Open Source ColdFusion

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Open Source ColdFusion

• Dallas/Fort Worth ColdFusion User Group
• January 11, 2005

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What is Open Source?

• When programmers can read, redistribute, and
  modify the source code for a piece of software,
  the software evolves. People improve it, people
  adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen
  at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace
  of conventional software development, seems
  astonishing. -- Open Source Initiative
  (http//www.opensource.org)

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What is Open Source?
Its a pretty basic concept ...

• The source code for the software is made freely
  available to anyone who wants it
• Depending on the type of license, any derivative
  works or works including the open source code
  must also be made open source

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What Open Source Isnt
Some points of confusion ...

• Free as in speech (or freedom), or free as in
  beer?
• Open source software isnt necessarily free
• Free software isnt necessarily open source

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Open Source vs. Free

• The Free Software movement and the Open Source
  movement are separate but have overlapping goals
• Open Source software should be open source as a
  matter of practicality (i.e. a development
  methodology)
• Free Software software should be free as a
  matter of social responsibility (i.e. software
  for the greater good free as in freedom)

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Open Source Licenses

• Copyleft the original program is free and open
  source, and all derivative works must also be
  free and open source (i.e. proprietary software
  cannot be created from Copyleft software)
• GNU General Public License (GPL) free software
  and copyleft license
• GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) free
  software license, but not copyleft because it
  allows for inclusion with non-free components
• Numerous others (X11, BSD, OpenLDAP, Zope ...)

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Open Source Examples

• Operating Systems Linux, FreeBSD, Darwin
  (underpinnings of Mac OS X), BeOS, Solaris
• Databases MySQL, PostgreSQL, Cloudscape
• IDEs/Editors Eclipse, CFEclipse, vi, joe, pico
• Numerous nix and Windows applications (e.g.
  Firefox)
• Numerous web applications, particularly in PHP
• Laszlo Presentation Server
• Java Application Servers (Sun, JBoss, Tomcat)

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Why Open Source?

• Political/social reasons (FSF sees proprietary
  software as a social ill)
• To provide lower-cost or free alternatives to
  commercial software
• Desire to share work with developers and
  users/spread knowledge
• Way to freely work with large number of other
  developers on extensive projects in a
  geographically-disbursed way
• Its just plain fun!

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What About CF?

• CF as a product is not open source
• BlueDragon offers a free CF engine, but its not
  open source this does open up some interesting
  opportunities, however
• Absolutely nothing stopping us from writing open
  source CF applications, and many, many folks
  already have

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Open Source CF

• CF apps are at a bit of a crossroads
• Currently CF apps are usually open source,
  intentionally or unintentionally
• In Blackstone, as well as with BlueDragon,
  sourceless deployment is an option
• Open source will be more of a conscious decision
  with CF apps in the future

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Open Source CF Projects

• DFW CFUG expatriate Isaac Dealeys onTap
  Framework
• Mach-II and Fusebox
• FarCry CMS
• Many individual apps (BlogCFC, CFCUnit, others)
• Entire sites cfopen.org, cflib.org, cfczone.org,
  openxcf.sourceforge.net

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FarCry CMS
http//farcry.daemon.com.au

• Extremely full-featured content management system
• Free to use, completely open source
• Huge user community
• Quick support from developer or other users

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CF_Nuke
http//www.mycfnuke.com

• CMS/Community site package
• Modeled after phpNuke
• Huge amount of capabilities for quickly getting
  community/portal site up and running
• Features include news, calendar, message board,
  photo galleries ...
• Modules can easily be developed and added by
  others

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CFMBB
http//www.cfmbb.org

• Simple, open source CF bulletin board
• Modeled on phpBB
• Very new, but if it continues to model itself
  after phpBB could be very powerful

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CFBB
http//www.adersoftware.com/index.cfm?pagecfbb

• Another open source ColdFusion bulletin board
  system
• Seems a bit more complete and mature than CFMBB,
  has some themes available

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openForums
http//www.stickshiftsolutions.com

• Open source CF-based messaging and conferencing
  system
• AIM and ICQ integration

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bellaAlbum
http//www.bellavite.com/bellaalbum.cfm

• Free CFMX 6.1 application for creating and
  managing photo albums

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Ray Camdens Tools
http//camdenfamily.com/morpheus/blog

• BlogCFC CFC-based blog software very widely
  used in CF community
• DumpF allows for cfdump filtering
• Lighthouse CFC-based bug tracker
• ScopeCache page and sub-page based RAM caching

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Web Clarity
http//www.webclarity.com

• Open source CF tools and components
• Zip and Unzip CFCs
• XMLDB component (allows for SQL-like queries of
  XML datastores)
• Flash/CF chat room
• Dallas-based CFer!

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CFCUnit
http//www.cfcunit.org

• Open source unit testing tool for CF, based on
  JUnit API
• Distributed under the Apache Software License
• Part of OpenXCF at SourceForge
• Excellent way to auto-test your code for
  robustness

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clearsoftware.net

• Joe Rineharts set of tools
• jComponents CF custom tags for trees, tabs,
  accordions
• QueryTool CFC CFC for converting queries to
  arrays, structs, XML, etc.
• CF_Implements brings Java-style interfaces to
  CFCs
• CF_CreateImage tag-based version of Alagads
  image component
• .NET DataSet Converter

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CFFM ColdFusion File Manager
http//www.webworksllc.com/cffm/

• Open source, web-based file management component
• Runs in CFMX 6.1 and BlueDragon 6.1
• Released under BSD license
• Can integrate with the FCKeditor (browser-based
  WYSIWYG HTML editor)

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Switch_Box
http//www.switch-box.org/CFSQLTool/Download

• Open source (GPL) tool for generating CFC code to
  handle CRUD operations

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CFEclipse
http//cfeclipse.tigris.org

• Extremely full-featured CFML plugin for the
  Java-based Eclipse IDE
• Eclipse is the editor of choice for many Java
  developers
• If youre doing hybrid Java/CFML projects,
  CFEclipse is definitely the way to go
• If youre looking for a good IDE and dont want
  to pay for Dreamweaver, check out CFEclipse!

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Dont Forget the Java ...

• Extremely large libraries of open source Java
  code at our disposal with CFMX
• PDFBox tools for working with PDF documents
• Java Advanced Imaging API (JAI) numerous CF
  image manipulation components based on these Java
  tools
• Many, many, many possibilities (see
  sourceforge.net)

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Free, But Not Open Source

• cfx_captcha CFX tag for creating CAPTCHA images
• Plum IDE/code generator
• CFMyAdmin browser-based GUI tool for MySQL
  administration
• New Atlantas BlueDragon Server

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Open Source, But Not Free

• Numerous commercial CFML applications
• 2simplifi.com
• CommunityMX
• Numerous CFX tags and other add-ons

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My Take CF Needs Open Source

• Big argument against CF PHP is free and so are
  many of the applications people use
• BlueDragon Server means cost is no longer an
  issue on the server side
• What we need now is more open source CF apps
• Its getting better, but we have a lot of
  catching up to do
• Consider contributing to the open source CF
  efforts!

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Resources

• http//www.opensource.org
• http//www.gnu.org
• http//www.apache.org
• http//www.cfopen.org
• http//openxcf.sourceforge.net
• http//www.cflib.org
• http//www.cfczone.org