Question: What Will It Take To Get CF Devs Involved In Open Source Development?

[Steven Neiland]

So today I asked this question on twitter. Lets just say the response
was underwhelming.

I received 2 responses,

#1: The organization where they work should encourage them to involve
more in opensource development.
#2: Getting paids lots of money? :p

Now I know that there are active CFML App projects currently working
and some people do care about developing apps, so I have to wonder...

Is it that I only have a few <100 followers and did not reach a big
enough audience?
Is it that I asked at the wrong time, basically a monday morning?

Or is it that most cf devs can't get motivated enough even to talk
about app development. I cannot imagine it is this, not based on all
the talented folks I have met...

So what am I missing, and what will it take to get CF Devs talking/
participating in Open Source App Development?

[David R]

Hi Steve,

I too had similar experience whenever I posted some CF related
issues / questions.

One thing I could suggest you is, place a hashtag at the end of your
tweet.

For eg.

Instead of this,

What Will It Take To Get CF Devs Involved In Open Source Development?

You could've tweeted the same as,

What Will It Take To Get CF Devs Involved In Open Source Development?
#ColdFusion #cfml

By doing like this, I hope many of the fellow CF folks might get
notified instantly, where as a mere "CF" term can't get you more
visibility.

Thanks,
David R

[Robert Zehnder]

Well, my opinion is, with less than 100 followers it probably didn't get enough impressions to really stick, especially first thing Monday morning.  Adding some hash tags as David suggested would probably get you a few more views.  Also, I notice I get more notice on my blog posts, etc if I post on a Wednesday or Thursday.  That is the "sweet spot" of the week because people are more apt to be engaged because the first of the week is behind them and they haven't quite checked out like they would on a Friday before heading out for the weekend.  I don't have any real metrics to back this up, only observation. ;)

Also, you have to take into account the kind of devs you have.  I know a lot of devs out there who only do this for the check; it surprised me when I started working for a large shop where people just don't have real passion about the language. Far fewer are those who take up side projects just because they like learning new things or my personal favorite, just because I could.

[Jeff Gladnick]

For me, it was the hope that someone might actually improve my code for free.  I hoped that if I put out a first version, maybe somebody would make it even better and I could use that.  That has actually worked out for me a few times.

I've said this before, but someone should start a company dedicated to writing API wrappers in Coldfusion.  Adobe might even be willing to partially fund it.  You could then approach big companies (yahoo, msn, google, etc, etc,etc) and say - we noticed your API developer page has examples for a few languages, but not coldfusion.  We'll write a full featured API wrapper for you for $20,000 and do lots of examples.  This will expose you to 500k coldfusion developers.

Jeff Gladnick
http://www.GreatDentalWebsites.com
San Francisco, CA
Office: +1 (415) 814-0078
Mobile: +1 (302) 584-1445

[Robert Zehnder]

LOL That has been hit and miss for me.  I cranked out the Amazon SES API in a day or so before testing and releasing it and I know it isn't a highly needed API, but I did have a few developers that downloaded it and sent me emails saying "I fixed a compatibility issue for X," and that was great.  I appreciated the heads up, but saying they fixed X but didn't send me the modifications so I could incorporate it into the code base and fix it for everyone gets frustrating at times.

But that is to be expected. :)

[Steven Neiland]

Thanks folks for the comments. I retweeted this morning with the
relevent hash tags and got a much better response. Im going to put
some time aside later this week and try to summarize everything that
was discussed.

Jeff while I like the idea of building api wrappers, especially
considering how few there are for CF, I dont know how much traction
you would get pitching. Then again I'm often wrong so...

Robert, I agree that there are many CF devs who are only in it for the
money, but not everyone is. I think its that we are such a smaller
community that it is easier to find these types. There also seems to
be an attitude among many CF devs to not want to share code or more
accurately not want to work on someone else's code.

[Sean Corfield]

Put your open source projects on github to get better collaboration!

Once I moved FW/1 to github, the number of contributors went up
dramatically because of the social nature of github: people fork your
project, make changes and send you pull requests. Dead simple!

Sean

[Russ S.]

I've tried off and on to get people involved in my open source CF API-wrapper project, CouchDB for Coldfusion, for the past couple years. It's got some downloads on RIAforge, but hardly anyone has even given me feedback, much less contributed. I just posted it on GitHub, so if someone is interested then they can fork it.

So... I'm not sure how to get people involved in open source CF. I think part of it is the people that learn it. Other languages are taught in colleges or have huge fan clubs, but CF is different. CF devs are usually professionals who don't have a lot of extra time for open source.

Also, CF is missing a few things that some crazy popular languages have: There is no CF package management system. No CF command line support. 

Now that I think about it, I bet a CF package management system would bring in a lot more open source activity. People tend to improve the tools that they use, and if it is easy to submit their patch to the world, then they will do so. But if they have to jump through a bunch of hoops to submit, then forget it. 

How cool would it be to have a Ruby Gems equivalent in CF?

[Camden, Raymond]

I'm not saying this is a magic bullet - but for some reason,
support/involvement/etc for BlogCFC improved dramatically when I added
a Google Group listserv for it.

[Greg Moser]

+1 to both Sean & Raymond's points.  The open source project that i work on took off when I put it up on github and created a google group.  Now we have a ton of support.  I really can't say enough good things about github... why not make it a goal to have CFML ranked higher than 32: https://github.com/languages/ColdFusion

[Camden, Raymond]

And as a reminder - as much as I love my - I mean our RIAForge - it
was built to allow for "just listing". Folks can make use of Github as
their primary project site and simply "list" themselves over at
RIAForge. If you think GitHub is superior but still want to be
'listed' in the primary place for CF OS - then you can do both.

--
===========================================================================
Raymond Camden, Adobe Developer Evangelist

Email : r...@camdenfamily.com
Blog : www.coldfusionjedi.com
Twitter: cfjedimaster

[Sean Corfield]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 12:10 AM, Russ S. <russel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So... I'm not sure how to get people involved in open source CF. I think
> part of it is the people that learn it. Other languages are taught in
> colleges or have huge fan clubs, but CF is different. CF devs are usually
> professionals who don't have a lot of extra time for open source.

Most open source out there is written by full-time developers. The
main difference is language background: if devs "grow up" in an open
source world, they are more inclined to produce open source
themselves. CFML "grew up" in a proprietary world. I think it'll just
take time for the mindset to change now that we have more open source
in the CF community. Hopefully the mindset will change in time...

> There is no CF package management system.

CFCs have "packages" in the same way that Java or Clojure or... have.
But I think you mean for deployment, not language-level packages? The
Railo extension system could be a model for this and now the extension
store is available there's a central location for browsing and
installing what's available, as well as an easy channel for developers
to publish their apps. We have quite a bit of work ahead polishing it,
and at some point we'll need volunteers to help make it work for other
engines (our goal has always been to make this a cross-engine
solution).

> No CF command line support.

Coming in Railo 4.0. We're already testing it internally and can run
arbitrary CFML files from the command line without a running server.
It's a lot of work to abstract that out of a Servlet engine and we
have quite a bit of refinement to do yet!
--
Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN
An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/
World Singles, LLC. -- http://worldsingles.com/
Railo Technologies, Inc. -- http://www.getrailo.com/

"Perfection is the enemy of the good."
-- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880)

[Sean Corfield]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 6:58 AM, Camden, Raymond <r...@camdenfamily.com> wrote:
> I'm not saying this is a magic bullet - but for some reason,
> support/involvement/etc for BlogCFC improved dramatically when I added
> a Google Group listserv for it.

Absolutely! I would have thought this was a given. Open source
projects need active mailing lists.

[Sean Corfield]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 3:15 PM, Camden, Raymond <r...@camdenfamily.com> wrote:
> And as a reminder - as much as I love my - I mean our RIAForge - it
> was built to allow for "just listing". Folks can make use of Github as
> their primary project site and simply "list" themselves over at
> RIAForge. If you think GitHub is superior but still want to be
> 'listed' in the primary place for CF OS - then you can do both.

Yes, this is my standard approach now: code, wiki, issues all on
github; listing on RIAForge. That's how FW/1 works and I've recently
done the same with Edmund.

[Matthew Woodward]

Another situation that's incredibly frustrating to me, and IMO
illustrates that CFML folks, as a whole, don't understand the spirit
of open source in the least.

I won't name names or projects here, but I did a bunch of work on a
project a while back and got it to a point where it does its job
pretty well. As with most open source projects it's hard to tell how
much use it's getting but after it was first released I got some great
feedback and bug reports that helped tighten things down. It's since
been kind of just sitting there because A) it isn't really an itch I
need to scratch anymore, and B) I stopped getting reports from users
so I assume it does its job well for the most part, or maybe it just
isn't getting used all that heavily, which is fine too. I know of at
least a few people for whom it was a godsend and that's plenty for me
to think it was worth the effort.

Since the time I stopped working on it actively it's been rolled into
another project by someone else, and I've also read on blogs/twitter/
mailing lists from time to time things like, "Oh this is great stuff,
totally fills a need I had, just had to fix a couple of minor bugs I
ran into."

Not ONCE have I heard from the people who fixed said bugs so they
could be rolled back into the project. I even actively (and very
politely, lest you think I had my rant voice on ...;-)) reached out to
several of these people and got a range of responses from "oh sure,
I'll get you the fix" to silence.

Well, to date I haven't ever received a single bug fix from anyone, or
even an email saying what the bug WAS so I could look into it myself.
I even offered to turn the reins of the project over to someone who is
working on it rather actively, and got no response. Two different
email addresses and filled out a contact form on their web site and
nothing. Guess I'll have to resort to Twitter? Facebook? It shouldn't
be this freakin' hard, not to mention the fact that if the shoe were
on the other foot, I'd be the one reaching out to the project owner,
not waiting on them to contact me.

So great, people took this open source project and got some benefit
from it. Wonderful! They found a couple of bugs and fixed them. Even
better! But the won't take that final, all-important step of
*contributing the fixes back to the project* so EVERYONE can benefit?

Incredibly, incredibly frustrating and I think speaks volumes about
the attitude of a lot of CFML people. It's very insular, very selfish,
and very, very frustrating.

Present company excluded, of course. :-) I just see this as being at
the very root of why compared to other communities the state of open
source kinda sucks in the CFML world.

[Jason Blum]

Having not had much experience with programmer communities outside of CF, I can only speculate that maybe the problem is that our community's relatively small size just has only managed to produce a few dozen rock-star programmers who actually get off their duffs and contribute to OS efforts - enough to generate some really solid and powerful frameworks and apps, but too few to reach escape velocity towards broad collaborative efforts across the community.

So I don't know about the short-term, but I imagine the long-term solution is to grow this community, maybe by evangelizing to folks just getting into programming.  A High School math teacher friend of mine says some of their CS classes cover Java and one advanced experimental class gets into Haskell.  But most stick to PHP and JavaScript.  No reason CF can't get in on that action.

Maybe we need to wiki together something like http://edexchange.adobe.com/pages/a2a43c91bb, but in a concise format that can be delivered in a half-dozen hour-long sessions and geared towards environments that are freely and instantly deployable, something like Open BlueDragon on the Google App Engine.  Maybe community leaders could earn badges for their blog by volunteering at their local schools to deliver those classes.

I know I am eagerly awaiting my own kids' getting old enough to move beyond http://scratch.mit.edu/ and some lego progrmaming classes I've signed them up for.  I definitely plan on getting them into CFML as a gateway to other languages because its RAD features = early and engaging results.

Anyway, I bet we could cobble together a pretty good outline for a short CFML curriculum in a single BOF at the next opencfsummit.org !

[Matthew Woodward]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 5:54 AM, Jason Blum <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

So I don't know about the short-term, but I imagine the long-term solution is to grow this community, maybe by evangelizing to folks just getting into programming.  A High School math teacher friend of mine says some of their CS classes cover Java and one advanced experimental class gets into Haskell.  But most stick to PHP and JavaScript.  No reason CF can't get in on that action.

Yep, completely agree. With the open source engines we're on equal footing in these arenas now.
 

Maybe we need to wiki together something like http://edexchange.adobe.com/pages/a2a43c91bb, but in a concise format that can be delivered in a half-dozen hour-long sessions and geared towards environments that are freely and instantly deployable, something like Open BlueDragon on the Google App Engine.  Maybe community leaders could earn badges for their blog by volunteering at their local schools to deliver those classes.

Fantastic idea. As I've learned with my recent effort (first being announced right here, actually) http://openbdcookbook.org you just need to start. It doesn't need to be perfect, and certainly since I've only been working on the OpenBD documentation/book stuff for a weekend it's far, far, far from complete, but the important thing is to GET STARTED. I'm more than happy to donate wiki space or whatever's needed for this effort.

Also Mike Henke started an interesting effort:
https://github.com/mhenke/CFML-in-100-minutes

It's based on a Ruby/Rails effort and I see a lot of potential with stuff like that. Between this and things like I have planned for the OpenBD Quick Start I think we can have some real impact.
 

Anyway, I bet we could cobble together a pretty good outline for a short CFML curriculum in a single BOF at the next opencfsummit.org !

That would be a great BOF/ongoing effort at OpenCF Summit 2012. If we start getting organized now and get a wiki up for people to start hacking away I bet we'd be amazed where we're at by February.

--
Matthew Woodward
ma...@mattwoodward.com
http://blog.mattwoodward.com
identi.ca / Twitter: @mpwoodward

Please do not send me proprietary file formats such as Word, PowerPoint, etc. as attachments.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

[Steven Neiland]

Just to add my two cents. While its great that we now have the open
source engines that is only part of the equation.

I absolutely agree that we need to grow the community. One of the
reasons in my opinion that we don't have as many open source projects
is the fact that CF has been a "commercial" language for so long. This
has led to a very insular secretive trait in the way many CF
developers look at developing projects. We need to break this mindset.

What we really need now is a new way of thinking about CF. In some
respects CF needs an image make over, we ourselves need to look at it
with fresh eyes. We need to see it as a rich, powerful, top end
language instead of how many others have portrayed it. To do this I
think does mean bringing in new blood who are not infected with some
of the insular views that seems pervasive in the CF community right
now.

However we must also continue to support the folks who are active in
the OSS community at the moment so that they don't get
disenfranchised. We need folks like the people here to not give up
because of the past bad experiences with the current generation of
commercially minded cf devs. We need them to inspire the next
generation, and we need to start now getting the next generation
introduced to CF.

Getting back to the question of apps. Maybe part of bringing in new
blood could be holding challenges to develop simple apps. Set a
challenge a few months before a big conference to develop a typeX app
and give some kind of award during the conference?

Finally, I have to applaud the efforts of people like Mike, Matt (and
everyone else) for creating new resources for the CF community. I am
going to start a separate resources thread to list these and any
others people might wish to contribute.

On Jul 6, 9:02 pm, Matthew Woodward <m...@mattwoodward.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 5:54 AM, Jason Blum <jason.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > So I don't know about the short-term, but I imagine the long-term solution
> > is to grow this community, maybe by evangelizing to folks just getting into
> > programming.  A High School math teacher friend of mine says some of their
> > CS classes cover Java and one advanced experimental class gets into
> > Haskell.  But most stick to PHP and JavaScript.  No reason CF can't get in
> > on that action.
>
> Yep, completely agree. With the open source engines we're on equal footing
> in these arenas now.
>
>
>
> > Maybe we need to wiki together something like
> >http://edexchange.adobe.com/pages/a2a43c91bb, but in a concise format that
> > can be delivered in a half-dozen hour-long sessions and geared towards
> > environments that are freely and instantly deployable, something like Open
> > BlueDragon on the Google App Engine.  Maybe community leaders could earn
> > badges for their blog by volunteering at their local schools to deliver
> > those classes.
>
> Fantastic idea. As I've learned with my recent effort (first being announced

> right here, actually)http://openbdcookbook.orgyou just need to start. It

> doesn't need to be perfect, and certainly since I've only been working on
> the OpenBD documentation/book stuff for a weekend it's far, far, far from
> complete, but the important thing is to GET STARTED. I'm more than happy to
> donate wiki space or whatever's needed for this effort.
>
> Also Mike Henke started an interesting effort:https://github.com/mhenke/CFML-in-100-minutes
>
> It's based on a Ruby/Rails effort and I see a lot of potential with stuff
> like that. Between this and things like I have planned for the OpenBD Quick
> Start I think we can have some real impact.
>
>
>
> > Anyway, I bet we could cobble together a pretty good outline for a short
> > CFML curriculum in a single BOF at the next opencfsummit.org !
>
> That would be a great BOF/ongoing effort at OpenCF Summit 2012. If we start
> getting organized now and get a wiki up for people to start hacking away I
> bet we'd be amazed where we're at by February.
> --
> Matthew Woodward

> m...@mattwoodward.comhttp://blog.mattwoodward.com

[Edward Trudeau]

Fantastic idea. As I've learned with my recent effort (first being announced right here, actually) http://openbdcookbook.org you just need to start. It doesn't need to be perfect, and certainly since I've only been working on the OpenBD documentation/book stuff for a weekend it's far, far, far from complete, but the important thing is to GET STARTED. I'm more than happy to donate wiki space or whatever's needed for this effort.

Matt, are you looking for help on openbdcookbook.org?  I'm also interested in assisting in developing classroom curricula for CF at various levels.

/ejt 

[Matthew Woodward]

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 4:42 AM, Edward Trudeau <etru...@gmail.com> wrote:

Matt, are you looking for help on openbdcookbook.org?  I'm also interested in assisting in developing classroom curricula for CF at various levels.

Absolutely! The more the merrier. This the email address you want associated with an account on the wiki?

[Edward Trudeau]

Yes, please!  Can you give me a brief overview of where you had envisioned going next and where I might focus first? Full disclosure: I haven't used OpenBD as my CFML engine yet....

/ejt



------------------------------------------
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
  - George Orwell

[Steve Bryant]

> Getting back to the question of apps. Maybe part of bringing in new
> blood could be holding challenges to develop simple apps. Set a
> challenge a few months before a big conference to develop a typeX app
> and give some kind of award during the conference?

A long time ago, Ray Camden had a challenge like this. One of them was
to build a code analyzer. I remember thinking at one point that such a
thing would be a massive undertaking. Once I saw the contest, however,
I thought "it must not be *that* hard." At which point I actually
started thinking about how it could be done. Soon after that, I spent
a good deal of a vacation banging out an app for the contest. I don't
remember what the reward was - I didn't care. I just liked the
challenge.

Point being, I think these sorts of challenges could really get people
going. Come up with challenges for apps that people need. I don't even
think that the rewards matter. My motivation was (1) to see how well I
could handle the challenge and (2) to basically get a free code review
from Ray Camden to see if I was making any massive mistakes in my
coding approach.

I'm not even sure it would need to be before a conference, though I do
think that the chance to get recognition at a conference would be a
big motivator. If we could get a conference to give a presentation
slot to the winner to talk about their app, I think that would be
HUGE.

[Matthew Woodward]

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 8:21 AM, Steve Bryant <sebt...@gmail.com> wrote:

Come up with challenges for apps that people need. I don't even
think that the rewards matter.

Another great avenue is to find non-profits, schools, etc. who need apps and build for them. That's what we're doing with Enlist (http://trac.mach-ii.com/enlist/) and I think it's a great way to both promote CFML and do some good in the world. :-)

--
Matthew Woodward
ma...@mattwoodward.com

[Jason Blum]

...not to mention the whole Gov 2.0 movement:

http://govfresh.com/2011/06/ask-not-what-your-city-can-do-for-you-ask-what-you-can-do-for-your-city/

[Sean Corfield]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 5:54 AM, Jason Blum <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Having not had much experience with programmer communities outside of CF, I
> can only speculate that maybe the problem is that our community's relatively
> small size just has only managed to produce a few dozen rock-star
> programmers who actually get off their duffs and contribute to OS efforts -
> enough to generate some really solid and powerful frameworks and apps, but
> too few to reach escape velocity towards broad collaborative efforts across
> the community.

I'm really not sure it's community size. For example, Clojure and
Scala are both languages with small communities and yet they're
generating lots of open source projects. I still think the #1 reason
why CFML is only recently getting its open source act together is that
the community started in a proprietary world, rather than an open
source one. That's changing, but it's slow progress.

> So I don't know about the short-term, but I imagine the long-term solution
> is to grow this community, maybe by evangelizing to folks just getting into
> programming.

That will grow the community but non-programmers are looking for tools
to get their job done rather than programming for the fun of it so it
will depend on *why* they're "just getting into programming". Open
source developers are programmers who just enjoy the heck out of
coding and would do it for fun, even if they weren't paid to do it -
which of course is the case with open source (unless you happen to be
one of those rare handful of developers whose employer pays you to
write open source software).

> CS classes cover Java and one advanced experimental class gets into
> Haskell.  But most stick to PHP and JavaScript.  No reason CF can't get in
> on that action.

True. Now that there doesn't need to be any cost associated with CFML,
getting it into web dev classes is much more practical. I still think
most developers out there are not using the language(s) that they
learned in school, however...

> Anyway, I bet we could cobble together a pretty good outline for a short
> CFML curriculum in a single BOF at the next opencfsummit.org !

Why reinvent Adobe's wheel here? Their curriculum is freely available
already, as I understand it, although I haven't reviewed the legalese
around its use.

[Matthew Woodward]

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 10:13 AM, Sean Corfield <seanco...@gmail.com> wrote:

I still think the #1 reason
why CFML is only recently getting its open source act together is that
the community started in a proprietary world, rather than an open
source one. That's changing, but it's slow progress.

Yep, agreed. Another great example is the Grails community with the incredible plugin ecosystem they have going. I think it's a combination of a lot of history and giving people the right tools/platform/whatever you want to call it to contribute.
 

That will grow the community but non-programmers are looking for tools
to get their job done rather than programming for the fun of it so it
will depend on *why* they're "just getting into programming".

True, but here we can capitalize on one of CFML's major strengths, namely ease of use. I contend that a massive number of PHP programmers today didn't set out to be PHP programmers, but got into it because they were using Drupal or WordPress or what have you, wanted to extend that, or it was already running on a server and they just needed a little script to do X ...

Open
source developers are programmers who just enjoy the heck out of
coding and would do it for fun, even if they weren't paid to do it -
which of course is the case with open source (unless you happen to be
one of those rare handful of developers whose employer pays you to
write open source software).

I see a flip-side here though, and this is kind of a which came first question. On the one hand you have programmers who set out to be programmers and eventually become open source programmers, but I think there's also an awful lot of people (the type I alluded to above) who don't set out to be programmers but they think a project's cool and solves a problem for them, or they need to solve a particular problem and have enough initiative to think "I'll just learn a little bit of code to fix this," and before they even know it themselves they're an open source developer.

Having resources, tools, ubiquitous availability (like PHP), etc. all contributes to creating an ecosystem that cultivates this from both directions.
 

> Anyway, I bet we could cobble together a pretty good outline for a short
> CFML curriculum in a single BOF at the next opencfsummit.org !

Why reinvent Adobe's wheel here?

Without having read it, I'd say because we might (emphasis on might, again because I haven't read it) want to do something completely different or--and speculating again here--cover things that they'd have no interest in covering.

[Matthew Woodward]

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Edward Trudeau <etru...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, please!  Can you give me a brief overview of where you had envisioned going next and where I might focus first? Full disclosure: I haven't used OpenBD as my CFML engine yet....

Well, the vision is grand but fuzzy at this point, and honestly I hadn't thought about curriculum (and as Sean said we'd have to see if we're reinventing the wheel) until Jason brought it up but it seems like another good effort.

At this point basically I'm envisioning an installation guide (in progress), a quick start guide in the same vein as something like Pragmatic Publishers' Grails Quick Start, a more comprehensive "Learning CFML" guide in the fashion of the O'Reilly books like "Learning PHP," and a cookbook-style guide (hence the site name) where you can look up "recipes" to achieve common tasks, using something like PHP Cookbook (O'Reilly) as a basic model.

As you can see we're just getting started, and even though it's by nature focused on OpenBD, about 99% of it will be generic and applicable to any CFML engine. And frankly I'm not averse to expanding this to have generic CFML stuff and then engine specific stuff as well where applicable; I just needed to start somewhere and was prompted by a discussion on the OpenBD list to jump in on the installation guide.

So the short answer to your question is you can get started wherever, just check with me first so we don't duplicate effort. And not having used OpenBD isn't a hindrance--the next step in the quick start guide was going to be starting down the path of building out a sample application, there's room for basic tutorials, if the cookbook recipes strike your fancy that's cool too ... I've only spent a few hours last weekend on this so far so pick your poison, just keep the communication going so we maximize our efforts.

Thanks!

[Edward Trudeau]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 12:25 AM, Matthew Woodward <ma...@mattwoodward.com> wrote:

Well, the vision is grand but fuzzy at this point...

Love it!  I would like to take a stab at a tutorial style that begins with a basic web site all in HTML and CSS and then "progressively enhances" the site with CFML.  This approach addresses a learning style that I see accommodated infrequently on the web, but is quite common in the classroom (in fact, the Allaire training materials did this on a much smaller scale in the exercises).  

Does everyone (anyone?) think that is a worthwhile approach and secondly, do we have the capability of hosting the demos on the same server and domain?

Thanks,

/ejt

 

[Matthew Woodward]

On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 7:56 AM, Edward Trudeau <etru...@gmail.com> wrote:

Does everyone (anyone?) think that is a worthwhile approach and secondly, do we have the capability of hosting the demos on the same server and domain?

Yes, and yes. :-) I think the static-to-dynamic approach is great.

I'm in the process of moving all this stuff around this weekend but I will get you all set up once things are in place. 

[Lola J. Lee Beno]

On 7/9/11 10:56 AM, Edward Trudeau wrote:
> Does everyone (anyone?) think that is a worthwhile approach and
> secondly, do we have the capability of hosting the demos on the same
> server and domain?

I think that is a great idea. Also, give good examples of what are best
practices. Scoping, etc.

--
Lola J. Lee Beno
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lolajleebeno
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=714355583
Blog: http://www.lolajl.net/blog/

[Steve Bryant]

> Love it!  I would like to take a stab at a tutorial style that begins with a
> basic web site all in HTML and CSS and then "progressively enhances" the
> site with CFML.  This approach addresses a learning style that I see
> accommodated infrequently on the web, but is quite common in the classroom
> (in fact, the Allaire training materials did this on a much smaller scale in
> the exercises).

I like this idea as well. I would something that includes tutorials on
things separate from, but necessary for, setting up a dynamic site.
For example, setting up a web server or a database. If you can't get
those running then the code doesn't matter.

Steve

[Matthew Woodward]

On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 11:23 AM, Steve Bryant <sebt...@gmail.com> wrote:

I like this idea as well. I would something that includes tutorials on
things separate from, but necessary for, setting up a dynamic site.
For example, setting up a web server or a database. If you can't get
those running then the code doesn't matter.

Right--that's why I wound up separating the OpenBD installation stuff out into a separate guide altogether since it will apply to all the other guides. Otherwise it winds up being completely redundant between the guides.

Same would apply to the things you mention; the only caveat I'd make is let's not burn a ton of time recreating resources that exist elsewhere, but rather explain the options and point people to the appropriate resources. In other words I'm seeing perhaps the creation of a "Setting Up a Development Environment" guide that's independent of all the other guides, and it's basically an overview that explains what you need to do CFML development, briefly discusses the options, but then points people to the web sites for things like MySQL, etc. as opposed to recreating installation and how-to guides for MySQL since they exist in abundance elsewhere.

[Lola J. Lee Beno]

On 7/9/11 2:29 PM, Matthew Woodward wrote:
> appropriate resources. In other words I'm seeing perhaps the creation
> of a "Setting Up a Development Environment" guide that's independent
> of all the other guides, and it's basically an overview that explains
> what you need to do CFML development, briefly discusses the options,
> but then points people to the web sites for things like MySQL, etc. as
> opposed to recreating installation and how-to guides for MySQL since
> they exist in abundance elsewhere.

There was someone who had set up a such a guide 5 years ago, perhaps,
but he pulled it off the site. Last year or two years ago he had said
he was going to be revising it, but I never heard any more about this. I
can't remember which website this is. I thought I had the guide saved,
but can't find it in my archives.

[Lola J. Lee Beno]

On 7/9/11 2:29 PM, Matthew Woodward wrote:

> appropriate resources. In other words I'm seeing perhaps the creation
> of a "Setting Up a Development Environment" guide that's independent
> of all the other guides, and it's basically an overview that explains
> what you need to do CFML development, briefly discusses the options,
> but then points people to the web sites for things like MySQL, etc. as
> opposed to recreating installation and how-to guides for MySQL since
> they exist in abundance elsewhere.

Errr . . . that would be you, as Google bought up:

Home | Matt Woodward's Blog
www.mattwoodward.com/blog/index.cfm?event...AB5A... - CachedFeb 16, 2007
� Another Update to the Mac Development Environment Guide ... previous
blog post about setting up a ColdFusion development environment on OS ...

[Steve Bryant]

> Same would apply to the things you mention; the only caveat I'd make is
> let's not burn a ton of time recreating resources that exist elsewhere, but
> rather explain the options and point people to the appropriate resources. In
> other words I'm seeing perhaps the creation of a "Setting Up a Development
> Environment" guide that's independent of all the other guides, and it's
> basically an overview that explains what you need to do CFML development,
> briefly discusses the options, but then points people to the web sites for
> things like MySQL, etc. as opposed to recreating installation and how-to
> guides for MySQL since they exist in abundance elsewhere.

Absolutely. I think it is enough to link to other existing guides with
maybe a note about anything additional that needs to be considered. By
the same token, it would be nice if each page of the guide had a
convenient URL to which other sites could link.

Steve

[Matthew Woodward]

On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Lola J. Lee Beno <lol...@gmail.com> wrote:

Errr . . . that would be you, as Google bought up:

Heh--yeah and coincidentally my old blog is down while I'm moving to a new VPS and some other stuff.

There was another guide someone put together that I probably have a link to somewhere, not that it would be relevant anymore but these old guides might serve as decent models for what seemed to hit the sweet spot in the past.

[Jason Blum]

timely and interesting discussion of reasoning behind selecting
JavaScript to teach CS 101 classes at Stanford:

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/167-javascript/2723-stanford-cs-adopts-javascript.html





On Jul 7, 1:13 pm, Sean Corfield <seancorfi...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Railo Technologies, Inc. --http://www.getrailo.com/

[Edward Trudeau]

Hi, Matt - 

Your post this morning to G+ reminded me that I still have made no progress on my commitment to supporting the ColdFusion tutorial.  I still want to participate in this, but I'm very short of time right now.   I'm hoping things will slow down a bit in the first quarter of 2012.  Hope all  is well with you.

/ejt

------------------------------------------
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
  - George Orwell

[Matthew Woodward]

No worries! Work, life, etc. always get in the way of stuff like this, as you can tell by my lack of additional work on that as well. I was taking a class that just ended and now with the release of OpenBD 2.0 it's a great time to dive back in, so maybe over the holidays and early next year it'll start to move forward again.

Open source is never having to say you're sorry. ;-)