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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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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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 return after a long hiatus with another episode!

This episode continues to take us on our exploration of other programming languages.

We discuss the work that Mark has been doing with Ruby and JRuby, including integrating it with his ColdFusion project and SOLR as well. This segways into a discussion on Platform as a Service's like Heroku and their position in highly available and scalable applications.

Kai mentions some of the issues he was having around databases when he was mucking around with NodeJS, and asks our listeners to comment on any possible solutions they may know about.

We make note of the fact that Sean Corfield will in Australia soon, and will be presenting at events in Sydney and Melbourne. Looks like both will be packed houses!

Kai took his hand to compiling Railo 4 from scratch, and talks about the issues he faced trying to do that.

We also discuss several events that we are attending / attended:

• MSFT TechEd NZ
• Strangeloop
• cfObjective(ANZ)

Resources

• Compile Damnit
• Github: railo-build
• 12 Factor Apps

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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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