I added a few pictures from my Washington vacation with my fiancee to my photos page.  Photos are of Arbor Crest Winery, Spokane Falls, St. Aloysius at Gonzaga, Wanapum Lake, mountain ranges, and Snoqualmie Falls.

On my last trip out to LA for work, I spent some time on the plane brainstorming on the data model and abstraction for gpuds.  I basically want to take the core feature set in the current incarnation of gpuds and abstract it into a "real" ColdFusion application.

I'm starting to realize that most of the ColdFusion development I've done in my career, starting back with CF 4.5 (I think), hasn't really evolved with the evolution of ColdFusion itself.  I'm still writing html/page based apps that require a lot of tedious maintenance and aren't very scalable.  In working more and more with BlogCFC and Mango Blog, I'm realizing some of benefits of CF 7 and 8. 

I think that I knew all along, in theory, how great CFMX was, but never from a practical perspective until I started working on the gpuds framework.  I can't even remember when CFCs were introduced, but aside from facilitating communication from the Flash player to the server, I think I've really been ignorant on why they are so important.

I don't think my applications were ever bad, but they could have been better.  The nature of ColdFusion as a Rapid Application Development platform is what perpetuated my continual use of less-than-efficient application design.  My applications worked and I could crank them out quickly, so why would I bother with any other approach or even framework?

I also think the fact that I'm doing much less development now and more project management is why I'm able to see these things.  I always had a deadline or projects piling up, leaving little time for analysis or post-mortem.  Now that I see these things from a different perspective, I can see all the shortcomings of my approach.

It's amazing to me that I've "discovered" all this in just the scope of working on my gpuds framework, especially considering that I've only just begun!

Ben Forta wrote a very interesting blog the other day about the newly created CFML Language Advisory Committee.  This post is great for two reasons.  One, it outlines how this new committee will hopefully benefit CFML in and amongst the ColdFusion community in the long run.  Two, he comments on how and why opening a language up to a community can impact that community in both positive and negative ways, not just on CFML. 

A great read for any developer.

Although I was excited each time a new version of Flex and AIR were available on the Adobe Labs site, I am really excited about Adobe's new AIR/Create Suite project, SwitchBoard.

At work, I'm involved a lot with our Digital Asset Management projects.  Our company deals a lot with high-volume photo shoots.  In almost every aspect of the creative workflow in regards to digital photography, our employees use Adobe products to manage, manipulate and edit our assets.

While we do have a large and expensive Digital Asset Management system in place, we constantly find ourselves writing custom applications to better facilitate the workflow amongst our photographers, image techs, photo editors and our legal staff. 

I think there is a lot of great potential with the announcement of SwitchBoard to really take our DAM applications to the next level!  I'm hoping to do some testing with it in the next couple of weeks to see how we can leverage SwitchBoard's features in our workflows.

Lately I've been thinking about taking my personal photo sharing website and creating a open-source framework version of it.  Why would I bother wasting time on this when sites like Flickr, Snapfish and Photobucket exist?  I feel as if they are still lacking many features that photo sites should include, like original high-resolution file downloads and group file uploading into the same album.  To me it only makes sense.  Say you're at a family reunion and everyone is taking pictures.  What sense does it make for everyone to have their own photo albums on different sites, with pictures of the same thing?

Additionally, I've had a couple people ask me if they can have their own version of gpuds to put on a site for themselves.  I've spent a decent amount of time lately looking at open-source blogging software like Mango Blog and BlogCFC, I thought I'd take a shot at developing something myself for photo sharing since I already have done a lot of the work in the form of gpuds.