As was recently announced, Railo, the open source CF engine, has finally given ColdFusion to the masses.  March 31st saw the release of the first 3.1 public beta, providing full feature compliance with Adobe’s ColdFusion 8 standard, and allowing developers to begin porting over existing sites to Railo.  The ability to port over existing sites, or to spin up entire servers for a client without running into the pesky licensing costs of ColdFusion is one of the developments that has me the most excited about Railo.

Previous versions of Railo (including the promising but ultimately not CF8-compliant and buggy 3.0) have been known to provide phenomenal speed increases, but without the ability to fully support the CF standard there have been compatibility issues with web software firms attempting to make a move to Railo.  This, combined with a lack of true enterprise capabilities led many to dub the platform unready for prime time.  Railo 3.1 is about to change all of that, at least once it is finally out of beta.

I have not yet had time to play with Railo 3.1 too much, but they provide an express install that isn’t really an install, so it has been very easy.  Just extract to a folder, double click the ‘start’ script to start the application/web server, and then you can immediately browse to it at http://localhost:8888.  Drop code into the Railo webroot folder, and you can start testing existing apps against Railo.  The administrator for Railo 3.0 was very sparse compared to the CF administrator that ColdFusion developers know and love.  Not so with Railo 3.1.  The server adminstrator which manages the more global settings has a separate password from the web administrator, and there are numerous settings available, many specifically tailored towards compatibility with CF8, but there are also enhancements beyond what Adobe provides. Additional enhanced selections within the administrator, such as “convert 0000-00-00 MySQL dates to NULL” seem like a sensible upgrade to the default behavior of CF, others probably depend on the needs of your application.  Missing at this point in the release is the much ballyhooed cfvideo tag, a cluster scope (though Railo supports J2EE sessions at this point), and clustered caching.  With a CF license costs no longer at issue, expect Railo’s clustering functionality to get a full workout in the coming months.

Installing extensions, and restarting the cf service are available within the administrator as well.  Things like Galleon forums, the Mach-II framework, and other open source CF goodies.  Additional providers can be added via the server, too, (this works very similarly to how plugin providers are added via the Eclipse IDE) and updating the server software is also possible within the Railo admin itself.  One of the weirdest things for anyone that has restarted a ColdFusion service before is that Railo’s cf restart is darned-near instantaneous.  Everyone gets logged out on the server, as sessions and other scopes are cleared, but other than that, there is no painful delay waiting for the service to kick in while site visitors are crashing into technical looking 500 server error screens as is so often the case with a typical ColdFusion restart.  It’s…eerie.  It is also a distinct improvement, but performance has always been Railo’s most promising and consistent offering in their platform.

You can bet that many people across the internets have been tinkering with Railo 3.1 lately, especially in tandem with Amazon’s EC2 or similar cloud service, in order to provide things like open source load-balanced J2EE session-scoped cluster farms.  Suddenly, stunningly, ColdFusion developers are now enjoying something that PHP developers have been able to enjoy for years.  I welcome an open CF8 standard (whether Adobe has created or simply joined the CF standard is unclear) and a fully-featured open source ColdFusion application server.  It is clear that this can only mean good things for CFML and ColdFusion developers in the future.

What is not so clear, however, is how Railo’s other open source competitor Blue Dragon has fared, but with many members of the Blue Dragon team leaving (and some of them joining the Railo team), chances are that it will not fare very well.  Equally unclear is Adobe’s opinion on Railo, and how its official release might come to affect its bottom line.  Whatever the case, the cat is out of the bag now.  We’ve seen the future, and the future is open source.

Viva la Revolucion!

We recently completed an ‘Interactive Roof Designer’ Flash piece for Trimline Building Products. The objective was to create an area where prospective clients could customize the look of a house, and apply different colors from Trimline’s Distinction Tile and Distinction Slate composite roofing product lines. The final piece allowed for some interesting looking houses – here’s a break down of the process for each step…

1. CHOOSE HOME STYLE
3 photos were selected to represent different house styles. The idea at this point was to focus on the overall structure of the house – as the material, color and roof product would be customized in the following steps. ArcStone’s Nick Longtin created line drawings of each house. He did it all with his left hand while sipping a delicate blend of herbs and spices with his right.

2. SELECT MATERIAL & COLOR
This stage allows you to select a building material – brick, stucco or siding – and customize the overall color. Using ActionScript’s BitmapData, a custom ColorSelector class was written to avoid using a simple color picker with a limited palette. This allowed use of the full spectrum and a color intensity slider (saturation).

Surprisingly, the bulk of the work at this stage wasn’t the ColorSelector or Flash development – it was the laborious job of masking out the exposed building on all 3 house photos and applying brick, stucco and siding textures to to each house with perspective and shadows in mind. The textures where then desaturated to a medium gray and applied to each house in Flash as a MovieClip, set to BlendMode.OVERLAY. When the ColorSelector dispatches a CHANGE event – the new color gets applied to the selected texture movieclip (via ColorTransform manipulations).

3. DESIGN YOUR ROOF
The final step – applying different roof products – was achieved through the same techniques as step 2, but the tint color overlay was limited to the colors of the individual composite roofing products.

The final product allows visitors to visualize their dream roof in real-time, right in the browser, and without downloading any software. Other similar systems from Timeline’s competitors often rely on server side image manipulation that is slow, requires page refreshing, and just isn’t very interactive.

Flash is a great technology for visualizing products, and incredibly effective at drawing customers into site content by offering engaging interactive elements. If you’re interested in bringing a product or service to life on the web please contact us. We would be happy to discuss the wonderful options Flash and other technologies offer.

The numbers are in. I’ve thought about this thoroughly and in keeping with ArcStone’s nerdy roots, created an algorithm.  I added up productivity gains subtracted employee gripes and moans and then divided by hours logged.

(Gains – Gripes) / Hours = X

The clear winner for best technology investment in 2008?

Our switch to Google Apps for our company email, calendar and documentation platform.

Google Apps has five elements that you need to know about…

1. User Management – to secure access and set permissions for your team.
2. Email – in this case Gmail, which is Google’s fantastic web mail service.  Users can also use mail clients like Outlook or Thunderbird if they wish.
3. Calendar – An online personal calendar which may be shared with your colleagues.
4. Sites - An easy to edit wiki system.  Need a quick wiki to organize a project, or documentation?  It literally takes a non-technical user 5 minutes to create a new site and start adding content.  You can then restrict content to certain users or publish to the web at large.
5. Docs – an online productivity suite which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and data collection application.   These have become very important tools in the tool box for us at ArcStone.  We use Docs for tracking basic spreadsheet information centrally like employee phone extensions and incoming leads, to collaborating on our 2009 business plan.  Google Docs also includes a slick form generation tool, enabling non-technical users to easily create online forms for surveys and similar data collection projects.  Google is clearly targeting Microsoft Office users, but I have to confess Google Docs still has a ways to go before replacing Office – don’t plan on using it exclusively.

And how much $$ for all these goodies?  If you have fewer than one hundred employees, the price is truly right. You pay them $0.  All it took for us was a DNS update so that Gmail started getting our our email and then some configuration / internal communication / training to make the transition.

Before you ask, no I’m not working for Google.  I just want to share something that’s working well for us.

If you’re an ArcStone client and you’re interested in making the transition to Google Apps, drop me a line.  If there’s enough interest, I’d be happy to schedule a group Webinar demonstrating how we use Google Apps and help you decide whether or not to make the move.

If you like art, and you like people, you’ll love Craftstravaganza – a rogue art and craft fair for handmade art. My wife and I attended last year and were really impressed with the talent and variety of artists – some really great stuff. Great gift buying opportunities at affordable prices.

At that time our baby clothing project was still in the design phase, so one of our goals for this year was to apply to become a vendor – and am pleased to announce we were accepted. Vendors are judged and a limited number are accepted so we were very excited. Come and say hi, and support our local artists. In fact, I will even offer $5 off any onesie or t-shirt if you mention this post! Preview our wares, http://orangerhinokids.etsy.com

Craftstravaganza takes place this weekend, complete information on the website: http://www.craftstravaganza.com/2008/home.html

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Saturday April 26th, 9am – 6pm
Minnesota State Fairgrounds - Fine Arts Building
Complete directions here

Our booth will be directly across from the band (yes there is music too!), our business name is Orange Rhino
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America’s obsession with all things gargantuan continues, and I will be here to document it. In this installment I highlight some food related items of truly ridiculous proportions.

64 Ounce Coffee Mug – that’s an entire pot of coffee, people, and at ninety-nine cents to fill it, it’s quite a value!

400-Inch Frying Pan – make omelettes for two hundred people, or a sixty pound pancake, or cook my five-year-old son whole.

120 lbs. of Treats – this has to be the biggest trick-or-treat bucket ever made. How is a kid even going to carry that around?

Vimeo, a video sharing site akin to YouTube but for a more discriminating user, has now launched HD video streams in gloriously sharp 720p. For those of you stuck in the analog, rabbit-ears age, that is 1,280 by 720 pixels of resolution.

I sampled some of their fare, and was quite impressed with the quality and speed of the video. The content however, like most video sites, still leaves something to be desired.

Other sites will probably follow suit and start offering higher video quality. It won’t be long before we have a regular resolution arms race on our hands. Alas gentle readers, this leaves me wondering: do we really need to see aunt Deloris’s 80th birthday party, or a montage of groin smashing shenanigans in high resolution?

It also appears that the move to higher quality video is in part inspired by a lucrative advertising contract with Canon. Throughout the site you can see ads promoting the obvious superiority of HD video, and Canon’s logo is even watermarked over select videos.

I have selected from the cream of the crop a video for your sampling (you still need to visit Vimeo for the HD version):

The FX Movie (A Tribute To Visual Effects) – HD version from Spinning Blade on Vimeo.

I once saw a woman driving her Hummer while wearing huge sunglasses, drinking a 64 ounce Big Gulp and eating a foot-long hot dog. Well, not really, but it seams probable given our preoccupation with all things enormous.

This even appears to be influencing something near and dear to my heart: gizmos and gadgets. So I submit to you, gentle readers, three items of ridiculous proportions spotted at my local shopping complex:

An Enormous Remote Control – STILL nothing good on

A Giant Calculator – can only add to 999,999,999 though

A huge Swiss Army Style Grilling Tool – if this fits in your pocket you need to grill less