I first mentioned Blackstone gateways at CFUN, and there has been lots of interest and curiosity ever since. Sean Corfield is already building Blackstone gateways (using the alpha version of the product), and has blogged an overview of how he is using gateways to tie different systems together in a Macromedia in-house application. See http://www.corfield.org/blog/past/2004_06.html#000490.

I presented Blackstone to the Philadelphia user group last night. Some of the attendees had attended CFUN, so I tried to alter the content slightly. This was a rather quiet (almost subdued) group, one of the attendees suggested that that was typical of Philadelphians, but I don't buy that at all. It took some effort, but I was able to wake them up and even get them to display genuine enthusiasm. The session went well, lots of good questions, and even included a somewhat animated debate on which features should be included with CF Standard and which to only include in CF Enterprise (and no, I did not make any commitments here at all, we're still trying to figure it all out).

I drive to NJ and NY shortly for 2 more user group sessions today, and then tomorrow I wrap this segment of the tour in Boston. 3 more to go, and we're within 200 people of our total attendance objective!

Finally, some really important news! :-) The title for the next Harry Potter book will be "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince", no publication date has been announced yet. The movie of book 4, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", is due in theatres November 2005. See http://money.cnn.com/2004/06/29/news/newsmakers/harrypotter/.

It looks like Microsoft is managing to settle State lawsuits one at a time. (See http://www.itworld.com/Man/2699/040629msarizona/ and more). Arizona is the 12th state to settle, and Microsoft will provide $104 million in vouchers to customer who were "overcharged" for Windows and Office in between 1996 and 2002. These settlements have already cost Microsoft more than $1.5 billion, and that number is likely to increase.

I am not going to get into a discussion about capitalism, and a debate on who gets to decide what price is right and what is too much. That is neither here nor there at this point.

What really bugs me is the perception of value, or the total lack thereof. Regardless of how anyone feels about Microsoft, this "overcharged" accusation is simply ignoring reality. To put it in perspective, not that long ago we willingly paid $400-$800 for an electric typewriter which did a whole lot less than Microsoft Word which can be bought for $70. Even in the software realm, Excel costs far less than we paid for Lotus 123 when it was the only game in town, PowerPoint costs less than Aldus Persuasion and Harvard Graphics used to, and Access is cheaper than Ashton Tate used to charge for dBase. In fact, the entire Microsoft Office Professional suite costs less than that typewriter did back then.

You may not like Microsoft and you don't have to, you may not want to pay for their software and you don't have to, you may not buy the value proposition in which case you'd not have to buy the software either. But don't call it "overcharging" just to be able to force a lawsuit and a subsequent settlement.

Overcharged? Sorry, I don't buy that argument, and I wish that Microsoft could have fought these suits. Ultimately, Microsoft lawyers probably figured that settling was cheaper, but that does not make the accusation right in any way, shape, or form.

Kansas City held the user group attendance lead (for this tour) for a few weeks, but Washington D.C. took the lead this evening with 100 attendees. About 1/3 of those present had attended my CFUN keynote, so I varied the presentation somewhat (different examples, additional content), answered lots and lots of questions, and listened to all sorts of suggestions and comments. Next stop, Philadelphia.

I just presented Blackstone to CFUN. The only adjective that I think adequately describes the atmosphere in the room is "intense". I was given 40+ minutes to talk and so had to scale back the content and also talk and demo really quickly. The crowd of over 500 loved everything they saw, spontaneous applause throughout, and then a standing ovation when I was done! Incredible, the general consensus seems to be that Blackstone is right on target, and has nailed the features that users want.

As promised, I did demo one new feature at CFUN, something not shown previously anywhere else. That feature is the introduction of event driven gateways to ColdFusion, essentially allowing events other than HTTP requests to trigger ColdFusion processing. The example I gave was dropping a file into a folder (maybe via an FTP upload), the act of which fired an OnAdd method in a CFC to be invoked, and the code in that method read the file and updated a database with its contents. I discussed other possible gateways, including listening to sockets, responding to database changes, firing asynchronous CFML processing, and more. This capability radically changes what ColdFusion is capable of. I think it will take time for the idea (and its potential) to sink in, and many will comment on this in the near future.

I did not catch all of CFUN, I drop-shipped in for the last half day, but what I saw was incredible, and the buzz was phenomenal. CFUN has become the premier CF specific event, and Michael Smith and his team deserve all sorts of praise for their hard work in pulling it all off yet again.

I am still planning to take the Blackstone tour to Europe (and probably Asia too), but it won't be the week of July 12th as originally planned. The reasons for the change are: A) Summer attendance will not be as good as we'd like, B) I really need a break from this, I am now in the middle of my 5th consecutive week on the road and additional week long trips is just too unfair to my family. I apologize for any inconvenience that this change may cause, and will post updated dates as soon as we finalize them. (On the upside, as the rescheduled presentations will be later in the development cycle, attendees will likely get to see stuff that is not being shown now, a silver lining perhaps).

I am in LAX waiting for a redeye home, having just wrapped week 4 of my user group tour. The San Francisco and Orange Country presentations both went very well, although neither group unseated Kansas City which still holds the attendance record. I'll post pictures when I am on a faster connection. I get a short break, and then head to D.C. for CFUN on Sunday to kick off week 5 (the final week of the North American leg).

I've been using my GPRS modem all over the U.S. for several months now, with varying results (both as far as connection reliability and speed). And nowhere has it worked as well as it working today all over the greater Los Angeles area. I'd not (yet) recommend GPRS connections for the masses, but if you live (or frequent) L.A. then you may indeed want to seriously consider trying it out.

I spoke to the user group in Sacramento last night (flight delays meant that I was cutting it close, but I did make it, and on time too). Another great presentation, and once again I did not get through all of my content because there were so many questions and comments. Some folks drove 200+ miles to attend, an effort greatly appreciated.

I'll be working my way down the coast, next stop San Francisco, and then the Los Angeles area (two more user group meetings this week, and a bunch of customer meetings too).

More to follow.

I should have been in Sacramento by now, but nope, I am in PDX (the airport in Portland). First a cancelled flight, then a mechanical delay, and now just waiting. Not very good data connections here, thankfully I have my GPRS card (although GSM/GPRS coverage here is rather weak). I have 4 1/2 hours, I should make it ...

BMW and Apple have partnered so that you may "iPod Your BMW" (see http://www.ipodyourbmw.com/). Full pages ads in USA Today and elsewhere are heralding this marriage as "total driving control meets total tune control", and lots of folks are mega-excited over it.

I may be missing something here, but why on earth would I want to "plug your iPod into the iPod connector cable in your BMW's glovebox"? Have they never heard of wireless? Come on, create a Bluetooth add-on for iPod, or something similar, and make it seamlessly cool. Sure, it may cost a bit more, but look at the demographic, this is supported by BMW 3 series, X3, X5, and Z4 Roadster, not cars driven by anyone who is overly budget conscious and looking to save a buck.

This seems like a cool idea, with a not overly cool implementation.

But then again, I don't own a BMW or an iPod, and am a bit of a wireless-nut, so what do I know.

I presented Blackstone to the user group in Portland, OR, this evening. It's been quite a while since I was last in Portland, I don't remember it being so hot here! I had to make lots of last minute demo changes because I installed a new product build and stuff changed (I like living dangerously). So, the attendees did not get to see everything that I had presented previously, but they did get to see reporting features that no one else has seen yet. Attendance was disappointing, but those who were present provided great feedback and seemed genuinely enthusiastic.

I head down to California soon. I'll be there until Thursday night, and have lots of meetings and presentations scheduled. Thankfully, I spend all of this week on the same time zone!

No tie for me. And no socks. And no tools, either. My kids have been well trained, they gave me Lego (3 planes, the Sopwith Camel, the Red Baron, and the Wright Flyer). Sweet! :-)

Last week I asked for feedback on the necessity for Blackstone reporting to support RTF (a file format primarily used with Microsoft Word). There were over 40 responses to that entry (and some even agreed with each other).

To summarize the responses ...

Those that want RTF support do so primarily because they want to create editable documents (maybe using programmatic processing to build a basic document, and then allowing tweaking before final printing). The other reasons given included "that is what the customer wants", and the feeling that RTF files are lighter weight than are PDF.

Those who do not see the need for RTF seem happier with PDF. The primary reasons given are that it is ubiquitous (and somewhat of a standard), and that PDF files can be locked (editing can be prevented).

So, when all is said and done, the biggest real distinction seems to be the editabilty of the files. PDF is intended to be a printable format (not really an editable one), whereas RTF is intended to be used with word processor documents (editable by its very definition). And while the idea of allowing users to edit documents makes me nervous (the idealist in me would rather they fill in some form so that what gets generated is exactly what they want, otherwise you have no reproducibility or accountability, and a real likelihood of lost edits) ... I do accept and appreciate this distinction. There really are two very different use cases.

No, I am not saying that we'll support RTF, nor am I saying that we won't. But you have given us lots of invaluable feedback with which to debate and prioritize the request, and will we definitely do so shortly.

Thanks!

Lots of you have been asking for a print output to Excel (this has come up in discussions at user groups, in e-mail threads, and in the comments to my blog entry regarding RTF files). I've been giving this one some thought, and honestly, I don't believe that Excel makes sense as a "print" format. I am not saying that I don't see a need for programmatic Excel spreadsheet generation, I just don't know how a spreadsheet would map to a printable output.

As I see it (and as I've been demonstrating for the past three weeks), there are two distinct needs when it comes to printing from within ColdFusion apps:

1) Printing web pages: essentially compensating for the pathetic printing support in most browsers, allowing for content (text, images, alignment, tables, etc.) to be printed so that pages and breaks and wrapping all work properly. Being able to create PDF, FlashPaper, or RTF versions of web pages makes lots of sense. The intent is to generate something that is printable, and those all are. But this type of printing makes absolutely no sense as an Excel spreadsheet, there is no way to map freeform content to Excel rows and cells in any way that would actually be useful or relevant.

2) Reporting: data driven template based reports that display data in a structured format, supporting bands, running calculations, charting, and more. Supporting the same print formats makes sense too. Unlike the printing scenario described above, the type of data presented in reports is a bit more structured and so it may indeed be a fit for Excel spreadsheets. But, I still don't quite understand how it could all work. Spreadsheets are 2 dimensional data views (essentially data grids, with a possible 3rd dimension if tabs are used), and reports really are not grids at all. After all, if you were to indent a total in your report, what spreadsheet cell would you want it in? And if you used a sum function would you expect the value or an Excel sum function to be embedded? And if you used nested bands with headers and footers, what would those map to? What would rows line up to? There is way too much potential ambiguity here, and the reality of it would likely be that the generated spreadsheet would never be exactly what you intended. To generate accurate spreadsheet content you would need to either a) explicitly put content in specific cells (using APIs for explicit cell manipulation), or b) be able to generate a grid type view with enough control so that it may be intelligently mapped to cells. And honestly, both seem like a lot of trouble for not much upside. Especially as you can already use other techniques to generate Excel content, including generating CSV content, and generating HTML tables which Excel can process properly (mapping HTML table cells to Excel spreadsheet cells, once you have done the work of determining exactly what to place in each cell, Excel can handle the importing quite nicely).

I may be way off base here, but it seems that the use case for Excel is very different from that of PDF or even RTF. The latter are great as print formats, I buy that. But Excel is not a print format at all, it is a tool used for data analysis, and that may result in charting and reporting, but not necessarily so. Or, put differently, data is not sent to Excel merely to be able to print it, that would make little sense. Data is sent to Excel to be manipulated, to perform calculations, to generate charts, and more. This may ultimately be printed, but the primary objective is the data manipulation that Excel offers, not the fact that it can print.

As such, I think that if ColdFusion were to generate Excel content then the interface to it should not be printing or reporting at all. It sounds like users want an "export" feature, a way to take a database query and export it to some other useful format, like Excel (or even XML). I can see a tag like this:

Or maybe functions like:

Both interfaces make sense (and have pros and cons), and both would allow you to simply generate Excel content (perhaps with column names as the top row, and then data in specific cells). Maybe we could even allow additional functionality to better manipulate specific cells (to set values, add formatting or functions, and more), we'd need to think that one through in more detail.

The more I think of it, the more I agree that Excel spreadsheet generation makes a lot of sense, and the more I feel that the use case and usage patterns require a slightly different way of thinking.

Your thoughts?

I am home, recuperating from week 3 of my Summer 2004 User Group Tour.

My last stop this week was Denver, which has always boasted a strong and enthusiastic membership, and this event reflected that. Unfortunately, I once again forgot to take pictures, so if you have any to share please send them my way.

And talking about pictures, week 3 evidence is now online at http://www.forta.com/about/theroad.cfm.

Next week I had west to Portland to start week 4, working my way down the West Coast.

I just arrived in Denver, a pleasant 55 degrees, far more agreeable than 101 degrees in Phoenix!

Last night's session (in Phoenix) was intense. About 50 attendees in a very nice room in a community college library. We got into a long discussion about RTF and XLS files, the formalization of development frameworks and methodologies, Macromedia's success pushing CF, and other equally contentious topics. In fact, we kept going for about 3 hours, and I did not even get through all of my slides!

I have now demonstrated Blackstone's ability to generate printable pages to 12 user groups, lots of corporate customers, and many hundreds of users. While we have publicly committed to Blackstone supporting the creation of printable documents, we have not publicly committed to any specific output formats. PDF is obviously the most requested format, and so I think that it would be reasonable to assume that PDF will be supported. I have also demonstrated generating FlashPaper as a printable output. (Incidentally, these two were the ones most voted for in a poll on my blog page).

But, at every user group thus far, the first question has been "will you support RTF?". The truth is that we don't know yet, we have not nailed down the final formats, and want feedback from customers to help us figure this out. I do see the appeal of RTF, I also see the appeal of XLS (the next most requested format, although I am having a really hard time figuring out exactly what XLS generation would do). But what I am still trying to understand is just how critical RTF support is.

Put it this way, if we were to support RTF then we'd need to not invest resources in something else, it's that simple. So, while RTF would be nice to have, I'd not want us to invest in it unless it were critical. Or, put differently, if users were to tell us that they'd upgrade to Blackstone if RTF were supported, and not if only PDF were supported, well, that helps put things in perspective. Again, I agree that supporting RTF would be a good thing. Heck, I'd like us to support every format you could ever think of. But, and realizing that we will need to ship the product at some point, we do need to think through prioritization.

Any thoughts on this one? Please share.

I am in Houston, Texas, and just finished the third of three presentations here.

Monday midday was a lunchtime presentation in Austin, at the Alamo Drafthouse (a rather eccentric feeling cinema / bar). This was my first trip to Austin in almost 5 years, long overdue. And attendance was great, especially for a midday session. The presentation went very well, lots of great feedback, and I was even presented with a couple of CDs featuring local music. Thanks, I'll be back (but perhaps not when the thermometer hits 95 degrees, ugh!).

Then an hour and a half drive over to San Antonio, my first trip to this city (which feels more like a small town, which it decidedly is not). The presentation was hosted by the Southwest Research Institute on beautiful sprawling grounds, complete with roaming deer. This was a smaller and more intimate group, and about half were not ColdFusion users (yet).

This morning I flew over to Houston (into Hobby, not IAH, as many of you know I've not had the best of luck when flying via IAH). I met with corporate customers earlier in the day, and then presented to the user group in the evening. This was the most engaged and interactive group yet, there were so many questions and comments that I covered only about 2/3 of the presentation. And then a group of us hung out at the bar while watching the Pistons annihilate the Lakers.

Next stop, Phoenix, Arizona.

Section 508 requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities. Section 508 was enacted (as an amendment to the Rehabilitation Act) to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. Section 508 law is most relevant to Federal Government agencies, but is increasingly being discussed at the State and local Government levels too.

The official Section 5508 site is at http://www.section508.gov/, a site built entirely in ColdFusion MX.

In addition, Gareth Slinn just brought an accessibility tool that he built to my attention. Go to http://www.hermish.com/ to access an online accessibility test tool. It parses specified URLs and checks for Section 508, WCAG, deprecated elements and attributes, and more. And this too is powered by ColdFusion.

Pictures taken at the groups visited during week 2 of the Summer 2004 User Group Tour are now online at http://www.forta.com/about/theroad.cfm. In my rush, I forgot to take any pictures in Chicago, so if you were in attendance and happen to have pics, please send them my way. Thanks!

I spoke to the Chicago ColdFusion User Group Last night. This was a whistle-stop visit, I arrived in Chicago in the afternoon (I was delayed getting out of St. Louis) and left the meeting as I was done to grab a taxi back to the airport. I got to O'Hare in time for my flight which was then cancelled, and then got transferred to a later flight on another airline which was running 30 minutes late but finally left over an hour later than that. Fun stuff.

But, the meeting itself went well, and the crowd was enthusiastic, appreciative, and wanted the new features immediately. Sorry guys, no can do! :-)

The Government Online Learning Center, http://www.golearn.gov/, is a US Government resource providing e-training products and services to Federal employees. Created to supports the President's Management Agenda (PMA), the site is continually growing with the addition of products and services and performance support tools that meet critical and Government wide needs of the workforce. The site is designed to resemble a virtual campus, using pictures of hallways (click on a door to enter) and elevators (go to a different level for more options), and a registration desk (for registration, duh!). And of course, the center is powered by ColdFusion.

I just wrapped my third presentation in Missouri in 25 hours.

Last night was the Kansas City user group, with over 90 attendees (they've now taken the lead on this tour, which group will challenge them?). This was the most engaged and interactive group yet. I didn't have to prompt for questions here, these guys just kept on going and going and going. Just the way I like it. Attendance might have been helped by the food, these guys laid on a full meal, impressive!

This morning I drove from Kansas City to Columbia (a hundred or so miles West on I-70). Columbia is a college town, and home to a Macromedia User Group (as opposed to a CFUG). Over 50 attendees at a lunch time presentation, very good response, indeed. About half of those present were Dreamweaver and Flash users, not ColdFusion users, so I had to change the presentation somewhat to accommodate the group. This was a rather quite and reserved bunch, some of that is typical of presentations in academic settings, and part of it was probably the room (formal auditorium, sitting much higher than the presenter looking down, big tables as a separator, all of that makes for a slightly intimidating experience which often seems to impact interaction). I don't get to visit the smaller, off-the-beaten-track, groups often enough, and I am really glad that I was able to speak to this group.

Then a drive from Columbia to St. Louis (another hundred or so miles West on I-70). This was a more typical CFUG event, with just over 50 attendees. Lots of good questions here, and was the big winner.

Next stop, Chicago.