For thousands of developers, ColdFusion still pays the bills, and likely will for some time to come, if judging only by the growth in the markets where it is most prominent. Adobe says that CF is thriving with a community of more than half a million developers, but how many of those developers are thriving [...]
I’ve been using Billings for about a year now. It’s a great OSX application for managing clients, projects, and invoices. It’s currently $40, and for the price, it has saved me enough time to be worth it. On the downside, I’ve found it to be less than intuitive on occasion, and I’ve often had to [...]
This is for Mac people only – sorry Windows friends. I’ve been looking for this for a while. Now, I’m pretty hard core, but I’m not hard-core enough to use the command line for all my interactions with MySQL. If you’ve been using the MySQL Query Browser that can be downloaded form mysql.org, you probably know that it will crash if you breathe on it. I’ve looked at a few of the clients that have come out for MySQL, but none have made me want to shell out money to replace what I had.
Adobe really needs to get this right. Bolt, the soon to be released IDE for ColdFusion, is the talk of the town in the CF community, and let me tell you – it better be good. I have to say, I’m not really that pleased that this is an Eclipse based product. I’ve almost completely dropped Eclipse lately due to instability – at least on the Mac. I think that Adobe could have made this product a stand-alone product on its own platform, and still allowed it to be extensible (If you have not heard, you will be able to write extensions for Bolt with CFML, which is all kinds of awesome).
Am I the only one who just doesn’t understand why so many ColdFusion developers are jumping to Flex? I’m aware that my opinion on Flex and its place may be unpopular in the ColdFusion community, but I’m wiling to entertain the possibility that I may be wrong, so bear with me.
I’ve always thought that as a ColdFusion developer, I should use CF for my own site. It wasn’t even something I’d thought about. I’ve used both BlogCFC and Mango Blog for my own site, and still use both on various other sites. I’ve been really happy with both, and have no plans to swap them out on any other sites.
I found it really easy to add all kinds of functionality using ColdFusion as a blogging platform, and that’s why I’ve stuck with the CF blogs so far. But then I did a little work on my cousin’s blog last year (check it out if you like illustration), and was intrigued. Since then, WordPress has made a bunch of updates, and the admin interface is simply beautiful. I found a very simple template, made some changes to the CSS, and everything worked. My last step is usually to bite the bullet and open up my new sites in IE6 – to see how late I will be up fixing it. For the first time ever, I had absolutely nothing to fix. I know this is due to the good work of the template designer, and not necessarily WordPress, but it speaks to the magnitude of people working on this platform.