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It has been an unusually busy week, both at work and things to do outside of work.
I attended an InDesign Melbourne Usergroup meeting on Tuesday (21 Aug), probably the biggest and most well run usergroup meeting I have been too all year. More than a 100 people attended (by my estimates), too many came so there was about a 40 min delay as everyone was registered. Many thanks to Noha Edell, Business Product Manager for InDesign, for coming and sharing the little quarks quirks of InDesign CS3 and what you have to do to get around them.
Also middle of the week saw the news of Flash having official support for the open source H.264 codec, and one would assume future H.26* revision which is good news for Flash/Flex community. I personally have not investigated enough into the support, but I hope this means Flash engineering team is trying to integrate native H.264 abilities into Flash which would accomplish what Silverlight has natively with VC-1.
Also somewhere along the week I realised that I may not have realised mentioned earlier that CF8 standard now comes with event/messaging gateway as well, albeit limited via the EFR, which was only available via CF7 Enterprise.
I also decided to get serious about picking up Flex, so I am going to start reading my two Flex books while waiting for, or travelling on, the train. Also decided it was time to have a CF site where I can pursue my projects (or extend others CF projects), and am shopping around for a CF web host based in Australia, but the usual problem of bandwidth pricing in Australia is frustrating to say the least.
I also started experimenting with the new feature set which interested me the most, which is the Exchange integration, which I must say is beautifully done, i.e. it works flawlessly… Though there is a little concern on security and the easy of use balance. To communicate with the exchange server, each thread/request needs to be opened with the user’s username and password, i.e. their Active Directory username and password, hence I need to find out what is the most practical way on storing this information and ensuring the security of the username and password, while not making it tedious to prompt for the password each time, for opening threads/request. If anyone wants to point me in the right direction it will be greatly appreciated! I will blog about possible solutions/considerations if and as they come to light.
Have a great week ahead!
It was a good event (run over Connect/Breeze)! All involved in planning it deserve a pat on the back! It was also good to see other CFUG groups around Australia and New Zealand.
Interesting snippets of info from the Q&A with Tim Buntel during the event:
- AJAX library can be extended, replace/updated. (though its at your own risk) This leave the door open for AJAX to be updated via a CF 8 updater if needed.
The question original asked was along the lines of ‘does adobe think it was risky adding AJAX functions/libraries built in considering they do not have control over browsers’
- There was no announcement to a future version of Homesite, for now it seems eclipse is the IDE for the moment.
- You can add any features to the wishlist here, the future direction of CF will be influenced by the feedback from CF users, just like CF 8.
- Good chance that there maybe a roadshow/event for CF8 in Australia!
Many Thanks to the effort of the people running the CFUG, especially the boys running the Melbourne CFUG, and Tim Buntel for lending his support!
Just a quick note to all about the difference of the two versions of CF8. I ask(emailed) Raymond Camden, your friendly neighourbourhood CF jedi, about it which he kindly pointed out it has been addressed in the comments of one of his post.
In brief, Jason Delmore (I assume he is one of Adobes CF engineers, or the very least one of the persons in the know Product Manager) commented on that post that Limited meant only one thread (think queue/pipe) for all features, Enterprise comes with Enterprise Feature Router (I assume this gives each feature its own thread at the very least), so unless you use the more advanced features extensively you would not see much benefit getting enterprise version, and if you do the company/business should be able to afford enterprise version of CF8, hence all CF 8 applications should and will work on any version, its just a matter of scalability of performance.
You can read more about it here on the post of Raymond’s Blog in the comments.
I had to ask this because i wanted to do a proof of concept project, and am hoping work gives me some time to work on it, if not i have to make time in my own time.
Have a good weekend
Click here for it! This is the easily navigable. (i hit a brick wall when i tried to search it and came to a Adobe page does not exist/Error 404 page)
Remember to check out the ‘Coldfusion Developer’s Guide’ in it, I believe most of the features are split into bite sized goodness, including new features like Interacting with Microsoft Exchange Servers, Creating and Manipulating Coldfusion images and Creating Slide Presentation among others.
A brief summary (in my experiences so far) between Coldfusion, PHP and ASP.Net
| Coldfusion | PHP | ASP.Net | |
| Upfront Costs | High, comes with a lot standard | Free to High, Free version is well Free, but there are numerous commercial packages/add-ons like file compression, dynamic caching, advanced server monitoring/management | Included if you have a Windows Server License. |
| Development time (comparatively) |
Faster comparatively | Fairly Fast but falls somewhere between CF and .Net most of the time, catches up with commercial packages/addons | Longer than the other two |
| Processing Speed | Fast, with proper setup of JVM, even faster. Scales well with size and load | Fast though may have problem scaling without addons | Decent, sometimes rather slow. |
| Integration with other languages | JAVA, Flex/Flash | non-native(non that i know of) | .Net, Silverlight, C# |
| Developer Community | Not as big as PHP or ASP.Net, but still a decent presence is expected in most major cities. | Big, anyone can pickup PHP, tend to have a large spectrum of skill level | Big pool from Higher Education Institutes. Well supported and backed by MS |
The license of Coldfusion is, and should be, a very small part of any business budget, especially if you happen to be in a country where bandwidth is more expensive than average, like Australia. Also, Coldfusion 8 has Developer(from memory, limited to 1 IP) and Trial editions(from memory, 30-day trial unlimited IP), which are free. So you can start learning or developing immediately.
A big advantage of coldfusion has is its development time, it was first developed as Rapid Application Development Platform/Framework, and still is very quick to develop and deploy in.The time spent on development is considerably less, even if it saves 1 developer 1 min a day, and who worked about 230 days a year, divide the number of your developers by the licensing fee per year. Same reason why software developers and/or software development companies don’t mind paying for good development tools.
Another is its tie in to Flex, and it will be the de facto choice due to integration with Flash. Thought that may change in the future, since Flex is going opensource and PHP will probably have extensions written for Flex integration. I can’t imagine the .Net platform supporting Flex too much, as it may undermine MS own Silverlight product.
One additional point is that Coldfusion is largely backwards compatible, the last rewrite was CF 6 when CF went to a JRun/JVM backend, after which very few functions/tags have been dropped. Which is something Adobe had the sense to maintain so far in both CF and Flash environment.
Over the next few days, you will see a fair number of people grumbling about the pricing of CF 8, which has not increased dramatically (besides R&D isn’t free, and the software engineers need their paycheck!). But no other web application platform today can offer what Coldfusion out of the box, from image manipulation, PDF integration, Flex integration, Exchange Server integration, dynamic presentaions on the fly, etc., click here to find out more
Coldfusion has loads of features but there is a business case for each,
e.g. PHP will do the job for most companies public facing websites why pay more than you need to ? PHP also has numerous framework and CMS, many of which are opensource. ASP.Net has loads of exposure in Higher Education Institutions, so it should be easier to find suitable staff, and tie-ins to Microsoft’s CRM and Sharepoint products.
Coldfusion will still be around for another iteration from the looks of what they have done with CF8, but don’t take my word for it, go read about it and try it out for yourselves! (Its only about 300+ mb download!)
Edited: Added in .Net Developer Community
