Apache: ‘No jerks allowed’ | The Open Road – CNET News

You see a lot of people doing open source, but not a lot of people doing open development…At some open-source projects [Erenkrantz mentioned Mozilla], all of the technical decisions, even if the license is open source, are not subject to public comment. At Apache, everything is done in the open over public forums.

This is the exact philosophy we follow on the Mach-II project, and I feel it’s one of the secrets of our continued success. Letting our community know what we have planned and getting feedback before writing any code helps us meet the needs of our users better by giving them exactly what they need, not what we think they need. Springing features on users is no way to do a truly open source project. Involve your community at all levels and it pays off big time.

Facebook iPhone Dev Quits Project Over Apple Tyranny

My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.

The web is still unrestricted and free, and so I am returning to my roots as a web developer. In the long term, I would like to be able to say that I helped to make the web the best mobile platform available, rather than being part of the transition to a world where every developer must go through a middleman to get their software in the hands of users.

Good for Joe Hewitt. Apple may like to say “our phone, our rules” but if Apple keeps up with the draconian behavior they may find a mass exodus on their hands. I hope the Pre and Droid start giving Apple a well deserved thrashing in the market.

Thank you, Rails

Lately, though, I’ve noticed the tone of the arguments in the Django community
getting nastier — especially when it comes to Rails. Again, I’m far from
innocent in this regard: I’ve certainly done my fair share of Rails-bashing,
and I regret it.

I think it’s important to recognize that we in the web development community
do in fact owe Rails and the Rails community a debt of gratitude. Rails helped
reframe the way we think about web development, and even those who’ve never
touched Rails nevertheless are probably reaping indirect benefits right now.

So I think we should all step back from our personal preferences and plainly
say thank you, Rails, for all that you’ve done to move the state of web
development forward.

I think the CFML community could stand to take this attitude to heart. As a community we spend WAY too much time patting each other on the back and blindly blasting our supposed enemies, when what we should be doing is taking off our blinders and learning from what else is out there. We don’t do nearly enough of that in my opinion.

It’s About Helping Your Users Become Awesome (or: “Being Better is Better” by Kathy Sierra) — Global Nerdy

If we want to create passionate users, we need to help them get better.

  • ‘Nobody’s passionate about things they suck at.”
  • Many people still have their cameras permanently set on “P” – automatic mode — even though those cameras offer finer control over things like shutter speed and aperture
  • What would it mean to our users if we unlock the door and help them be awesome?

This falls right in line with many of the discussions Team Mach-II has been having as we look ahead to the 1.9 and 2.0 releases. If we implement even half of what we have in mind for 2.0 it’s going to be awesome and will help our users be more productive than ever before.

Shalin Says…: Why you should contribute to Open Source

Open Source projects offer you a chance to work on something that you want rather than something that others want you to work on. It is a great opportunity to work on something that is both cool and useful as well as to associate with a well known brand and all the publicity and goodwill it brings. You are free to pick and choose between the thousands of open source projects out there. Moreover, you are free to decide on how much you want to contribute. You won’t have a boss and you won’t have the pressure of deadlines and schedules.

And don’t forget there are about a thousand different ways to contribute to open source projects, with documentation/wiki contributions typically being the most neglected. So find a project you love and get your hands dirty! ALL open source projects can use the help, and it’s a great way to learn new things, meet new people, and boost your resume all at the same time. As Michael Scott would say, “It’s Win Win Win.” 😉

Great “Mach-II and ColdSpring for N00bs” Article by Ollie Jones

Ollie Jones has written up a great post on his blog entitled “Mach-II and ColdSpring for N00bs.” It’s excellent information, very thorough, and very well presented. He even includes a zip file of his basic setup that you can download.

Thanks Ollie! I’m sure this will be extremely useful to a ton of people starting to learn Mach-II and ColdSpring.

Great Example of How Our Users Help @mach_ii

My former co-worker Brandon Culpepper (who is still one of the quickest studies I’ve ever had the pleasure working with) ran into a bit of a bizarre issue with Mach-II yesterday, and after hearing him describe it I was determined to get to the bottom of it.

The gist of the problem was that for some reason after a session timeout occurred, the application would throw a rather non-descript error along the lines of “Element {directory name} is undefined in a Java object of type class coldfusion.runtime.ApplicationScope,” and a slightly different error in OpenBD. You can read the full details in the ticket.

Brandon described the issue to me in great detail over IM, but it was one of those things I had to run locally to really get my head around it, and he was nice enough to take the time to not only whittle the problem down to a very specific, repeatable test case, but he sent me two different test applications that had only the elements we needed to be able to repeat the error and figure out what was going on. This was no small amount of work on Brandon’s part and was tremendously helpful in getting to the bottom of the issue.

Using these sample apps I was able to figure out that it didn’t throw the error if the hyperlink or AJAX call involved was a Mach-II event as opposed to a plain old URL, and at that point I submitted the ticket because I knew Peter, as lead developer of Mach-II, would be able to diagnose things much more easily than I could.

So Peter jumped on the case and figured it out rather quickly. It turns out that this is a rather weird bug that goes back probably to Mach-II 1.1.1 and has to do with the way Mach-II has auto-generated the MACHII_APP_KEY property based on directory names. If you hit a .cfm file or remotely call a CFC in another directory, that will trigger a change in the app key property, and since the app key property changes, Mach-II will think it hasn’t been loaded. Note that this only occurs if you don’t explicitly set the application key (which I always do), and only reared its head with the introduction of the onSessionStart/End methods in the Application.cfc boostrapper.

Peter came up with a fix that’s currently being tested, and he makes note of it in the ticket, but I’ll test posterous’s code handling and stick it here:

<cfparam name="MACHII_APP_KEY" type="string" default="#GetFileFromPath(ExpandPath('.'))#" />

Note that you can also explicitly set the MACHII_APP_KEY variable to your application name as opposed to relying on the directory name and this will also fix the problem:

<cfset MACHII_APP_KEY = "whatever" />

So I wanted to take a moment to thank Brandon for notifying us of the bug and doing quite a bit of work to help us come to a quick rationale behind and resolution for the bug. Without the diagnosis and sample apps from Brandon this would have taken a lot longer to figure out, and due to his work all Mach-II users will benefit from Peter’s fix to a bug that would likely bite others from time to time.

Another great open source success story. Thanks again Brandon!

Considering starting a “CF Fringe” podcast focusing on the bleeding edge of CFML, hacks, etc.–any interest?

This won’t be weekly–I learned my lesson there. It also will be down and dirty, much like the content, meaning the long hours of production we put into ColdFusion Weekly (http://www.coldfusionweekly.com) won’t be there. It’ll likely be myself, Peter Farrell, and miscellaneous guests jumping on Skype to talk about open source in the CFML world, cool CFML hacks, and other topics for 15-30 minutes every so often.

 Definitely would like some feedback on this–I’ve been mulling over some ideas for quite a while and I think this one has some legs. And I don’t want it to turn into “the Matt and Peter show” by any means, because there’s a ton of people out there doing a ton of cool stuff, so the more the merrier.

 And who knows, the web site could turn into a place for how-tos, cool hacks and sample apps, maybe even some screencasts …

 My motivation is that I know from Twitter and through the grapevine that there are a lot of people out there doing some very interesting things, and I don’t think there’s an outlet for things like this since, at least in my opinion, the current CFML podcasts have turned into “Sunday morning news shows” as opposed to being technical. There’s a place for that, but that certainly shouldn’t be the only thing going on and given that the more technical episodes of CF Weekly were also our most popular, there’s a void there that needs to be filled.

 Anyway, let me know what you think if you have an interest or opinion on this.