If you can think of others, feel free to share them with me, or enter them in the comment area on the online version of this article at www.sys-con.com.

Community and Resources
I think if you ask most CF developers what the key is to their personal development, success, and ability to solve problems when working with ColdFusion, they'll point to the community. It seems that from the beginning, CFers have been able to rely on each other and benefit from the tremendous community of developers (including CFDJ authors) and the resources that were enabled by Allaire and Macromedia.

Speaking of community support, 1999 was the year of the first DevCon, or Allaire Developer Conference, in Boston. It was the first of a long line of great conferences, as a great coming together of the CF community and a celebration of everything ColdFusion. But it wasn't actually the first ColdFusion conference. Several of us had gathered in Fort Collins, Colorado, in July, 1998 for the first "national CF conference," where speakers included Allaire founder Jeremy Allaire, chief architect Sim Simeonov, yours truly, and several others. Clearly, the ColdFusion community was taking shape on a larger scale by 1999.

In actuality, the community was already well developed in many ways, both online and in the form of local user groups, the oldest of which was the DC ColdFusion User Group run by Fig Leaf Software. I was working there at the time, and with folks like Steve Drucker, Dave Watts, and others sharing knowledge each month, there were often a hundred attendees at the meetings.

User groups have continued to thrive and you can find a local one (for ColdFusion or for other Macromedia products) at www.macromedia.com/v1/usergroups. There's also been a growth in regional events, both organized by Macromedia and run by developers. These include CF Europe, MXDU, DevCon Japan, CF North, Denver TechCon, MXDC, CFUN, CF Underground, and many more, including some attempted and still planned cruises. You can find most of these events listed at Michael Smith's "CF Conference Central" at www.cfconf.com.

Of course, not everyone lives in a city with such an active user group or event. Fortunately, there have always been plenty of online resources to help developers support themselves. In fact, I reviewed them in my March 2000 (Vol. 2, issue 3) article, "Helping Yourself - Resources for Learning and Getting Questions Answered," at www.sys-con.com/coldfusion/article.cfm?id=91. Most of the resources I described then are as valuable today.

Perhaps the greatest self-help and community resource is the Macromedia ColdFusion Forums, at http://webforums.macromedia.com/coldfusion. Hundreds of messages have been traded every day for several years, and there are currently more than 60,000 messages that have been posted! (See Figure 1.) The forums may be overwhelming in their depth, and clearly no one can read and respond to every message, though Team Macromedia members (like myself) try to help where we can. More than anything, it's just another great example of developers helping each other. And the search facility allows you to find the proverbial needle in a haystack when you need it.

Of course, not everyone enjoys Web-based forums, preferring mailing lists instead. The king of those is the CF-Talk, run by longtime CF maven and community leader Michael Dinowitz. With hundreds of messages traded per day, you can sign up to receive them by e-mail or simply read them online at www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists. Indeed, there you'll find several other lists including active ones on CF-Flash, CF-Linux, CF-Jobs, SQL, JRun, and lots more. Other valuable mailing lists include our own CFDJList (www.sys-con.com/coldfusion/list.cfm) as well as those of several user groups that nearly always welcome non-locals.

Still another, more recent means by which enthusiastic developers share their knowledge with others is the "blog," or Web log. These generally take the form of a diary of discoveries and observations. You'll find them offered by Macromedia employees, user group managers, product developers, and others, including my own at http://cfmxplus.bloqspot.com. One of the best places to find most of them both listed and aggregated (so you can read them in one place) is Geoff Bowers' www.fullasagoog.com. Don't worry about the name (it's explained there). Just go fill yourself with CF (and other MX product) goodness (see Figure 2).

An equally valuable resource is the Macromedia Knowledge Base, www.macromedia.com/v1/support/ knowledgebase/searchform.cfm, where several hundred TechNotes are offered on a huge range of topics. They go back to 1996, and it's fun to see what issues troubled folks then that may or not bother us now. The second oldest, TechNote 158 from November 1996, laments that cookies are not set on a page doing a CFLOCATION. Fortunately, it's been updated to reflect that this problem has gone away in CFMX. (We shouldn't say it was "fixed." You heard no announcement of it in the manuals or release notes, but good riddance nonetheless.)

Macromedia has also invested heavily in its Designer & Developer Center, at www.macromedia.com/desdev, and it's become a valuable resource, with hundreds of articles covering CF and all other Macromedia products.

Recently, SYS-CON (publisher of CFDJ and other fine technical journals) has created a new developer portal, http://developer.sys-con.com. Those familiar with theserverside.com or slashdot will recognize the approach. Once you register, you can contribute comments on the posted topics or even post your own. The first posted thread on a ColdFusion topic had nearly 60 replies in the first two days. It's not limited to CF topics, and it does indeed open the discussion to a wider audience than the number who might participate in the Macromedia forums, for better or worse. But it's a community.

One final element of community, in the minds of many, comes in knowing who else leverages ColdFusion. We all know that it works well for us, but sometimes we're challenged to point to any examples of large and/or highly visible organizations that use it. Back in May 2001 (Vol. 3, issue 5) I wrote, "Who's Using ColdFusion?" (www.sys-con.com/coldfusion/article.cfm?id=271) where I identified several such organizations. Of course, it's been more than 18 months since then, but the list remains mostly accurate. Indeed, I've since learned of more such sites and keep that updated list on my site at www.systemanage.com/cff/who_uses_cf.cfm.

Technologies and the Future
We've seen how many things have changed in the past four years and how CFDJ has been there for you. More important is how much Allaire, and then Macromedia, has been constantly watching the technology landscape to give us the solutions we need, often before most of us knew we needed them!

Of course, they've always responded to the needs of developers and organizations relying on ColdFusion. The addition of support for Unix platforms and Apache integration are examples, as are the advancements in version 4 to make CF more scalable, performant, and secure. But they quickly moved forward from there.

In 2000, Allaire released their Technology Roadmap (still available at www.macromedia.com/v1/documentcenter/ partners/allairebusinessplatform1.pdf). In it, they described their efforts that laid the groundwork for what would become ColdFusion 5 and MX, including those aforementioned "code name" projects for XML and Web services integration, Java integration, server management, and more.

Beyond that, we see that CFMX has introduced the concept of component-based development. On the surface, this may seem to some to be merely an extension of modular programming design, but those who are leveraging it to approach object-oriented development may find more reward. They'll certainly lay the groundwork for those who follow. The IT world in general is moving in the direction of component-based, as well as service-oriented, architectures, so these are more great examples of how Macromedia is positioning us to take advantage of this trend.

Macromedia's not only following the IT trends, but is also setting them. By now everyone reading this should be aware of the great power of Rich Internet Applications, as enabled by Flash, Flash Remoting, and the Flash Communications Server. For some, the Flash interface and platform may seem a daunting prospect, but as more developers become familiar with it and offer their own interpretations of how developers can get started with it, we'll see it become a more common tool in the kits of most CF developers.

Other examples of Macromedia bringing developers into new ways of working include Dreamweaver MX and the more recently released Contribute. Many CF developers scoff at these tools thinking they don't really apply to them. And they are new and may change in time to better suit CFers. Again, I think you'll see more and more people helping each other learn how the tools can apply or, in some way, take a load off CF developers.

With respect to all these "new" topics, we absolutely welcome contributions for articles by developers who feel they have something to offer. As we've seen before, the CF community learns best from each other. Be part of the solution!

Conclusion
We've touched a bit on how ColdFusion, the community, and the technologies we use have continued to change and improve in the past four years. They'll continue to change, of course. That's the only constant.

CFDJ has changed as well. You may have noticed the new look we took on with a graphics redesign in recent months. Another change is that Raymond Camden and I were recently appointed as technical editors. We aim to constantly improve the technical quality of the magazine. Here's to a great year five! Now on to writing my 34th topic...

SIDEBAR

ColdFusion Ship Dates

Have you ever wondered what the ship dates were
for the various major releases of ColdFusion?

1.0:   July 1995
2.0:   November 1996
3.0:   July 1997
4.0:   November 1998
5.:   June 2001
MX:   May 2002