Joel on PR spending vs. Ship Early/Often

There's a good post over on Joel on Software (well, a lot of good posts, actually) focusing on how big PR / marketing budgets don't work for large companies (Microsoft) attempting the ship early/often web apps (live.com).

In a nutshell: if you're planning on releasing early/often, and maybe even planning public release before product is "done" (see: Gmail, BasecampHQ, etc.), it doesn't pay to spend millions of dollars to drive a lot of people to your site, especially if it sucks.

More at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/02.html.

0 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 1:32 PM - Categories: See Also

New Blog: Dave Carabetta

Dave Carabetta, a top-notch ColdFusion developer from NY, has started blogging. It'll be good to what hear what he has to say; he's contributed code to Model-Glue that fixes some cross-platform issues in early releases. Read more at http://www.cbetta.com.

1 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 11:29 AM - Categories: See Also

The floors are finished!

I've been reflooring/repainting/renovating two floors of my house now for a few months, and I'm proud to say I'm done! Here's a few pics of what I've been up to when not working or playing with Model-Glue and Arf!

Also, the house is for sale. If you're looking for a house or know someone who is in the Washington, DC area, let me know so I can get you in contact with my agent.

Yes, I own too many bicycles. There are six in there.

10 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 3:28 PM - Categories: Off Topic

jComponents: Goodbye.

I've been catching some grief, both publicly and over personal e-mail, for my 404ing of the jComponents custom tags. While I do apologize for the way I've just let those e-mails sit in a bucket for a while, I don't really appreciate some of their contents.

Use of the component set was free, was a support nightmare (I get 10+ e-mails a week, most of which are from people who FTP encoded CF files in ASCII mode), nobody was buying it (the source wasn't free, remember?), and it wasn't all that good in the first place.

If you're looking for what they provided (tabs, trees, etc.), I'd strongly suggest you check into CFMX7 or Flex 2. They provide much cleaner, extensible, standardized implementations.

I'm sorry if this comes of as crass, but seriously - it doesn't help those of us who do contribute to the community when we wake up to anonymously sent complaints about our contribution.

8 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 7:24 AM - Categories: jComponents

BlogCFC "Tag Cloud" Pod

I've grown to like the "Tag Clouds" I've seen on some other ColdFusion blogs (a good example is Pete Freitag) because they let me visually see what the blogger has focused on.

This weekend I hacked together a quick Tag Cloud pod for BlogCFC - you should be able to simply drop it into the same dir as all of the other pods, then mod your layout.cfm custom tag to include is along with/instead of the archives pod.

Attached as a .TXT enclosure, or see http://clearsoftware.net/client/enclosures/tags%2Etxt.

1 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 10:54 AM - Categories: ColdFusion MX

Slow Blogging Ahead

I'm going to be light on posts for a while (maybe even until the end of December), as I'm going to be pretty busy with some other things going on in my life. Nothing bad happening, just time-consuming.

I *will* do another Arf! TV session sometime this week, though!

10 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 8:01 AM - Categories: Site News

Arf! and Scaffolding: Not Happening

I've had few people ask me when Arf! will support Rails-style scaffolding. I just don't think it's going to happen. There's a few reasons for this:

1. Would you like your scaffold in FB, Mach-II, Model-Glue, or nothing at all? On top of that, would you like MVC FB, service-layer scaffolding serving all three and the "no framework" methodology? There's simply too many ways to do it, and nothing's going to make everyone happy.

2. If it _did_ generate scaffolds, we'd all just overwrite them with our own custom UI anyways.

3. I'd like to focus on getting the easy CRUD/ORM side of things right, and hey, I'm just this guy, you know?

4. I'd like to look beyond HTML. Flex Builder doesn't give a crap about scaffolding, but having a fast CRUD layer could make building Flex apps much faster, and might help some of the J2EE/PHP Flexers see that CF is a viable platform as well.

If someone wants to do their own scaffolding project, it might be nice to see it done in a way where multiple framework UIs can be created, and in a way where it communicates with a generic service layer supplied by either hand-coded components, Arf!, Reactor, or whatever pops up next.

7 comments - Posted by Joe Rinehart at 9:10 AM - Categories: Arf!