My wife did not want to repost this link on the chance that she might offend some of her readers. I, however, have no such compunctions.

Which Religion Should I Follow from the Friendly Atheist.

These past few weeks, I’ve been pulling some major hours to complete two projects. One is almost four weeks past its original production release date because of modified requirements (shocking!) and, thus, has pushed the project that I was supposed to start after it back – now at two weeks behind.

Two weeks ago, I was up to 58 hours and last week I was over 70. This week, I’m on track to hit that mark again. I’m telling you, it’s nowhere near as easy at forty as it was at thirty. Every night I go to bed utterly exhausted. When I get home at night and spend time with my daughters, I find doing simple things to be tiring and my patience level has significantly decreased.

My dreams, almost always very strange, become absolutely psychedelic when I’m this tired and for about eights nights in a row now, I’ve woken up ready to start writing a book. Perhaps this is how Stephen King comes up with all his weird ideas.

I see some light at the end of the tunnel, and by the time the holidays hit, I’ll be ready for some serious R&R. I’ll just tell my wife to hide the eggnog from me this year.

Just had a Big Bang Theory afternoon. For those who may not watch the show, it’s about these 4 uber-geek friends. This week’s episode featured two of the friends working together on a project to determine the energy contained in the collision between dark matter particles in outer space.

The next 20 seconds just showed a time-lapse of both of them staring at a whiteboard doing absolutely nothing for hours, but set to the soundtrack of “Eye of the Tiger”. I chuckled, but my wife got a kick out of it. She loves the show because it reminds her of me and my friends.

Anyway, I just spent about 1.5 hours staring at my computer screen without moving a muscle… but I actually got a LOT done.

I see a trend happening at Adobe that I believe others may be detecting but no one has come out and said it yet. This trend will have a significant impact on software engineers who are experienced and/or committed to the Adobe stack of technologies – specifically to ColdFusion developers.

I have seen the question, “Why do I need to learn Flex?”, floating around for about two years now from many ColdFusion developers. These dedicated folks have noticed the ongoing trend of companies moving their user interfaces from straight HTML/Javascript to Flex.

Aside from noticing the trend being enough of a motivator to learn Flex (and it should be), the trend at the technology level should be additional motivator.

Blurring the Lines

The reason I entitled this article ColdFlash! is that I believe that by the time ColdFusion 11 is released to the public, the lines between ColdFusion and the Flash Platform will be practically eliminated to the point where entire applications can be written in the Actionscript language. ColdFusion will simply be another package available to Actionscript developers, much the same as data visualization.

Let’s take a look at some of the things that led me to this conclusion.

• Back in ColdFusion MX 7, the ability to use ColdFusion on server-side Actionscript was introduced.
• ColdFusion 8 greatly enhanced the ability to integrate ColdFusion with Actionscript applications with the inclusion of LCDS Lite, or using BlazeDS.
• The ability to use ColdFusion functionality from Actionscript is finally marketed with ColdFusion 9, which, to me, indicates that Adobe is going to start expanding on this.
• Enhanced Flash Remoting in ColdFusion 9. BlazeDS installed by default with the ability to upgrade to LiveCycle Data Services 2.6.1

A World of RIA

The era of static web applications is coming to an end. Everywhere you look, there are Flex web sites, Flex web applications, Flex business applications, iPhone apps, Android apps, AJAX sites and applications, and even Silverlight (but since this is an Adobe related article, we won’t focus on “that” technology).

Using these technologies allows developers to create interactive, responsive, intelligent, and user-friendly applications that people actually enjoy using – because in the end that’s what it’s all about. I’ve seen many apps created that perfectly fulfill the requirements established for it, but are disliked by the users because of the technical restrictions the old world of HTML placed upon it.

Of course, we’re still living in the world of HTTP, but with Adobe’s AMF protocol, it’s not as painful because our payloads have been drastically reduced – which increases responsiveness even further.

I believe what I’m trying to get at here is that RIA can no longer be considered a fad, a passing fancy, or a dead-end trend. Just like technologies such as ASP, ColdFusion and PHP completely transformed the Internets from a vast collection of non-interactive HTML pages into a data-aware, responsive universe, the RIA trend is the child of that revolution. Applications can now not only present data, but present it more quickly, more intelligently and in a more visually engaging way.

If you are ColdFusion developer, and not even considering learning some of the technologies is what is now called the Flash Platform, you are ensuring your continuing progression towards being along the same career path of a COBOL programmer. Granted, that’s an extreme example, and may not be accurate, but it conveys what I’m trying to get across.

It’s Still J2EE

For me, the most powerful feature of working with ColdFlash is that it’s all built on the Java platform. You could have Java developers, and ColdFlash developers in the same organization with no loss in productivity or community.

In fact, one of the things we’ve been considering in my team is the possibility of coverting some of our heaviest ColdFusion Components into Java code to increase our performance (sidebar: Let’s go ColdFusion team! We need even more speed on CFC creation) when sending back large arrays of objects to our Flex clients.

It’s Time to Evolve

In conclusion, I want to say that I don’t believe ColdFusion as a language is going away, Adobe has proven that it’s going to be a core component of the Flash Platform, but I do believe it is going to evolve into ColdFlash and that the best career move that ColdFusion developers can make right now is to learn Flash, AIR, and Flex.

In 2-3 years when the Flash Platform becomes more integrated, employers are going to be looking for the whole package, not just a ColdFusion developer, and not just an Actionscript developer.

Now that I can officially talk about Cairngorm 3, I thought I’d put some of my thoughts down (more for my future reference, but feel free to follow along).

Alex Uhlmann officially announced the release of Cairngorm 3 beta on October 5th, and from my limited access to the documentation and code, I have a few opinions.

Cairngorm 3 != MVC

I think that it is a positive thing that Adobe Consulting decided to take their hat out of the ring of application architecture providers. The next release of Cairngorm is a complete paradigm shift for the project, in that it is – to simplify it a bit – a set of best practices and support libraries that developers can use within an application architecture such as Mate, Swiz or Parsley.

After I learned this fact, I was surprised that they kept the same project name, but it is a strong brand which will retain the current developer base and level of interest.

I also think that it lays the groundwork for a more free-market environment for other application architectures available today, or soon to be available. I know that a large consideration we made at DaVita was that since Cairngorm was produced by Adobe Consulting, that it would always be a strong contender, and most likely the proverbial 400-pound gorilla. Now that there is not an “official” application architecture supported by Adobe, then the weight of the brand is removed from the decision making. Now becomes about who has the architecture that is best implemented, best documented, easiest to integrate, etc.

It’s Smart Business

Looking at it strictly from a consulting business perspective, this approach to application development support is much more sustainable and has higher revenue-generating potential. If a shop chose to implement the Cairngorm 2 architecture, they may require assistance initially to get up to speed but eventually they become highly proficient and that well dries up.

In addition, it limits their business to people who implement Cairngorm 2.

Now that Cairngorm 3 can enhance and extend any architecture available – since it is about applying best practices – their consulting possibilities are now limitless. It doesn’t matter if you choose to use Mate, or PureMVC, because the Cairngorm 3 libraries can enhance them to support enterprise Flex development.

It’s a win-win situation. They get more business and more expertise, which in turn generates more ideas for Cairngorm, and makes their package more useful as time goes on.

Past Imperfect

However, I now wish I could turn back the clock 1 year and change the decision we made to implement Cairngorm 2 architecture. After doing internal testing of the major packages available, Cairngorm was not our main choice from a technical perspective, but was the top contender from the business perspective, and so we bit the bullet and adapted.

At the time, Mate was my choice for our application development efforts, and now we may have the discussion again internally about moving over. I know it won’t happen, for we’ve invested far too much time and effort into adopting Cairngorm, but I at least want to have the conversation.

Exciting Times

Lastly, I will say I am excited about this new direction that Adobe has taken, and we’ve already begun to play around with some of the code in-house. I’ll post reviews once I’ve had a chance to digest most of it.