Author: tpryan

DZone released my Refcard on ColdFusion 9 today.

As you may or may not know, DZone Refcardz is a collection of cheat sheets that are designed to give developers a quick jumpstart into a new topic. They’re pretty great – no fluff and lots of content squeezed into a little bit of space.

I’m particularly excited about this as the audience for the DZone is pretty expansive, and cuts over many technology interests, including Flash Platform developers, Java developers, .Net Developers and other web developers. As an evangelist, it’s important for me to show off ColdFusion to people who aren’t already fans. The Refcard and my interview with DZone over the release of the public beta of ColdFusion 9 are part of that ongoing effort.

I’m committed to expanding the ColdFusion community by bringing in .NET, Java, PHP and other web developers who are willing to give ColdFusion a new look. We’re not going to do that by only talking to the ColdFusion community, and this is what reaching out to them looks like. More things in this space are coming down the pike, but I wanted to let all of you know that we’re committed to growing the community, and taking steps to do so.

I’ve gotten this question a bunch of times. How do you get information about what’s enabled in your application scope? How do I know if ORM is enabled, or what the datasource is?

Pretty easy – Instantiate the Application scope, and then get that information from the This scope.

In honor of CFUnited next week, I’m running a little Friday giveaway contest.

I will be asking 1 ColdFusion trivia question every 30 minutes on Twitter (@tpryan) starting Friday August 7th from 12:00PM to 2:00PM EDT. Use the Twitter hash tag #CFTFri. This will total 5 questions, and therefore 5 chances at a prize. The first person who gets a particular question right, as determined by my twitter client, gets the question’s prize. Prizes are limited to one prize per person. So if you win one, you cannot win another.

Prizes will be:

• 4 ColdFusion Rocks t shirts – 12:00, 12:30, 1:00, 1:30
• 1 set ColdFusion 8 Scotch Glasses (4 glasses in set) – 2:00

After you win, we’ll get in touch with each other via direct message. Then I’ll get your shipping details (not limited to USA), and shirt size.

I’d like to give special thanks to a recent re-addition to the Evangelism team, Ted Patrick. This is a blatant rip off of his contest idea. (But he said I could.)

If for some reason, Twitter is not playing well tomorrow (as it appears to be today), I’ll reschedule for Monday.

I had a 1 + 1 = 2 moment the other day. I was fooling around with the ColdFusion’s ability to turn Word docs into PDFs. At first glance it’s pretty simple and straightforward:

Word to PDF is nice to have, but as features go, it’s a pretty small bullet point. Don’t get me wrong, you get fidelity to the original, including fonts, layouts, and images. But it’s still just converting a Word document to a PDF.

That is until you remember that you can pull content out of PDFs now in ColdFusion 9. So now you can do this:

This will yield you the content of the original Word document. Now that’s cool.

There are a number of community events coming up that are either dedicated to ColdFusion or have ColdFusion tracks. What impresses me about this list is how many of them are either new this year or expanded from previous events. It’s great to see how committed this community is, not just to the technology, but to lending a hand to other members of the community.

• CFUnited – Leesburg, Virginia – August 12 – 15
• Adobe Max– Los Angeles, California – October 4-7
• CFinNC – Raleigh, North Carolina – October 17-18
• Scotch on the Road – Multiple Stops in Europe – October 19 -29
• Cf.Objective ANZ – Melbourne, Australia – November 12 – 13
• RIA Unleashed – Boston, Massachusetts – November 13
• RIA Adventure – Central American Cruise – December 6 -13

Date not publicly set yet:

• BFusion/BFlex Bloomington Indiana

If I missed your event, I apologize. I thought I had all of them. Drop me a line and I’ll add it to the list.

As Ben and Claude have noted, the Gartner Report on ColdFusion 8 is now publicly available.

It’s an analyst’s report and not a ColdFusion marketing piece. It’s honest, it’s independent, and it’s not there to fluff up ColdFusion. Therefore it has both pros and cons in it. However, I think it’s much more positive than negative.

It also makes me wonder, if Gartner thinks this after seeing ColdFusion 8, what are they going to say after we release ColdFusion 9?

I’ve been remiss in blogging about CFUnited mostly because I’ve been busy reviewing topics, writing sessions and brainstorming about CFUnited.

It’s looking to be pretty awesome from the content I’ve been seeing. Today we finally revealed the Adobe sessions:

http://cfunited.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/7/20/Adobe-ColdFusion-9-and-ColdFusion-Builder

What really excites me about the list is the participation of some Adobe people I haven’t seen participating in the ColdFusion community in awhile:

• Ryan Stewart
• Greg Wilson
• Christophe Coenraets

And members of the team from India:

• Bhakti Pingale
• Dipanwita Sarkar
• Praveen Gupta
• Manju Kiran Pacchhipulusu
• Hareni Venkatramanan
• Hemant Khandelwal

And of course the usual suspects:

• Ben Forta
• Adam Lehman
• Josh Adams
• Me

It’s looking like it’s going to be a great show. I can’t wait.