2 Devs from Down Under

Today we've been joined by John-Daniel Trask, one of Kai's Wellington-based friends who's also the co-founder of both Mindscape and Raygun.io.

Kai admitted that Mark clearly won "thing of the day" this time, but he's already planning his come back from that loss for episode 31 in about two weeks.

After this unavoidable business of the day we start talking to JD about Raygun.io, a cloud-based service to track unhandled errors in your software. It's a very interesting product that stands out from the competition (according to Mark's 3-minute market research) by supporting a variety of different technologies as well as looking pretty.

The latter triggered a brief interesting discussion on the importance of the user interface, the Novopay debacle in NZ and how enterprise software (the likes of Oracle Forms, Adobe Lifecycle, Microsoft Sharepoint etc) now jump on the HTML5 bandwagon and what we'd expect to happen with that.

JD explains the tech stack Raygun.io has been built upon and it's interesting to see that they've used Mono on an AWS infrastructure for the core parts of the backend. While we're talking about AWS, Kai jumps to Glacier and his experience of backing up into Glacier using a Mac OS X tool called Arq.

The unavoidable Mercurial topic comes up again as well - Kai's got a Mercurial column in Tweet Deck now that's actively being monitored and JD chimes in that he used to use Mercurial a lot in the past because of the lack of good Git tooling on Windows, too. However in the last 12 months that has changed, in particular because of Github providing a lot of good services (if one is willing to still use the command-line). Side note: Atlassian's SourceTree is available on Windows now, too - only supporting Git (and not Mercurial) at this stage though.

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After nearly 4 months of "summer break" (yeah, right), we're back.

We actually managed to talk about a few really interesting things:

• Conferences we attended this year (Mark: RubyConf AU, Kai: Webstock) and conferences either or both of us plan to attend. The latter is a rather long: PyCon AU, cfObjective, D2Wc, Strangeloop, CFCamp, Lambda Jam Brisbane and YOW! Melbourne.
• Distributed Version Control - what's the future of Mercurial (looking at the vast success of Git) and what are the options to host Mercurial in-house after Kiln on premise doesn't seem to be actively sold anymore to new clients
• IntelliJ 12.1 is out - what's new and which plugins have we experienced to work well/not that well yet?
• Ruby/JRuby vs. Python/Jython - what's the story with some languages being very popular on the JVM and others not so much?
• Some CFML-related news: Railo 4.1 beta is out there (and looks great), CF 10 is available on Amazon AWS (finally) and Adobe CF 11 alpha is coming soon.
• Error tracking with Raygun.io and Mark's efforts in OpenGL and LWJGL.

Here are some more links:

• Clojure Workshop before Lamba Jam in Brisbane
• The "surprise" link for Bootstrap users (listen to the podcast first)
• Kai's CFML provider for the Raygun.io error tracking system

If all goes according to plan we're back in two weeks. Have a great weekend!

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So we're taking on a pretty controversial topic, but one that has been talked about a lot in the blog-o-sphere, and something we have touched on tangentially in the past.

Here is the list of articles we discuss during the podcast:

• CFML 2012: State of the Platform
• State of ColdFusion Platform in 2012
• CFML - Too Little, Too Late?
• Sean said that Nick said that Fusion Authority said...
• Coldfusion and the law of dialectics of progress
• Thoughts on "Coldfusion and the law of dialectics of progress" by Stofke on wheels
• The Last cf.Objective(ANZ)

We talk about our perception of the decline of CFML, specifically in Australia and globally, as well as thoughts on whether or not CFML as a whole can pull out of it, what we think the major CFML backers can do about it, and what we think you should be thinking about as a developer in the CFML community.

We expect this to invoke some differing opinions - so while we welcome the discourse, please remember to be civil.

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In this episode we are joined by the venerable Mark Drew where we talk about his favourite features in Railo 4, what his favourite IDE is and the interesting relationship between Adobe ColdFusion and Railo's CFML engine.

It's an interesting conversation all around, and live talks often are, including plenty of audience participation.

Kai also admits to his strange relationship with cats.

Update from Kai: Towards the end of the episode there's a bit of an uproar in regards to Cats that look like Pinups. Please note that the content might or might not offend you. You've been warned

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Today we were joined by Kris Korsmo who is presenting at cf.Objective(ANZ) this year on Efficient Coding Using CFBuilder.

We talk with him about IDEs, including ColdFusion Builder as well as other options (and we find out that Kai hates VIM).

As well as that, we cover Azure, building Windows 8 apps, as well as Mark's new 2560x1440 Catleap Q270 Monitor.

Resources:

• The IPS LCD Revolution
• Catleap Q270 Whirlpool thread

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As per usual, we are conducting speaker interview for the wonderful cf.Objective(ANZ) conference!

On the panel today we have Andrew Mercer who is presenting Work, ReST and Play, about REST based webservices, Justin McLean who is presenting Android Application Development with Java and Richard Turner-Jones who is presenting on Mobile Application development using PhoneGap.

We talk to each of them about their history as programmers, and get some of the details on each of their presentations as well.

It's a lively discussion, so tune in!

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We got the wonderful opportunity to talk to the illustrious Sean Corfield this week, which was a great delight and pleasure.

Continuing with our exploration of "What would happen if ColdFusion died tomorrow", we explore further into the Clojure programming language, as well functional programming, and Lisps as a whole.

We discuss with Sean the reasons behind why you would want to use a Functional programming language, over Object Oriented, the reasons why they have had increasing popularity over the last few years, as well as how you can integrate Clojure into your CFML applications.

We also go a little deeper into how you would structure a Functional programming application and the tools that you would use to develop with Clojure. Make sure to check the bottom of this post, we have ALOT of resources to link to.

If you have any questions regarding what we talked about on the podcast, please feel free to add a comment, and we'll make sure that Sean notices.

Also, if you are looking for a job, and want to work with Mr. Corfield himself, the company he works for World Singles is hiring! Two positions are available:

1. Back end, data-centric
2. Front end, design + CFML

Resources

We have so many, that it needed it's own section!

• Clojure Home Page
• CFMLjure Project Page
• Emacs
• Free Course on Functional Programming with Scheme: mitpress, udemy
• Try Clojure
• Clojure Koans
• 4Clojure
• Programming Clojure (2nd edition)
• Clojure in Action
• Clojure Programming
• Joy of Clojure

If you have any more you would like to add, please feel free to add a comment!

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So in this episode, we propose the following hypothetical scenario:

Adobe decides that it’s EOL’ing ColdFusion, without open sourcing it. Micha, Denny, Gert and Mark Drew all crash into the ocean in a tragic plane accident (they should really fly separately) and we discover that the OpenBD corporation is over an Indian burial ground, and everyone disappears in what looks like a horrific massacre, but no bodies can be found.

So essentially, CF is about as dead as it could possibly get. What do you do? Can you keep your applications with the platform you are on? Do you have to move? Can ColdFusion be resurrected and/or continued? Do you have to move to another language - and if so, which one?

It's a fairly interesting discussion topic, as it really forces you to look outside of "CFML-land", and make a proper examination of the offerings that currently exist, which is something that not a lot of us do (present company included).

As per always, we welcome any comments and or discussions - so please feel free to add comments to this blog post.

Also - if you have experience with any of the languages we have talked about on the show (or some we haven't), and think it would be an interesting addition to the podcast, please get in touch, we would love to have you on.

Links to some items we referenced in the show:

• Adobe Support Program
• TIOBE Language Index
• GitHub Language List
• StackOverflow Top Tags
• High Availabilty
• Clojure West Conference
• The StrangeLoop Conference

Also, don't forget - we'll be at cf.Objective(ANZ) which is the 1st and 2nd of November this year!

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