Wednesday 3 October 2012

ColdFusion (/Builder) most recent bugs feed

G'day.
For all intents and purposes, the Adobe bug tracker is one-way traffic: one raises a bug... and that's likely to be the last interaction one has with Abode on the topic of that bug. That's not to say that Adobe don't address the bug in some way shape or form, but the humans at Adobe often don't feed back on the bug tracker in a very helpful fashion, and even if they do: there's no notification system, so one pretty much needs to come back on a regular basis to check if there's been any updates to a ticket. This is made slightly unfeasible because Adobe's reaction time to most issues is absolutely glacial compared to the likes of Railo. So checking on a regular basis is generally a fool's errand.

I'm thoroughly bloody pissed-off with this attitude Adobe had taken with their clients, many of whom have parted with thousands upon thousands of quid for the privilege of being ignored (I've never paid a plug nickel for ColdFusion, but my employers have. Hundreds of grand over the years). It's rude, disrespectful, and for a company touting "Enterprise" products, borderline unprofessional. IMO.

Anyway, simply being pissed-off - whilst being slightly cathartic to an old curmudgeon like meself - achieves bugger-all, so I'm gonna do something useful.

First-up is today's pre-work (I'm still on the train, en route) and lunchtime mission is to create an RSS feed of "latest bugs". I'm interested in knowing about all bugs in ColdFusion, so would like to hear about then as they get raised. I presume other people might be the same. It'll take me a coupla hours to knock this out - not least of all because I have never touched <cffeed>, and also know nothing about what constitutes an RSS feed - but I'll post the URL back here when it's done. It should be today at some stage.

The second thing I've been chipping away at in the evenings is a "Bug Notifier" system which allows subscribers to subscribe to bugs, and they'll get emailed when the bug's status changes, or anyone comments or votes. This is about half done (admittedly the easy, fiddling-around-with-the-interesting/new-stuff half).  This should be done before the beginning of next week. "Done" in a very rough-and-ready, v1.0 sort of way, anyhow.

It's pathetic that the bug tracker doesn't provide these facilities out of the box, and Adobe is the only organisation I know who provide a bug tracker that doesn't do this.  Admittedly other organisations don't even have a public bug tracker, but the ones that do, do it properly.  Not half-arsedly.

Anyway, I realise an article that's basically about something that doesn't exist isn't that interesting, but... well: there you go.  That's what I have to say this morning.

Now... <cffeed>...

--
Adam