CF Developer needed in Philadelphia, PA

Thomas Jefferson University^* is currently looking for an Intermediate to Advanced level ColdFusion developer with strong design and layout skills. Flash/Flex skills and knowledge of Contribute a plus.

We are a small team that maintains TJU's internet and intranet web presence. In addition we do small to medium sized ColdFusion applications for various departments. For many of our projects we utilize Model-Glue. We provide complete service from design to database work. We are currently in the middle of a re-branding effort, our new look can be seen on our Electronic Medical Records site.

^*Note: Our employment page is due to be upgraded in the very near future. As such I'm providing a basic link that will be valid before and after the upgrade.

Labels: Actionscript, Adobe, ColdFusion, Contribute, Contribute Publishing Services, Dreamweaver, Flex, Object Oriented Programming

posted by Luis - 0 comments

Testing is hard work!

I recently found myself in the beta test group for Tunnels of Doom Reboot. My initial thought was that this would be easy. After all, I do write code for a living. I regularly test my code as well as my colleagues' code. I've spent countless hours of my life playing the original; I know it inside and out. How hard could this be?

Enter a world of fantasy where your instincts and imagination determine your chances of survival. Your journey is about to begin—Prepare yourself.
–Tunnels of Doom Manual

When the beta became available to the testers, I downloaded it, fired it up, and quite frankly had a ball. That day I submitted my first 'bug report' which consisted of a 'bug' that I could not reproduce as well as a handful of usability suggestions. Shortly after that the first status report came out, with a number of reported bugs list, most of which I had seen, but not thought to mention.

My big problem was that I was approaching it like a gamer and not like a tester. While I did not have access to the design spec to confirm behavior against like I normally do, several of the bugs that I failed to report, were pretty obvious. For my part, once I realized my mistake, I fired the application back up and have since delivered the type of bug reports that I want to see when folks are testing my code.

The thing is as web developers we are all very aware of the limitations of web-based applications, and it is easy for us to ignore things that are not easy to fix. We cannot, however, let ourselves become complacent. With the help of newer technologies such as Flex, we are in a position to overcome many of the historical limitations of web-based applications. The challenge is weilding these new technologies appropriately, and freeing ourselves from the limitations and thinking of the past.

Labels: Actionscript, Adobe, AJAX, ColdFusion, Flash, Flex, user interface, web 2.0

posted by Luis - 0 comments

Gettin' Reorganized

I came back from Vacation a few weeks ago to find out that my department is reorganizing. It's taken a few weeks to find out what exactly that means, but essentially I (and my colleagues) are in the process of deciding to either be full time web developers or move into middleware. It's an interesting decision to make. In my case, most of what I currently work on, falls under the middleware umbrella, but moving over there means probably less coding (at the very least less, ColdFusion coding, probably no Actionscript work, and most certainly no Flex). It would mean, however moving into other interesting things like identity management, and data integration, that would give the reconstituted web development group broader access to interrelated data from various systems. At the moment I'm trying to figure out whether it'll be more interesting enabling this access, or building the mashups that will hopefully be and end result. Decisions, decisions... In any event, I'll either keep this blog Adobe/Web related, or have it removed from MXNA.

Labels: Actionscript, Adobe, ColdFusion, Flash, Flex, mashup, middleware

posted by Luis - 0 comments

Some thoughts on ColdFusion Evangelism

In one of the comments to my Friday post, Barry B asked for my thoughts on ColdFusion's Strengths, and how they could be leveraged to get more companies on board with CF development. In my mind that called for more than a simple comment response. Below is the last of a series of posts exploring the topic.

In my last post, I talked a little bit about why I am a ColdFusion Developer. In my final post for this series, I thought I'd throw out some ideas on how Adobe can better evangelize ColdFusion. Bear in mind that these are just thoughts, and as such may or may not truly be viable ideas. I hold no claim to ownership on these ideas, so Adobe, or whomever can feel free to use them as they see fit. Mainly this is meant as a jump off point for discussion, rather than fully realized ideas.

The first thing Adobe can do is to better advertise. I receive regular mailings from Microsoft advertising .NET, as well as seeing their ads regularly in publications like eWeek, Baseline, etc... More importantly, my boss (who ultimately decides what we buy) sees those same ads. Sure, I receive emails from Adobe when new products come out, but my boss does not. Beyond that, the fact of the matter is that when I do receive one of those emails, I tend to file it away to look at later, and move on to the more time sensitive emails. Two guesses as to how often I get back to the Adobe mailings. As a direct result, while we would be good candidates for using Flex, I don't see that happening anytime in the near future. I've mentioned it a few times, but it's been difficult to put together a compelling business case for a product that my boss has barely heard of. (Reminds me of the old catalog service "Everything you've never heard of but can't live without".)

The second thing Adobe can do is put Livedocs out of it's misery, and replace it with something better. One would think that between Flex and ColdFusion, Livedocs would be a showcase of how to build a compelling rich internet application. Livedocs was great back in the day, but it's getting more than a little long in the tooth at this point.

My third suggestion would be to recreate the CF Pet Market application in competing languages (PHP, .NET, Ruby, etc..) using best practices in those various languages, then posting a series of articles highlighting specific areas where CF shines.

My final, and probably most controversial suggestion is for Adobe to release a free version of CF server that can be used in a production environment. I'm thinking something that sits say below Standard edition, with support for maybe 95% of the tags (i.e. no reporting, no pdf work, no image work, etc..), and reducing the number of built-in database drivers (perhaps keeping only mysql and access). The idea here would be to put CF on an equal footing price-wise with the PHPs of the world at least for getting in the door. Once users have an investment of time in CF, I suspect the cost of upgrading for the more robust pay version would be less of a concern than it is today. It might also mean more developers learning CF in the first place.

Well, there you have it, during this series of posts, I've discussed Why CF is not dead, why I use CF, and finally with this post, added some thoughts on how Adobe can better evangelize CF. Hopefully you found some of these ideas interesting.

Labels: .NET, Adobe, CF Is Not Dead Yet Series, ColdFusion, Evangelism, Flex, Microsoft, PHP, Ruby

posted by Luis - 5 comments