2 Devs from Down Under

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 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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I don't want to take too much of the excitement away from you guys listening to our little, friendly neighborhood podcast this time, but expect some ranting on various levels:

• Kai had some interesting experiences with Adobe's customer support after Adobe's software activation (resp. a failure in it) made Kai having no activated Creative Suite licenses anymore, then
• Mark and Kai agree on how ridiculous it is having to deal with DRM'ed ebooks in a lot of scenarios (besides Kindle, which actually works quite well) and then
• Mark gets into a rant on Adobe showing the broadcast of the MAX 2011 keynote in a loop and not on demand.

We also talked the good things that happened at MAX and the implications Adobe's push into the HTML5/CSS/JS developer communities has on the large crowd of Flash/Flex developers.

Make sure you listen up to the end - there's a challenge in which we ask you to leave a comment if you haven't ever met us in person. There's a bet included - I need more than 15 people to leave a comment to win! Go for it, please!

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And again Mark and I ran a session with two guests - coincidentally both speakers at cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex 2011: Sandy Mamoli and Phil Haeusler. Yet again Mark proved that he struggles to pronounce European last names with umlaut-replacements correctly (well, he's usually not even close) and yet again Mark found a new approach to introduce me weirdly at the beginning of the show.

We talked about Sandy's and Phil's sessions which basically deal with agile technical concepts (in Sandy's case) and geolocation/GIS (in Phil's case). Phil explained a few of the basic concepts of geolocation, we got into chats of him FB- and GIS-stalking his children when they're older (which Mark seemed be very interested in picking up to monitor his future offspring and general privacy discussions re use and abuse of such data.

Sandy points out that her talk is not going to be an agile introduction, but rather in introduction is some technical practices that people regularly use within agile workflows. Most of them are actually best practices for any development process, such as unit testing, continuous integration and more.

When Mark brought up the idea that he and I should talk about our sessions as well we got into a discussion on A/B testing and if/how it can be seen as an agile technical practice. Not sure if we reached any agreement on that though. I introduced my JVM tuning topic and one of the comments I got from Sandy was: "wow. and you can talk about that for 45 minutes?  VERY impressive". Thanks Sandy - I'm always trying to please

Two jobs: CF Developer in Melbourne and Flex/Java developer with GIS knowledge in Brisbane.

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This is another episode in which Mark and I are talking to some of the speakers that are going to attend and present at cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex this year. Today we're discussing a variety of topics: General concepts and pros/cons of version control (Dennis Clark), Test-driven development for ColdFusion developers using MXUnit (Gavin Baumanis) and task-oriented workflows within Flash Builder and ColdFusion Builder (Mike Henke).

As usual it came to a lot of spin-off threads such as why Subversion is still relevant (Gavin is the Patch Manager for the Subversion project), how the Farcry guys work when it comes to version control and why they still use Subversion and some other bit and pieces. One interesting project to link to would be the Ant4CF library, a set of ANT tasks to use together with ColdFusion.

Finally, I won. After being introduced by Mark as "intellectual" this time (first small win), I won our bet that we had more than 2 US-based listeners. A lot of comments on the Episode 12 blog post proved my point and also proved that Mark clearly can't count

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Yet another speaker panel from cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex! We're joined by the fantastic crew of Bjorn Schultheiss, Geoff Bowers (our first return guest) and Robin Hilliard who joined us to give us an introduction to the topics they are presenting at the conference.

This leads us to talk about designing testable Flex code, new feature in the Farcry framework and implementing domain specific languages using custom tags in ColdFusion.

From there, things digress into a history lesson on Spectra, and we also have a talk on how to find quality developers, irrespective of programming language.

Kai also made me link to this video. Apparently it's the game he was trying to explain in the podcast

More speaker sessions to come!

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We finally managed to record episode 11 after a hiatus of nearly 2 months, geeez! This was mainly due to a combination of work trips, vacations and renovation projects on my (Kai) end, so don't blame Mark for any of this.

In the current episode we're starting a series of speaker interviews (or rather speaker panels) for cf.Objective + Flex (ANZ). The first session features Tanya Gray, AJ Dyka, AJ Mercer and Andrew Meyers. We start off by discussing mobile web development frameworks like SenchaTouch, jQuery Mobile and jqTouch. Flash and Flex on mobile becomes a topic of interest along the way as well and there's a common perception that the Flex components are "not quite there yet" when it comes to performance.

From there we move on to automated deployments and build scripts for cloud-based CFML development and the pros and cons of various version control systems. We talk about cloud hosting offerings and RESTful service design as well as development adhering to the idea of REpresentational State Transfer. Kai gets another chance to rant about SOAP-based web services, which he happily jumps on

We close the panel discussion with a chat about Mura CMS, its extension/plugin mechanism and CFML-based content management systems in general.

Thanks a lot to Tanya and the three Andrews for taking the time to have a chat with us. There are some more sessions with cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex speakers in the pipeline - September will be a busy podcasting month

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Mark recently got back from the amazing cf.Objective() conference in the US.

We discuss the content that was part of the keynotes, as well as the new features that were revealed about the next version of ColdFusion - including the revelation that the next version of ColdFusion is coming sooner than expected...

We then go through some of Mark's favourite sessions, including, but limited to:

1. Undocumented and Off Script: ColdFusion & Ehcache
2. ORM Zen
3. Implementing an In-Memory Distributed Cache Using ColdSpring AOP and Ehcache
4. Advanced Web Application Security
5. Test Driven Development in JavaScript with JsTD and Jasmine
6. What is Functional Programming? (and why should I care?)
7. Intro to AngularJS, JavaScript Done Right

Resources:

• cf.Obective() Keynote Recording

Events:

• Adobe Creative Camp New Zealand 2011

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We're back again!

Starting off this conversation, we discuss Mark's (and probably soon Kai's) addiction to Spiral Knights, which is an incredibly simple and fun Diablo style freemium cross platform MMO (Friend Mark as 'Neurotic', if you play too).

Kai takes us through his experience at WebDU this year, and talks about how much he enjoyed the conference. We have a good discussion about his presentation on developing for mobile platforms, ranging from phones to tablets, and the pros and cons to different approaches.

The Amazon outage (which is still ongoing) becomes an interesting topic, and diverges into discussion about decentralised version control (i.e. what happens when your source control repo is stored on a server that goes down).

Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP comes up as well, and we have a good chat about the Flex ecosystem, and IDE's in general, along with the discussion of an interesting e-week article.

Finally, we announce a ColdFusion Job in Melbourne, and the CS5.5 Asia Pacific Roadshow.

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Another long episode! We have a long and winding discussion about running and developing for ColdFusion on platforms other than Windows - generally speaking, Linux (Ubuntu, Mark) and Mac (Kai), which takes us well into how we set up our local development environments. Details like how we use virtual machines, what Eclipse plugins we use, version control clients and the like are talked about as well.

Late to the party, we have a talk about the ol' cfscript vs cftag debate, and how we feel about how people can format their code. Surprisingly no fireballs were thrown in this exchange, as usually this tends to provoke incredibly heated discussions!  As we all know, which line a { goes on, is very important stuff!

Lastly, we talk about the recent broo-ha-ha over whether or not open source developers should be taking donations (Spoiler: we tend to side on the "if you give stuff away for free, do what you like" camp).

And lastly, we put a call out for more people to comment on this site to our podcasts! We love the feedback and being able to interact with our audience, so please comment / send us any suggestions or questions that you have, we'd be happy to talk about them.

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