Ray Camden on Developing Open Source ColdFusion Applications

Last week I got a chance to have a conversation with coding guru and author Ray Camden on the open source ColdFusion community. Ray Camden has authored many open source ColdFusion applications as well as creating various platforms for developers to share code and information publicly. Here's what he had to say.

Greg: You've done a lot in the promotion of open and shared ColdFusion code. RIAForge in particular has filled a missing gap in the community for open sourcing applications. How did it get started?

Ray: It was entirely Ben Forta's idea. He came to me with the idea and I began development on the platform. What's great from a purely selfish perspective is that the site is tremendously useful to me!

Greg: The ease is not just on the management end, as an end user it's helpful to have a quick way to update applications as well. Coming back to the applications you've created, it seems as you've taken the approach of bringing a wide variety of useful applications over making a single application deep with features. How do you decide which features to include in a new projects?

Ray: Most of the time it is strictly personal. As an example - I'm working with a client who is using my bug tracker, Lighthouse Pro, and they have a large number of bugs and refer to bugs by their ID (ie, bug # 290). I noticed there is no quick way to jump to a bug by ID so I'm going to make the filters support that.

Ray: So it's really a 'I need it, let's built it' type process. A lot of the modifications that come in to me work the same way. A guy says, "I needed the app to do X", it makes sense to me, so I roll in their changes.

Greg: In addition to playing key roles in the inception of community focus sites, you've also done heavy work in creating many useful open source applications like BolgCFC, Galleon, and Lighthouse Pro. With so many active projects what difficulties do you encounter?

Ray: Management - which is where RIAForge comes into play. :) Just having a quick way to upload new builds by itself is great.

Greg: ColdFusion is a closed source commercial product. Why heavily invest time in free and open source applications for an expensive application server?

Ray: I'd argue against saying it is expensive. It isn't free, but there are plenty of low cost hosting options and certainly the amount of time you save using ColdFusion makes up for the cost. But - that is another discussion. :)

Greg: The expense of ColdFusion is definitely a debatable topic, with good argument supporting the ease of rapid development. Still though, it's a closed source application. Why develop free open source applications for a commercial closed source platform?

Ray: Well I don't think that's a fair question. The same could be applied to Windows, and there are many open source Windows application even though the core operating system isn't open.

Greg: I've heard that open source applications can be a great way for entry level developers to get real world experience contributing to active projects. What is the best way for a developer to get involved in an open source RIAforge application?

Ray: They should download the application, of course, and be sure to read any and all documentation. They should then look at the bug tracker and get an idea of what open bugs/enhancement requests are out there. Speaking for myself as a project author, I prefer for people to ping me before they go ahead and fix something. Of course, being OS they can do what they want, but if they want me to include their fix, it makes sense to ask first. I may have the fix done already and just not checked in, so it saves them time from duplicating efforts as well. Plus, the way you may fix something is not necessarily the way I would fix it, so I may want you to modify your solution a bit first.