My Open Policy Decistion
This morning when I read all of the GNU/Linux news from my email inbox delivered via Google Alerts, I decided to have my own open policy. Although my career is web development, I can contribute my server-side script code such as ColdFusion and PHP through Github and Google Code Project. Other server-side scripting languages such as Perl and Java is out of the topics of this blog because I’m only beginning to learn the basics of Perl and soon I will learn JSP as well as other languages, except Microsoft-owned ASP and ASP.NET. My hosting provider doesn’t support these two languages anyway. In fact, it also does not support ColdFusion. The reasons that I’m studying and using ColdFusion is that first because this language is required for my major. Second reason is that this language is identical to PHP. Thus it ‘s easier to learn this language together with PHP. In fact, the RPX demo page that I created is inspired by curl function in PHP.
In addition to open up more of my code, I have also decided to use, learn and contribue to other open source projects, including WordPress and PHP, as well as VLC and other projects whether they are related to the web or not.
One of my current goals is to wait and see if there is any good Android-based device in the near future that meet my requirements. Although I have a jailbreaked iPod Touch, I felt that it still is not very openness to me. My requirements of the device are following:
- Its price needs to blow $200 dollars
- It needs to have a camera
- It needs to have access to Android Market Place
- I definitely do not want the phone ability
- The GPS feature is in my wish list, but not really a requirement
I hope that there is going to be a suitable device for me before I begin to attend University of Maryland this Fall so I could experienment with some mobile programming knowledge.
CFWheels, an Open Source Framework for ColdFusion
CFWheels is a ColdFusion framework inspired by Ruby on Rails. It has a very thorough get started tutorial to get you started with using CFWheels on its website. The URL format of the framework is pretty much like CodeIgniter PHP framework, example.com/index.php/news, except it’s index.cfm instead of index.php. Since it’s open source, I’m able to see its source code.
CFWheels uses CF Components, which is ColdFusion method of Object Oriented Programming (OOP). I’m happened to be learning UDF (User Defined Functions) and Custom Tags for ColdFusion in college. Therefore it’s a perfect opportunity to learn the ColdFusion Component which is the next step of UDF and Custom Tags.
There are also many useful documents and tutorials on the CFWheels website. It has 10 episodes of video tutorials and offers online version and PDF version of its Reference Guide and Wheels API documents. Overall, it’s easy to get started to using this framework. However, I’m still struggled with completely using ColdFusion on GNU/Linux.