Just saw a tweet from Brian Meloche made last night. I'm sure that I am way late to this party (although I've not seen any postings - damn MXNA being down), but WTF? On the tiobe page it now says:

"Richard Bremner pointed out that ColdFusion is not a programming language. It is a framework comparable to JSP and ASP. As a consequence, ColdFusion has been removed from the TIOBE list. All its history has been deleted, which means that the history of the index has changed a bit as well. "

Further down, a programming language is defined as follows:

"A language is considered a programming language if it is Turing complete. As a consequence, HTML and XML are not considered programming languages. This also holds for data query language SQL. SQL is not a programming language because it is, for instance, impossible to write an infinite loop in it. On the other hand, SQL extensions PL/SQL and Transact-SQL are programming languages. ASP and ASP.NET are also not programming languages because they make use of other languages such as JavaScript and VBScript or .NET compatible languages. The same is true for frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, Cocoa, and technologies such as AJAX. Finally, we have also excluded assembly languages, although Turing complete, because they have a very different nature."

ColdFusion is Turing complete, and you can write entire applications using CFML (as with any other web language, HTML will usually also be required). I have a hard time seeing how CF is just a framework. It's true that it is compiled down to Java (or the CLR for Blue Dragon.NET), but Ruby is compiled down to C - doesn't mean it isn't a programming language. Of course, whenever you try to define things you can get into tricky edge cases (I don't understand why classic ASP wouldn't be considered a programming language), but I look forward to finding out more about the precise definitions used for this discussion.

On the bright side:
(i) Tiobe actually noticed ColdFusion. With its recent rise in popularity it's good to see it is being paid some more attention.
(ii) The index is more of a distraction than anything else. While I disagree with the reason it was removed, I'm not convinced it is a bad thing for ColdFusion just to "not play this game".

I got a quote to get out and meetings all day so this was a quickie. Looking forward to something with a little more research from someone else later today.

I can't really mention Rob's talk last night without also posting about last months NCFUG meeting. Peter Freitag came down from the frozen north of the state to talk about image manipulation in ColdFusion. Pete is one of those people who I've been looking forwards to meeting for a while now and it was great both to learn from his presentation and then to catch up with him after the meeting . . .

[More]

Rob Gonda flew up from Florida to present at the New York CFUG last night. I've to to say that while Michael and Judith did a great job with the NYCFUG, Clark Valberg and Ben Nadel are doing an even better job of building on the solid base they were provided and developing a vibrant user group. If you're in the NYC area you should really check out the meetings. Last night there were well over twenty attendees, a great talk and plenty of good networking both before and after the meeting . . .

[More]

After a *lot* of prevarication, we've finally made the business decision to open source our LightBase framework. There is a lot of clean up work to do over the next couple of months, but I'd imagine we'll be releasing the project at either Scotch or CF United.

It's going to be an interesting year . . .

Should you move more of your business logic out into your db? After some recent comments on a very old posting I wanted to revisit the benefits and downsides of such an approach.

[More]

Let's say you have tens of thousands of records that you need to be able to export from a db.

Ideally you'd like to write a db agnostic script (so not relying on MSSQL DTS or any other DB specific technology) for handling fairly large exports (the kind that are going to time out if you using a simple cfquery/cfoutput/cffile solution).

Any thoughts on how best to approach this? I need to do something that'll work for MSSQL2000, MSSQL2005, MySQL5 and ideally (but optionally) for PostGres.

Any thoughts appreciated!

Delighted to find out I have been granted membership of the Adobe Community Experts program. No doubt it'll be a couple of weeks before the bio is up on the Adobe site, but I'm really excited about this.

Many thanks Adobe!

Looks like Joshua will be giving a presentation tomorrow about the Savvy CMS. Whether you're in the market for a Content Management System or just want to learn how other people are solving these problems, if you build end-user maintainable web apps, it's probably worth checking out . . . Especially given the testimonial from Jared.

I'll be sleeping down under during the preso but can't wait for the recording to hear what Joshua has to say!

[Update] If you missed it, the recording is here.

Firstly, BladeDS rocks! Can't wait to play with it. But did anyone notice that the open source version excludes the CF connector . . . ?

[More]

It is interesting to see the change in tenor on the mailing lists recently when discussions turn to DAOs, Gateways, Service classes and the like. I won't say the Gateway is dead, but when I say it's feeling unwell, I'm thinking of Soviet era Russian premiers as I think about it . . . :->

[More]