Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about the redesign of Happy Cog Studios web-site. This lead me through a really long line of thought.

As I pointed at previous post, design is important and ColdFusion being a programming language attached - since Macromedia's days - to the design world is a great thing.

That being said, I see ColdFusion development being fragmented these days. Some people argue for more programmatic, Object Oriented recurses. Some jumps to the boat to fight for more easy-to-use solutions. There's no consensus at the community.

To me is far more important to implement things quickly and easily - that meaning more webapps with less time - to make great systems and more money. As an entrepreneur, I'm interested in tools, tags and features for that. We have a handful of ideas but no time to implement all of them, even using CF, which we believe to be a RAD.

To accomplish that, Adobe should focus on two things:

• A great IDE to allow developers to do MORE with LESS. I have to say I'm not using Dreamweaver, Eclipse nor Flex tools and I don't know the state of these softwares. But first key concept to focus on is IDE. Period.
• To map the most common tasks and create really easy ways to implement then. CF price is high and I can bet we never used some of the most advanced features it delivers. We just haven't need of then.

I'm not saying that Adobe should forget all the great and advanced features. It has to be there and we like to know that, if we need, they'll be available without the need to spent more money. But the main focus should be RAD solutions, and the "Flex+ColdFusion" package seems to me as a sign that Adobe really understand things this way.

As a side note, Happy Cog new design is amazing. I wanted to do THAT with this web-site but, as you can see... I'm in lack of design skills to do so. =)

Labels: adobe, coldfusion, entrepeneur, flex, ide, rad, simplicity, work

Leave a comment | Links to this text |

Yesterday was the launch of Yahoo! Pipes. I haven't had the time to try it myself - and it appears to be down all the time, anyway, most because of the attention it's receiving.

Pipes seems to be a web development ambient that allows users to mash RSS Feeds up to get more interesting and focused information in an easily and fashion way. Everybody is talking about it (from BoingBoing to O'Reilly Radar and HacksZine) and I think the idea sounds fantastic, bringing Yahoo! (finally) to be the first one to release something really new. Let's watch what move Google will be doing...

There's also some interesting news today about ColdFusion. As I wrote in the previous post, the combined force of ColdFusion plus Flex is huge. Adobe released today a case study of a solution to deliver risk management information in a powerful, meaningful and easy way. Very interesting, specially because of the integration with LogicERM.

Second interesting news today was the announcement of the third (or second?) coming of Ben Forta to Brasil. Great! It'll happen in February, 28th, at São Paulo and you can get all details here. I read it at the CFBrasil mailing list and at CFGigolô blog. Alex Hubner, CFGigolô founder, is one of the most devoted ColdFusion developers here in Brasil and member of the AUG-SP board of directors and CFBrasil mailing list manager.

Some years ago we had Marcello Frutig too, but it appears he (sadly) retired from development. This makes me remind that I first met Frutig at previous visit of Mr. Forta, at Rio de Janeiro - I've had to travel about 15 hours in two buses to go -, in October, 2003.

At that time Flex was a secret "in development" by Macromedia (!) and I was questioning Mr. Forta (in a shame poor English that made me blush) about how Flex and ColdFusion could live together (and if Flex wasn't a ColdFusion killer!) and about the support from Macromedia to hosting companies.

It's sad to note that I think today as then: it's poor and keeps youngster from learning and developing in CF, as they don't have hosting at a reasonable price - or don't have a host at all. I sure hope Adobe change things with Scorpio (CF8) to stay competitive. This is one topic I'll be watching.

Related links for "Quick notes - Yahoo! Pipes & ColdFusion related"

Another entry in O'Reilly Radar about Yahoo! Pipes...

...and another one.

TechCrunch post about Y!Pipes

Read/Write Web post about Y!Pipes

Finally, Anil Dash post about Y!Pipes

Labels: ben forta, coldfusion, flex, hosting, mashups, pipes, rss feeds, yahoo

Leave a comment | Links to this text |