GenuineJD - My Website

gpuds framework: reflections on my software developer life cycle

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:12:00 -0500

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!

gpuds framework: planning stages

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:11:00 -0500

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.

Photos

Wed, 28 May 2008 22:58:00 -0500

Although I usually use my personal photo website, gpuds, for sharing photos, I thought I would occasionally post some of my more favorite photos here. Plus it gives me the chance to extend BlogCFC some more using the slideshows feature.

The first slideshow includes some photos I took up at Sleeping Bear Lodge in northern Wisconsin.

Articles

Mon, 19 May 2008 11:28:00 -0500

I was able to port some of my old tech articles into the BlogCFC framework. Although some them are extremely outdated, it was a good excercise in leveraging some of the features in BlogCFC.

Website Resurrection

Sun, 18 May 2008 14:45:00 -0500

After a LONG time, I finally decided to resurrect my website. Unfortunately, all my old blog entries are gone forever. The good news is that there weren't that many entries to begin with, and there wasn't anything really worth keeping. The additional good news is that anything that WAS worth keeping, like some short technical articles I wrote, I was able to recover. Eventually I'll get those back up, too.

My previous blog application was something I wrote myself in ColdFusion. Instead of writing something from scratch again, I decided to go with Raymond Camden's BlogCFC. I attempted to port a free CSS template for use with this application. So far so good. I've also used Mango Blog for a few of the sites I've deployed. I like it quite a bit and there seem to be several decent skins for it, but I think for my personal site, BlogCFC has more features for me to leverage.

That's it for now. I'm happy to be back up and running :)