Finally the email tool that I built for a client has finished sending its first batch of newsletter. I’m quite proud of this project, I think this is the first project where I really was given responsibility to lead the technical team and it was quite challenging technically too.

Couple of major problems that I encountered during the development phase:
- Tracking the email marketing. How to know how many people open the email, what link they clicked etc2. I borrowed quite a lot of ideas from the email marketing service providers like MailChimp.
- Our company using an object based page composer for our CMS, I was porting this and modifying it for email composition tool. Due to email specific issues like lack of CSS support, this task was particularly challenging to me. Getting an HTML email to work in Gmail is really a challenge.
- Client keeps on changing his mind which at the moment causing major reworking on some aspects of the architecture.

I learned a lot about Coldfusion’s ability of schedule tasks, all of our system are using combination of Coldfusion scheduler and database structure to make the task scheduling easy and versatile. I found that this is one area where Coldfusion is better than PHP. Task scheduler is not a part of PHP, usually we need to use cron job for task scheduling in PHP based sites and setting a cron job requires a considerably more effort than setting a schedule task in Coldfusion server.

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I guess not much of a news for CF enthusiasts.
Get it here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion8/

CF blogs have been buzzing with excitement over this first Adobe release of CF. Honestly, I also felt quite excited too, it seems that this version has quite a view of dazzling new features, these are from Adobe link above:
* Server monitoring to help identify server bottlenecks, allowing for tuning and improved performance.
* Step through code debugging in a new Eclipse plug-in debugger.
* Adobe Flex™ and Ajax features that let ColdFusion power personalized, multimedia-rich applications to enhance users’ experiences on the web.
* High-quality, dynamically created on-demand multimedia presentations.
* PDF document and form integration for a printable, portable way to intelligently capture and share information.
* Image creation and manipulation with more than 50 new CFML tags and functions.
* Native support for .NET objects to easily integrate ColdFusion applications with enterprise data and infrastructure services.
* Significant application runtime and server performance improvements.

I am just wondering whether PHP developers are also as excited about PHP releases.. I never followed PHP blogs before (which I should have when I was programming PHP for S3Group), so they might as well be excited about PHP. All that I seem to notice with PHP releases are bug fixes and patching security holes.

Anyways, I am not bagging PHP, I am still coding in PHP for my personal website and some other side projects. But I’m just in love with CF at the moment (probably because I follow too many CF blogs).

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