Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

A quick heads up about next week's ColdFusion User Group in London, UK. It's going to be an awesome event!

Our main speaker will be Gert Franz from Railo presenting, of course, Railo! But that is not all, we shall also have some very special guests turning up. I can't mention their names yet, but they are very big in the CF world and its an event not to be missed!

We shall also be doing a live recording of the CF Doc's podcast where we will be interviewing Gert as well as getting opinions from our very special guests on "2009 and all that Jazz" with what will be hot in the upcoming year!

As always send us your questions either to myself or call in your question via skype (UKCFUG).

This will be an event not to be missed and as you know seating is limited so get in early by emailing your attendance to reservations at ukcfug.org

For details about the event and how to get there, check the ukcfug.org site

The UKCFUG is having it's monthly meeting tomorrow night, with the topic being a Adobe Max 08 De-brief

After the presentations by Neil Middleton and Kev McCabe, we shall be recording live and direct the next episode of the CF Docs podcast!

If you would like to send questions to be answered by the CF Docs in the next podcast, email mark@ukcfug.org or skype: ukcfug to have a chance of your call being heard on the podcast!

Liz has posted up a nice big menu of choices for presentation topics at CFUnited 2009. Go cast your vote for the ones you like (I am not going to hint that Atomic Reactor and Model Glue and you are my presentations and they will be a LOT of Fun!... oh.. I just mentioned it! Ooops!)

But I was going to ask the reading public the this: Would you be interested in Model Glue/Reactor/ColdSpring training on the day before? Yes, I mean ME running the training! Dont be scared, it will be fun! (that's what Todd said)

Is one day enough? Maybe you would like a bit more? Or another topic? What would you like to be trained on by me? 

Here is how I do it, I add a contact form to my website from a nice service called http://wufoo.com/ and then I forget to mail them to myself. 

So what do I have now?  A year's worth of contacts that I have ignored. So apologies there! Since I am now using Mango Blog, it comes with a nice plugin to do FormToEmail that you just have to enable and put simple tokens in that create a nice form, which sends an email. Does what it says on the tin eh?!

So, without further ado, you can actually now contact me over at the new intelligent form! (Intelligent since I am not!)

This question has started to raise its head amongst various forums and I have been asked (and misquoted) that the CFEclipse Project will be discontinued now that "Bolt" has been announced. 

I just want to clarify to everyone that this is not the case. I am absolutely looking forward to Bolt being released. It is a great step forwards for CFML developers out there. But what will happen to the CFEclipse project?

Bear in mind that CFEclipse isn't just an editor. There are other features that I personally (ok I built them, I should like them) like such as the CFUnit tests, the Frameworks Explorer, Snipex and Snippets and the Dictionary view. These plugins are part of the CFEclipse project but they can be used standalone with a bit of coding. 

Also, think about how hard it is to get some developers to change their IDE. At the moment Bolt is in production and I am sure when it is released people will find some "quirks" that they are not used to and complain and switch back. Sometimes it requires a crowbar to separate a coder from their IDE. 

Regardless, the CFEclipse project (and even the editor) will keep on going, at least it means that we will have choice. Homesite, Dreamweaver, CFEclipse and Bolt (and others like TextMate etc). 

As with any ecosystem, they can live together, and be as individual as the developers that use them. CFEclipse will evolve and keep on going. 

I salute the CF Team as they have (from opinions of people at MAX) produced an IDE that is obviously wowing the crowds! And who knows, I might even submit bug fixes to Bolt given the chance ;) 

The first episode of the CF Doc's UKCFUG podcast is finally live! It took me a while to edit it and we had some problems with the microphones on the night so it was recorded straight from the laptop, thus you can't hear the audience very well. Next time I promise we shall have our mic's all sorted out and it will be of much better quality, that said, I don't think it's too bad considering the situation!

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes too! How amazing is that?

If you want your questions to be featured on the CF Doc's podcast, send an email to podcast@ukcfug.org or Skype "ukcfug"

At least live in this month's UK Coldfusion User Group meeting!

The UKCFUG managers will be hosting the first live recording of the "CF Doc's" Podcast at tonight's meeting, the podcast covering some CF community news but mainly answering YOUR questions! Yes, we have had some great questions posted already that we shall be answering tonight.

But fear not, you can also call in your questions via Skype! Just call the "UKCFUG" number or simply click the button below if you want your call featured in the show.

Hopefully the recording will go well and become a monthly feature.

After the summer hiatus which is essentially the conference season, the UKCFUG is back! And its better than ever!
We have got a new site up, in blog format so you can easily subscribe to news of meetings and other events. There is also an awesome meeting planned for the 6th of November.

We are testing the waters with a new format, we have a new segment at each meeting called "CF Docs" (like CF Doctors, gettit?) in which you can ask the panel of myself, Niklas Richardson, Neil Middleton and Big Mad Kev any CF based questions (and some Flex ones!). 

Hopefully if no technical issues happen we shall be recording the segment and turn it into a podcast, something like a "Gardener's Question Time" for CF. 

So whether you are planning on attending or will catch up via the podcast, send us your questions via email and we shall read them out. The email for the questions is or leave a comment here or on the UK CFUG website. 

Neil will also be giving us a preview of his Adobe MAX Conference talk "Structuring your development team and getting the work done" which should be awesome! 

So whether you can make it on the 6th, or just want some answers to your questions, get registered on the UKCFUG website! 

It's going to be a great season!

I recently have been working on adding a couple of different cache providers for Model-Glue 3 .

So I was getting my head round Andrew Powell's CF_EHCache so that I can write an interface for it that Model-Glue can use, which should be simple enough since it already uses a SimpleTimedCache, when I come across a very odd thing, with the code out of the box I got the following error:

The system has attempted to use an undefined value, which usually indicates a programming error, either in your code or some system code.
   Null Pointers are another name for undefined values.

So I started dumping my way through it, so to speak, but it would work... eh?!

	<cfscript>

		var mBeanServer     = createObject('java','java.lang.management.ManagementFactory').getPlatformMBeanServer();

			variables.manager	= createObject('java','net.sf.ehcache.CacheManager');

			variables.manager.create(javacast("string",expandPath('#arguments.scope#.xml')));

			variables.cacheName = arguments.cacheName;

	</cfscript>

	<cfdump var="#variables.manager#">

	<cfset createObject('java','net.sf.ehcache.management.ManagementService').registerMBeans(variables.manager,mBeanServer,

		javacast("boolean",false),

		javacast("boolean",false),

		javacast("boolean",false),

		javacast("boolean",true))>

<cfset variables.manager.addCache(javacast("string",arguments.cacheName))>

The above is the constructor code, I have split it out a bit so that you can see what is happening, but if call the above code without the cfdump, I get an error, but if remove it, it crashes. I have never seen something like this before.

UPDATE!

This morning, writing this post, I realised that in the third line I had forgotten to add the .init() to the CacheManager. Go figure! Seems that cfdump does the init for you eh?

Over on the Model-Glue mailing list, Dan Wilson has posted a very quick survey to get feedback and thus improve the features of the framework.

If you would like the project to grow, why not take a couple of minutes to fill out the survey?

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pV_YPtP0HXyYxlOXmNduDVA