Many times when we are working on our ColdFusion apps there are situations in which we want to quickly evaluate something or try some one or two-liner snippets to do something quick. The typical process then is that we have to create a .cfm page, put in on the server, go to the browser and execute it. And that's pretty much the only way we have for interacting with the CFML engine. This contrasts with other languages like Ruby, Python, or even PHP in which you can quickly interact with the language directly from a command line or terminal window. Wouldn't it be nicer to have the inmmediate satisfaction of evaluating our CFML/cfscript statements interactively? Well, that's where CFShell comes in.

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To the couple of misguided souls that used to pay attention to my blog, you may have noticed that after an unfortunate db crash last year (resulting in loosing a couple of really interesting comment threads) I seemed to drop down from the face of the blogosphere and just abandoned completely my blog. Well, what really happened was that the last few months of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, have been pretty hectic in my life, sorta like a rollercoaster of life changes that took me (literally) from one corner of the country to the other.

First, I left a job I had had for a little more than four years to seek fame and fortune elsewhere. Working at Unique Vacations/Sandals Resorts was a very interesting experience; I made great friendships, learned from a master developer, and tried my hand at building/improving pretty interesting and high profile applications. But in the end I felt it was time for a change and that I had to move on. So I left Miami and headed north to Tampa.

In Tampa something extraordinary happened: our first child, Diego, was born. The experience of being a father for the first time is pretty unbelievable and way too much to put in words. We stayed in Tampa for a couple of months, while I worked for a little bit at a consulting/software company there. Then, with the turn of the new year, I was presented with an extraordinary opportunity to work together with some very smart people on a beautiful place called Oregon. So yep, at the beginning of the year, my wife, the baby and I, packed our things and flew cross-country to start a new life on the other corner of the country.

And so, here I am, living south of Portland, Oregon, surrounded by a beautiful scenery, working with a great team on challenging projects and technologies, and blessed with a wonderful baby and wife.

Finally, I already started working again in a couple of personal projects. Over the next few weeks, I'll post about some improvements for the next versions of HomePortals and ColdBricks to give an idea of where they stand, and hopefully get some feedback about them too.

Until then, have fun and code a lot.

*** THIS IS A REPOST OF AN EARLIER ARTICLE THAT GOT WIPED OUT ON A RECENT DB CRASH. ***

If you ever wanted to modify ColdBricks or BugLog, but didn't understood how these application were constructed; or if you just want to see yet another way of developing CF applications, then this post may be for you.

I just posted some pages describing the framework I use for developing CF projects. It doesn't even has a proper name, I just call it "Core" due to its simplicity and its minimalistic nature. The basic principle of this framework, and the reason why I choose to use it instead of going with more traditional offerings, is that it only focuses on one thing and one thing only: provide a formal mechanism for going from one page to another and for invoking actions.

It doesn't do any fancy things, no complex request lifecycles, no sophisticated caching, no extensive API, none; however, it does provide enough extension points to which I can hook any functionality that I desire on a per-project basis. Basically the framework consists on a Front Controller implementation, a base event handler and a few conventions for directory structure and nomenclature.

Anyway, you can find the code and read more about this framework by going to the Projects section or by going directly here.

I realize I'm a bit late posting this now, but better late than never :) Last week I had the opportunity to do a presentation about ColdBricks to the Inland Empire's ColdFusion User Group (IECFUG). I want to thank Luis and all the IECFUG guys for inviting me and enduring my bad english and my blatant lack of PowerPoint/speaker skills; but hopefully they got to see a bit of ColdBricks in action and got a better idea of what ColdBricks brings to the ColdFusion's CMS market.

Here is a link to the recorded Adobe Connect presentation; also attached to this post are the presentation slides in PDF form. Feel free to take a look as it may answer some ColdBricks/HomePortals questions some people may have.

Again, thank you guys for the opportunity!