Objective Bias

That's right -- I did it. I made the move to Railo. My original plan was to wait for the open source version 3.1 to be released. But after playing with Railo 3 for a while and testing my sites on my local development box, I've been nothing but impressed with its performance and how my CF8 sites "just work" on Railo. So I called up my host, Viviotech, set up a new Linux VPS, installed Railo 3 (Community Edition), migrated the sites from my former CF8-powered VPS (which include this blog and a couple of other sites) and shut that one down.

What can I say? Gert Franz, Michael Streit and co have done an amazing job with Railo. I upgraded my blog to the latest version of Mango, which is Railo-compatible, and my ColdBox sites are just screaming along. And I definitely can't complain about the fact that my hosting costs have been reduced to less than half of what they used to be. Also, any newcomers to Railo should join the Railo_Talk group on Yahoo. The Railo guys are very responsive in helping people out.

Many thanks to Gert and Co. I'm really looking forward to Railo 3.1!

Like others before me, I decided to take the Are You OO-Ready? quiz at HalHelms.com. I have to say that I surprised myself by getting a 72.9% (35 out of 48 correct). That's not too shabby considering that I'm a (mostly) self-taught CFML programmer who just got into the whole OOP thing a little more than a year or so ago. Anyone think that maybe Hal should offer me a scholarship to one of his classes in Sarasota?

I've mentioned before how impressed I am with Sava, an open source ColdFusion CMS released by Blue River Interactive. In my spare time, I've been tinkering with it quite a bit, but now I am really looking forward to an upcoming project in which I will be knee-deep in Sava.

One of the cool things about Sava is how it's been designed to be extended and integrated with third party code.

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Last week at the Boston CFUG meeting, we had an "open mic" night where CFUG members went up and gave short presentations in front of the group. I decided to follow up the talk that Luis Majano gave on the ColdBox framework back in July and give an intro on ColdBox plugins. I had some technical problems with my Winblows laptop early on, but Brian Rinaldi graciously let me borrow his laptop for my presentation. It was fun to present and it went well overall. But due to time constraints, I didn't get a chance to go over the code of the custom plugin that I demoed, so I decided to do it here on my blog. (Besides, it's been getting stale around here).

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In a previous post, I commented on how I discovered that using slash-delimited component paths worked in the CreateObject() function. In the comments to that post, the general sentiment was that use of this "undocumented feature" should be avoided, as it may lead to unexpected behaviors. I kind of figured that already and make it a point to stick to using dot-delimited paths.What brought this to my attention in the first place was the following example code in the Coldbox Framework Documentation

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