get the gist of what I was talking about. This episode was recorded on Day 1 of CFObjective, April 21, 2010. This was an interesting session that I think you'll enjoy. The audio quality, especially at the beginning, is not so good, but by the time we get into the panel discussion, the quality improves, so if you don't like what you hear at first, try to stick it out until the panel begins. Run time: 1:05:11

CFConversations 45, Interview 30: Sean Schroeder, Matt Levine & Chris Peterson

Sun, 02 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

I told you we're back, didn't I??? :-) This is the second of three episodes recorded at CFObjective 2010. This is a mobile interview, with Matt Levine and Sean Schroeder of Blue River Interactive (creators of Mura CMS). We mostly talk about the new Mura version 5.2. Later, we talk about the conference. Near the end of the interview, Chris Peterson of Alagad, whose session Matt and I just attended on the Amazon cloud, joins in and we continue to talk about sessions we attended. This episode was recorded with a Flip Video camera, which has a surprisingly good microphone (sorry, no video). It was recorded in the vendor area on the morning of Day 3 (Saturday, April 24th). That's why you'll hear kids, people and a few unknown sounds during the recording. :) However, the quality of the sound is pretty good on this one, better than the next episode we have coming out next. This was the last episode I recorded. I had hoped to record one or two more at lunch, but my shuttle left earlier than expected, and I had to leave suddenly to make it (which I did, somehow). The next episode was recorded on Day 1, but will take some more time to clean up. Run time: 21:53

CFConversations 44, Roundtable 15 - We're back! Day 2 at CFObjective 2010!

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Listeners, it is with great pleasure that CFConversations is back!!! And we're back with a vengeance! This roundtable episode was recorded on Day 2 of CFObjective 2010. We had:

Brian Meloche
John Mason of the RIA Podcast
Charlie Arehart, who is a regular on the RIA Podcast

We talk about the first couple of days of the conference, and various sessions we attended and presented. Here is a link to my presentation. I also want to mention that John, Charlie, the CF Jedi Master himself, Ray Camden and Josh Adams recorded a roundtable earlier in the day for the RIA Podcast, and you can find that on the website or by searching for RIA Podcast on iTunes. Believe me sincerely when I tell you how much it pains me when I can't get out a podcast, and the joy I am feeling right now that I was able to get this to you and in short order (24 hour turnaround). The last several months have been pretty tough on a lot of levels. Thankfully, things have stabilized and I'm hoping I'll be able to resume a regular schedule. I recorded two other episodes, including the Duct Tape Programmer vs. Architecture Astronaut session. I had planned to record my session, but I am planning something special for that later. Stay tuned! Enjoy! Run time: 40:45

CFConversations 43, Interview 29 - Matt Pressnall & HTML Formatter (which formats CFML)

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:12:00 -0400

It's been a longer than expected hiatus (yeah, I know you've heard that before), but we're bring something you've probably not heard about for the first CFConversations episode of 2010. If you're using the ColdFusion Builder beta, you may have noticed that there's something missing that may have been a part of your old IDE: There's no code formatter. Dreamweaver has its own code formatting features, and HomeSite+/ColdFusion Studio has Codesweeper. For CFBuilder, though, that functionality's not there. Now someone may build a ColdFusion Builder extension, but I've found another option. Searching around the net for an Eclipse plugin to format code, I found HTML Formatter. Now, you may think it's just a program that formats HTML code, but it's designed to format ColdFusion code, in fact, it was designed specifically for ColdFusion. If you go to the link above, you'll see a YouTube video: Through some detective work, I found the developer, Matt Pressnall, and contacted him. Eager to try it out before hearing from him, however, I paid the $14.99 and bought the program, and I was pleased with the results. I realized though it's called HTML Formatter, and it does format HTML, it was written for ColdFusion, and if you check it out, you'll see that the video on the homepage uses a ColdFusion example. Matt contacted me back, and we got talking, and I realized that this, and he, would make a good interview for CFConversations, and it would help get the word out about HTML Formatter. We talk about what led to Matt creating the application, how it can work within your Eclipse workflow but also with any other code editor, how it's currently Windows only, the licensing, how it works and what it can do over built in tools. We also get into some of the other interesting things about Matt, such as working with his wife, who is a web designer, his company, Copper Six, his experiences working with Ryan Stewart prior to him joining Adobe, some other projects he's worked on, and an interesting story of a viral video he created while his wife was expecting their first child. Check that one out, it's quite cool! This episode was recorded over the holidays, on December 28, 2009. Enjoy! Run time: 46:45

CFConversations 42, Interview 28 - David Stockton of Intergral (FusionReactor)

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:12:00 -0400

For this episode, here's an interview recorded on October 21 with David Stockton of Intergral, the company best known for their server monitoring tool FusionReactor and their ColdFusion debugger, FusionDebug. David discusses their long awaited analytics tool FusionAnalytics, which I can't WAIT to get my hands on! You can sign-up for the beta here once it's out (it's still in Alpha): http://www.fusion-reactor.com/labs/signup.cfm The potential of FusionAnalytics, if it lives up to the hype, is big. I am looking forward to seeing what it can do. David and I also talk at length about FusionReactor, some of the things he's seen during Intergral troubleshooting engagements, the framework vs. no framework discussion, ColdFusion 9, Railo and driving a beat-up 1989 VW Golf that he purchased for £82 across Europe and some of the adventures during that trip. Run Time: 1:18:27 Note: This is most likely going to be the last CFConversations episode until at least December, due to some tight project deadlines I've got coming up. Stay tuned!

CFConversations 41, Interview 27 - Blue River (Mura CMS)

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:08:02 -0400

The last, but certainly not least, of the episodes recorded at this year's CFUnited was an interview I did on Day 3, with the guys from Blue River Interactive, the company behind the open source Mura CMS. Specifically, I interviewed:

Sean Schroeder
Matt Levine
Ryan Thompson
Malcolm O'Keeffe

This was a very fun interview to do, and I think that comes out in the recording. We talk about Mura, its beginnings, how Blue River markets themselves and Mura to other companies (very interesting to hear; it certainly opened my eyes to the possibilities), the name change (from Sava CMS), the guts of the CMS and Mura's reception at conferences, in the blogosphere and user group community, among other things. If you haven't looked at Mura yet, I strongly suggest you have a good look at it. I think you'll be impressed! My recent exposure to Mura motivated me to get this interview. I have been told that I am somewhat frugal when it comes to giving out compliments, :-) I don't speak highly of something unless I mean it... and I do mean it when it comes to Mura, and no, they're not paying me to say that! Enjoy! Run time: 1:04:38

CFConversations 40, Interview 26 - Mark Phillips of Vertabase

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:58:10 -0400

This episode's much later than expected, due to back to back but unrelated computer outages, and then several delays this month, but we're finally back with a new episode! And I apologize, but we won't be having any episodes recorded from MAX or CFinNC, and we'll only have stuff from this past weekend's bFusion/bFlex if we're lucky enough to have one of the guys record some for us (I'll update this once I know one way or another). On this episode, we have another of our "Speakers of CFUnited" series, even though CFUnited has long since come and gone. This is an interview Mark Phillips of Standpipe Studios, best known for Vertabase, a project management application and software as a service provider that's written in ColdFusion. I remembered Mark was at a Birds of a Feather at MAX 2007 that I hosted, where we discussed ColdFusion in the Enterprise. I was curious, as a lot has changed since that BOF. In the two years since that conference, we have two new and viable open source ColdFusion engines, a new ColdFusion 9 and much more. I asked what does any of that means for a company like his that sells both hosted applications and source code. We also discuss the conference (from a Day 1 perspective), project management, the Vertabase application, AIR and dogs (briefly). This interview took place on Day 1 of the CFUnited 2009 conference, which was August 12th. Enjoy! Run time: 30:49

CFConversations 39, Interview 25 - Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan Return!

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:01:00 -0400

I am happy to give you this second interview with Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan of Adobe, following up the one we did at cf.Objective() 2009. This one was recorded on Thursday, August 20th over Skype.

In this post-CFUnited interview, we talk about the conference, both from each of their perspectives, and the corporate Adobe perspective. You may be surprised that one of them... well, you'll have to listen to find out!

I ask them about what they think about 4CFF.org, which was announced at CFUnited. Adobe isn't actually involved in 4CFF at this point, but they comment on it individually.

Since the last time we had sat down at CFObjective, Adam and Terry have been busy people! They both did stops on the user group tour, so I ask how the tour was for both of them. Since this was Adam's second tour, I also ask him how the ColdFusion 9 (Centaur) tour compared to the ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio) tour two years ago.

Also since the last interview, ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder were released as public betas. I asked how the participation and response has been so far. It may or may not be common knowledge that ColdFusion Builder was built on Aptana Studio. I ask why Aptana was chosen over the Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst engines, which were also built on Eclipse.

From the last interview, I followed up on something that had been hinted at during the last interview: Battles with Adobe Marketing. I try to dig more to get some dirt, but I got a very good explanation of why certain things get held back. Specific to that, I ask about their/Adobe's efforts to get the word out about ColdFusion beyond the current developer base.

I ask about a couple of things that were recently posted on Twitter:

Terry's repost of this post, and some of the posts that preceded it.
Terry talks about apologizing for not being Ben Forta.

Note: Speaking of Twitter, I have setup a Twitter account specific to CFConversations, in addition to the ones I have for the Cleveland CFUG and my own: coofuushun.

We didn't get to touch on the CFML Advisory Committee much last time, so I ask more about it this time.

Adam and I mentioned on Twitter that we were going to have this interview, so Some questions to ask (names not identified to protect the innocent):

Do you have a release schedule for ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder?
When are you releasing ColdFusion 9?
How much will CFBuilder cost?
More info on EC2 licensing?
Will the ColdFusion 9 licensing be changed to allow for development and staging licenses? (You may want to listen to the podcast for this answer specifically!)
Is ColdFusion so powerful that it can create a problem that ColdFusion itself cannot solve?

An aside: I'd like to congratulate Adam and Rachel on their recent announcement!

Run Time: 1:00:51

CFConversations 38, Roundtable 14 - Post-CFUnited 2009: Wrap-up, Withdrawal & Fallout

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:18:00 -0400

Recorded on Thursday, August 20th, this episode is a post-CFUnited 2009 "wrap-up fallout" roundtable, where we review the conference as a whole, "post-conference withdrawal and fallout" of things that both happened and what didn't happen during the conference. On this roundtable, we have:

Brian Meloche (Host)
Adam Haskell
Dan Wilson
John Farrar
Mark Mandel (who had to leave about 45 minutes into the podcast)

If not mistaken, aside from the last roundtable (which I split into two episodes), this is the longest episode published so far! I could have split this one in two, but I've decided that it has to reach two hours to be split. And, besides, it took me long enough to edit this one, and splitting it would have meant even longer delays. During this episode, we discuss whether or not CFUnited 2009 was the best ever, the venue, some of the highlights from the conference, including the day 2 keynote (where my friend Todd Sharp's SlideSix was prominently mentioned), the day 1 keynote, as Dan tells us about the 4CFF.org foundation (he's on the board), the CFML Advisory Committee, and memorable sessions from the conference. We also talk about some of the things that happened on the periphery of CFUnited. We ask Adam about the Fusebox fork to FuseNG. We talk about Model-Glue 3.0, Railo 3.1.1 coming out and going out of beta, and Mach-ii 1.8 beta. We also talk about what I call "Post-conference fallout & withdrawal", especially the "fallout" portion of that. We talk about several speakers cancelling last minute, the most prominent of them being Hal Helms. We talk about his last minute cancellation, and his training offer, and offer some other suggestions, like doing a ColdFusion Meetup and giving his slides to Liz so they can be put on CFUnited's website. Lastly, we talk about upcoming conferences, such as CFObjective ANZ, CF in NC, bFusion/bFlex, RIA Unleashed, and MAX. Here are some links to things mentioned in the episode (in no particular order, and please add any not mentioned here in the comments):

Run Time: 1:41:22

CFConversations 34, Interview 23 - Lawrence Cramer (corrected)

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:29:02 -0400

Note: This episode had an issue in the recording that has since been corrected. Hence, I am reposting. The first of a deluge of CFConversations episodes is upon you! It's time to break the log jam! This episode that is one of the Speakers of CFUnited series, is an interview with Lawrence Cramer, who you may know from Cartweaver. Lawrence is speaking (in one hour! - apologies to all) on Real World eCommerce with ColdFusion, and he talks about his presentation. He also talks about how he got started in Dreamweaver and later ColdFusion, ColdFusion 9/ColdFusion Builder (still code named, at the time) and some other projects. Run time: 40:11 (was 36:17) [8/17 Update: There was a track overlap at around the 20 minute mark of the recording. It was mentioned to me, but not fully explained, so I only went back to listen to it today - 8/17 - and finally confirmed the issue. The track has been corrected, and now no longer overlaps. Apologies to all!]

CFConversations 37, Roundtable 13 - CFUnited 2009 Day 2, Part 2!

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:35:00 -0400

I told you that I wouldn't keep you waiting for part 2 of the Day 2 CFUnited roundtable. Well, I did not disappoint! In part 2, we cover a lot of stuff, including things both at the conference and other things to think about. We talk about the importance of giving feedback to speakers, particularly if the talk didn't meet expectations. I shared reactions from my recent CFObjective presentation and how, although most feedback was very positive, some of the more negative comments helped me for when I present it next. That sent us off on a tangent about OO in ColdFusion and the recent discussions in the Blogosphere, including the podcast Hal Helms recently did that OO (and software development in general) is not a destination but a journey. We discuss several of the birds of a feather sessions on Monday night. John Farrar talked about his silent authentication BOF. Listen to the recording if you don't know what that means; I didn't myself know what silent authentication until I heard the definition. FYI, the Google Group hinted at in the recording is: http://groups.google.com/group/cfauthentication We also talked about the CFML standards committee BOF, the user group BOF, the iPhone development BOF, and the sci-fi BOF. We discuss Joe Reinhart's inspiring day 2 keynote that prominently featured my friend Todd Sharp's Slide Six site as an example of sites CF developers should aspire to build rather than oldschool CF CRUD-style apps that ColdFusion no longer has the same advantages it historically had over other languages. We also talk about some of the other announcements that might be lesser known by CFUnited attendees, such as Railo officially going gold on Wednesday, Model-Glue 3.0 going gold on Monday, and Mach II 1.8 beta being released. We FINALLY talk about 35 minutes in about the Fusebox forking announcement, as the fork will be called FuseNG. We discuss some of the interesting day 2 sessions we attended. Janine Driver, Mark Phillips, Charlie Arehart, Mike Brunt, Adam Haskell and Barney Boisvert were singled out as speakers with interesting talks. Lastly, some of the demo derby apps were discussed, as the two Johns and Timothy are each competing in the derby. If you are at CFUnited, we'll be doing another roundtable tonight (Friday, August 14th) at 7:30pm in the Legolas room (Dogwood E) if you would like to participate in the next CFConversations roundtable. Also, I am trying to schedule some CFConversations interviews for the rest of today and tomorrow morning with speakers, sponsors attendees. Even if you only have a few minutes, I'd like to talk to you. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook contact me through the contact form or just yell at me in the hallway! Run time: 1:03:50

CFConversations 36, Roundtable 12 - CFUnited 2009 Day 2, Part 1!

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:36:41 -0400

Unfortunately, the roundtable scheduled on Day 1 of CFUnited kind of fell through, but we made up for that big time on Day 2! It was two hours of non-stop podcasting goodness! Since it went as long as it did and there was nothing to cut, I decided it would be best to split the episode into two parts! That is a first for a roundtable episode. On the roundtable panel:

Brian Meloche (moderator)
John Mason - By the way, check out John's new RIA Podcast.
Timothy Farrar
John Farrar
Anita Neal
Jason Dean

In part 1, we talk about the new venue for CFUnited this year, Stellr, the day 1 keynotes from Liz Frederick and Adobe, day 1 sessions, birds of a feather and hints at several other things that we dive deeper into in part 2. I think you'll really enjoy this one! Run time: 59:46

CFConversations 35, Interview 24 - Barney Boisvert

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:10:35 -0400

Another one from the backlogs, this episode in the Speakers of CFUnited series features Barney Boisvert. This is a great episode, which was recorded on Day 2 of CFObjective in May. Barney talks about his session, CFGroovy - Groovy for the CFML Developer, which he's doing Thursday at 4:45pm at CFUnited. Of course, that means he talks about Groovy and why he uses it with CF. We also talk about Hibernate, Grails, Fusebox and his mini Fusebox-inspired framework called FB3Lite. This is a great interview that I think you'll enjoy! Run time: 58:04

CFConversations 33, Interview 22 - Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan of Adobe!

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:27:00 -0400

On Day 3 of cf.Objective() 2009, May 16th, I was able to interview Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan of Adobe. I knew Adam back when he was a user group manager. Adam's been with Adobe for three years, first as a ColdFusion specialist on the sales team, and later as a product evangelist for ColdFusion and government. He recently took over as product manager for ColdFusion and Bolt, the code name for the new ColdFusion IDE. Terry, or Terrence as you might know him, joined Adobe this year as a product evangelist for both ColdFusion and Adobe in education. Before that, he was an Adobe Community Expert, and an IT director at the Wharton School of Business. In this interview, we talk about Centaur, Bolt, the reaction so far, presenting the new stuff, release dates, and what might be coming in what might be called ColdFusion 10 and the second release of Bolt. We talk about what it's like to be former ColdFusion fanboys now working for Adobe, and for Adam, taking over the reigns of ColdFusion. I also ask Adam about his recent accident while in London for a Wee Dram of Scotch and his recovery, the CFML standards committee, and the other open source engines. We also talk about the user group tour, which starts today, is hopefully coming to a city near you in June. Check your local user group's website, or groups.adobe.com, for more information. In Cleveland, Adam is coming June 17th, and you can find out more and RSVP by going to www.clevelandcfug.org. Please note: RSVP is for those who will attend the meeting in person. This is not going to be recorded or available on the web. Sorry... this is a in-person event only! The only thing I regret about this interview is that it's not long enough, but that's all the time we had. I didn't get to ask everything I wanted, and skimmed the surface on several topics. However, maybe that's a good thing. I hope to sit down again with each of them very soon. A few announcements... Several people have asked for my What to Do When OO Fails You in ColdFusion" presentation from CFObjective. I'm going to be presenting it next month to the CFMeetup group, and I had some issues with my demo code for the conference, so I'm going to hold off posting it until that presentation's over and I have better demo code. The wait will be worth it. Ryan Mannion at Politico.com contacted me, and they are looking for a Senior ColdFusion developer. Politico.com is a high-traffic site, with 40-100 million page views per month and you may have seen them mentioned on CBS' Face the Nation or CNN. The position is full-time, in Arlington, Virginia, and if you're interested, please check it out http://www.politico.com/employment/senior_coldfusion_developer.html. If you haven't found it yet, there's a new ColdFusion podcast out there. It's called CFHOUR(), with Dave Ferguson and Michael Sean Becker. They're up to episode 9, and you can find them in iTunes and at cfhour.com. Lastly, and I don't know who to thank, but just before CFObjective, a beautiful new 24" ASUS monitor showed up at my door. The shipping label had my name for both the bill to and the ship to, so I'm not sure who sent me this wonderful monitor. It appears to be an upgrade from one that was on my Amazon wishlist. Whoever you are, thank you. If you're curious, my Amazon wishlist can be found here. Run time: 43:27

CFConversations 32, Roundtable 11 - The cf.Objective() Roundtable!

Wed, 20 May 2009 02:34:00 -0400

I had hoped we would have been able to get in more than only one roundtable at cf.Objective(), but one is all I was able to get, and it's a good one. I had hoped to get this out before the conference ended, but I had a few issues on Saturday, and I just didn't quite finish it. Once I got home, it took a few more days before I finished it, but here it is, still fresh! On the roundtable panel:

Recorded during the last Birds of a Feather (BOF) time slot on Day 2 Friday night (around 8pm), this roundtable covers Days 1 & 2, but not Day 3 except to say what sessions we were looking forward to. We start with the keynote, which covered Centaur and Bolt and a few other things. Several Centaur and Bolt features were discussed and shown during the conference, both during the keynote and during sessions Adam Lehman and Terry Ryan did during the first two days, and a few more on Day 3 that we don't talk about here. We also cover the interesting sessions we attended in the first two days, our own sessions (we were all speakers), the BOFs we saw, the Flash Builder renaming announcement, sessions we were looking forward to on Day 3, and some of the well-known speakers that did not attend this year (though we missed several). Enjoy! Run time: 59:53 Note: The episode is the eleventh roundtable episode, not the twelfth. I corrected the title, but the link will remain as is.