Flex Camp Miami is only two weeks away (only $30 for a full day including lunch - register today!) and since we have a really amazing lineup of speakers, I have been taking advantage by interviewing them about their sessions and other topics of interest. Today I am interviewing Andrew Powell of Universal Mind. Andy was a speaker at my previous Flex Camps and he is well known for speaking at a variety of conferences such as 360|Flex, MAX, CFUnited and cf.Objective() among others. Andy is a contributor to the Merapi project, which he will be speaking about, and the winner of the 360|Flex API Contest: Ribbit Category.

Mark Mandel, the creator of Transfer ORM for ColdFusion, has posted on about an upcoming update to his JavaLoader component for dynamically loading Java classes into ColdFusion without requiring that they be added to the ColdFusion classpath. In this instance he uses ColdFusion 8's new functionality (including onMissingMethod() support) to create an automatic ColdFusion Component (CFC) proxy for the Java class rather than returning an instance of the class itself. Very interesting and potentially useful stuff for deeper CF/Java integration.

Writing my own JavaProxy for ColdFusion 8 using onMissingMethod

Usually I save this stuff for my open source updates, but this one I found particularly fascinating personally - particularly since I had a similar idea when I read about the onMissingMethod() support in ColdFusion 8. Nonetheless, looking at Mark's code, it is clear that my working on this would have been like Miss Teen South Carolina at a Mensa conference. Nice work Mark!

So, as I mentioned on my Pownce account, I am working on a curriculum for teaching some basic object-oriented development in ColdFusion as well as introducing frameworks like Mach ii, ColdSpring and Transfer. I have outlined the basics of what is an object and the data access object (DAO) pattern so far, and then I hit the commonly used (including by me) "gateway" component. Now with most patterns in ColdFusion object-oriented development you can find a direct correlation in common J2EE design patterns. However, in this case, though I am not an expert on J2EE design patterns, the typical ColdFusion gateway seems to bear little resemblance to relevant design patterns in Java. So, the question becomes, what is the "gateway" in ColdFusion?

...here it goes again. Well its not all specific to Ruby on Rails exactly, but to Ruby, Rails and some of the underlying concepts like scaffolds and object-relational mapping (ORM). In just the past few days, we have had a brief discussion of incorporating Rails-like functionality into Mach II on the mailing list, Sean's Ruby (sans rails) and ColdFusion comparison, Ted Neward's long-winded explanation of why ORM is the "Vietnam of Computer Science," and now Joe Rinehart's lengthy and detailed explanation of why he doesn't like Rails. In all cases here, the opinions are coming from experts whom I respect and who probably know more about this than I do, but I'd like to share my view nonetheless.

So the other day I wrote about my experimenting with Mark Mandel's javaLoader.cfc and the mjxml java library. I have put this code into a set of components that you can easily use to read rss and output RSS feeds in ColdFusion. Basically, all you need to do is supply a URL when you initialize the component. Here is an example that reads the New York Times homepage RSS feed: