Alan Williamson

I think over the last four or five years that I have really been part of the community (before that I didn't know there WAS a community), I think most people will think of me as the "CFEclipse guy", which is one of my biggest contributions in terms of the number of people that are using it and how (I hope!) helpful it is in their day to day work. Having said that, I would also like to think that I have helped people by talking about practices and frameworks thus allowing them to be more productive programmers. Or at least write less spaghetti code!

Very humbled really! Especially for all the thanks I get. I got involved in the project back in 2004 and to be honest, I am just standing on the shoulders of giants, because of all the great work that Rob Rohan, Spike Milligan and Oliver Tupman did.

Having said that, there are bad days, since a lot of features and bugs are mentioned in lists and what not that I would like to fix but don't have the time. It would be nice to get a few more people on board killing some of the bugs.

The most requested feature, and one that I would love to implement is to get insight into the methods of a CFC that you have defined. There are challenges round this since CFML is a runtime language at heart, and until you are actually running the code you cant be sure what a variable is. But I have a couple of ideas.

That is a difficult question. The whole idea of Open Source is that people can contribute back to the project, which for CFEclipse has been hard since it is written in Java, and not just that, it uses the crazy Eclipse way of doing things (ok, not crazy, but ...different...). There are other projects out there, such as BlogCFC for example that even though very widely used but I doubt there is a large a number of contributors.

The most seen side of Open Source is that the applications are seen as *FREE* which is desirable but only half of the equation to see projects thrive. They also need commiters and people looking at the code to improve it.

My interest from the project is actually more strategic than tactical. I want to see CFML spread to new markets. It is a mature language, and Open BlueDragon is a mature application server which hopefully will bring a lot more interest from people such as studients that have previously been solely into (free) languages like PHP.

The other reason that I am interested is seeing more CFML applications being deployed to the world wide web and not just intranets, for example a lot more "out of the box" applications could be deployed via JumpBoxes with a CLAM (ColdFusion, Linux, Apache and MySQL) stack. So hopefully in the coming months we should see a lot more CFML based applications out in the wild, and again this can bring a lot more interest in the language itself.

I hope that as part of the steering committee I can bring a lot of the knowledge I have accumulated through being the Lead Developer of CFEclipse. I get to talk to a lot of developers and hopefully their opinions will get to shine through onto the project.

I have been developing in CFML for close to 11 years now, so I obviously love the language! One of the things that impresses me about languages/frameworks such as Ruby on Rails is the ability to easily integrate into databases and easily deploy applications. I would love to see the ability to create implicit database objects as well as test cases for your code as you write it. I know there are great frameworks out there for this, but it would be great to see it as an integral part of the engine.

As for the language, I would love to see the ability to create CFCs solely in CFSCRIPT where appropriate.

I develop mostly on OS X, at work I have an iMac with dual screens that I run both Windows XP and OS X. At home I use my MacBook Pro. Obviously my IDE of choice is Eclipse with CFEclipse, Aptana and the ColdFusion 8 extensions.

That is a difficult question, but I think the success of the project could be seen twofold: an increase in the number of patches submitted and an increase in the number of actual installations, hopefully from people that previously had not used CFML.

Maybe a complete dream but if Google Application Engine also accepted CFML as a scripting language, that would be pretty awesome too!

Contact Mark @ mark.drew@openbluedragon.org — http://www.markdrew.co.uk