Ben Forta | Blog

Blog posts made in February 2009

Brandon Hansen's blog is called "We make Good Websites Great", and he has just posted an interesting entry entitled ColdFusion vs PHP.

I guess the title of this post pretty much sums up my impressions of Mango Blog, but, let me add some details and context ...

I use Ray Camden's BlogCFC for this blog, and have for many years. BlogCFC has served me well, and continues to do so. I have thousands of entries, many thousands of comments, and many more thousands of page views. As I said, BlogCFC has served me well, and while I do have some suggestions/criticisms of it (which I do share with Ray who is very receptive to the feedback), I have no plans on switching away from it. BlogCFC works for me and does what I need.

I also run another blog, an Adobe internal blog that is used by all of the Platform Evangelists. We use it for trip reports, pointing out news stories, and more. It's been running on BlogCFC for a while, and I actually hacked Ray's code to make it use the Adobe LDAP server for authentication, as well as to build a mail server bot that the team uses to send blog posts from their e-mail, great for those of us who need to file trip reports but who live on the road. But some members of the evangelism team were a little less than enamored with BlogCFC, they wanted something that looked much better and which could be skinned easily, they wanted richer editing capabilities, and more.

So I downloaded Laura Arguello's Mango Blog and installed it on a test server. The setup was quick and painless; it just worked flawlessly the first time. And I was pleased (and surprised) to see that it even includes an option to import an existing BlogCFC blog (it can import from Wordpress, too), and that worked quite well (I had to tweak the database tables to fix a few things, but nothing too painful or time consuming). The blog is fast, looks good (by default, and can be made to look even better quite easily by using other skins, some of which are included and others can be easily downloaded and activated), and the Administrator tool is superb.

But what about the code and the ability to make modifications if needed? I started working through Laura's code, and honestly, this is some of the best ColdFusion code I have ever seen. It is well organized, consistent, documented, highly understandable ... but it's also pretty sophisticated, so casual hacks would not be recommended at all. So I pinged Laura for pointers. As it so happens she was working on a custom authentication feature for her next update (which she released this week), pass it the name of a custom CFC to do your authentication and everything else just falls into place. Clean, easy, problem solved. My mail bot was a little trickier, but actually very doable via Mango Blog's plug-in mechanism. I now have a plug-in CFC that was able to reuse much of the raw processing of my prior mail bot code, but which now invokes Mango Blog APIs to add posts. And the end result is actually much cleaner and safer than the casual hacks I was using previously. I still have a few bugs to work out with this one, but I am more than impressed with the code and how extensibility and flexibility were thought of and built in from the very beginning.

The bottom line is that while I am sticking with BlogCFC for my own blog, I really like Mango Blog, and am very pleased that the ColdFusion community has another great blogging option available.

Great Indian Developer Summit is one of the premier India tech conferences and events. Each year the conference hosts awards, and last year ColdFusion 8 won for Best Web Development Platform. This year, ColdFusion is nominated again for that same category, and Flex, Flex Builder, Connect, LiveCycle Rights Management ES, Flash Platform, and Device Central are all up for awards, too.

Next week Miami plays host to a Flex Camp. The event is on March 6th, 2009, at Hurricane 100 Room at the BankUnited Center on the campus of the University of Miami. Fellow Adobe Platform Evangelist, Greg Wilson, is presenting the opening session.

Nothing to add, this strip speaks for itself:

Lee's done it again, a new dead drop, this time in London. And the first clue is a doozy!

ColdFusion users in Europe have long been bemoaning the shortage of local hosting options. So it is worth noting that U.K. based Hostway was recently added to the Adobe ColdFusion Hosting Partners list. Hostway offers CF8 Enterprise Edition, Server Monitoring, Sandbox Security and VMware support. They can also provide 24/7 enterprise support.

It's good to see additional ColdFusion hosting options in Europe. If you have any personal experiences with Hostway, please share. Thanks!

The Adobe AIR team has announced the release of AIR 1.5.1 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This release fixes bugs and adds minimal new functionality. You do not need to recompile your application to take advantage of the 1.5.1 improvements. However, if you want to take advantage of the 2 new API changes introduced in this release you will need to update your application descriptor to 1.5.1.

The Flash Lite Developer Challenge is the leading competition for developers working with Flash Lite. The competition challenges three groups of developers: 1. those currently working with Flash Lite, 2. Flash developers interested in developing applications for mobile devices, 3. mobile application developers interested in using Flash Lite. If you belong to one of these groups and you are a company or an individual, a professional or a researcher, you can enter the competition in one of the five categories, get access to great tools from Adobe and stand a chance of winning one of the great cash prizes and promotional packages from the sponsors (including Adobe). The competition is open to developers worldwide (with just a few exceptions, see the rules). The deadline for entries is May 31st, 2009, and winners will be announced June 17th, 2009.

I'll be in Tampa next week, and will use the opportunity to speak to the Tampa ColdFusion User Group and the Tampa Flash, Flex and AIR Developers Group. Fellow Platform Evangelists Greg Wilson and Kevin Hoyt will be there too, and will also be presenting. The event is scheduled for Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 6pm in the Atrium of the Art Institutes of Tampa.