CFML: proposed new meet-up in London?

G'day:
Perennial CFML community-member Mark Drew is looking at the feasibility of getting a CFML Meetup going in London. Sounds like a good idea to me.

He's just gathering some metrics as to people's interest levels and availability at the moment... here's a survey: London CFML Meetup.

Also help him get the word out by RTing this, and in general spreading the word, eh?

Hey there! Can you give me some feedback about having a London #CFML Meetup? https://t.co/K2kO3iBXjp Thank you peoples! please RT! #lucee

— Mark Drew (@markdrew) November 3, 2016

If it's on days I can make it, I'll probably pop along.

Good work, Mister Drew. Am always glad to see someone trying to put back in to the CFML community.

Righto.

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Adam

Abandonware: "Learn CFML in 24h" notes

G'day:
I've just been talking to a few people on the CFML slack channel about the sorry state of ColdFusion documentation.

A while back I started a private project "Learn CFML in 24 hours", which was gonna be my attempt at teaching people CFML in a style appropriate to 2015 (or perhaps 2014, at the time). There's other learning material out there, but I think all of it does CFML a disservice, and I wanted to move people on from that.

But I can't be arsed.

I find writing easy... most of these articles are created at about 100wpm... rattled out as fast as I can spew my stream of consciousness onto the screen via the keyboard. But I find focus and motivation very difficult. unless it's typing drivel straight from my brain, things become tricky, so I never finish anything I start. And that project is no different to any other I've started.

Seen in that light, I've just converted it from a private repo on Github to a public one.

My idea is people can look at what I've done and perhaps add some stuff or perhaps guilt-trip me into writing more, or... whatever.

The project is at https://github.com/adamcameron/cfml24h. I present it as-is. There is currently no licence, which means it's not licensed for anyone's use. I'll CC it or something soon.

I'm OK with continuing to write it, actually. Maybe I just need some direction from the community as to where to go in various areas. Raise issues I guess. I dunno. If anyone gets a handle on the editorial slant I am trying to take with it and wants to contribute, then I'll take pull requests. Perhaps discuss them with me first though.

BTW, Mark Drew helped me a lot with this when I first started this: with tone, motivation and general "food for thought". He might not realise how much I appreciated his input, so it's worth mentioning.

Righto.

--
Adam

Regarding codes of conduct and the nature of forum participation

G'day:

There's been discussion about a Code of Conduct for the Lucee Google Group. Well without having the bottle to actually describe it as such... indeed going so far as to suggest that isn't what this thread was floating: "Tone and community guidelines".

Despite knowing full-well that some of the points are directed at least partially (or possibly entirely) at me, I think it's an appropriate idea. Sorta.

That said, I'd like to have a look at a coupla issues that came up in that list of bullet points, from comments on the thread, and in general.

Lucee launch: thanks

G'day:
I was just thinking about this evening's Lucee launch. I'd just like to say that Micha gave an excellent presentation this evening, especially for a fella who was giving his first presentation ever. And also in a language that isn't his primary one. And not just some flippant "I fancy giving a presentation at a conference" sort of affair, but annoucing the release of something quite significant and controversial in our wee community, and career defining for him personally. No pressure then, eh?

Also I'd like to say thanks to Alex for providing the venue, beer, and general logistics for the thing. Nice one mate.

And to Mark Drew who sat there in the front row fielding all the questions coming in from a variety of online channels - the online meeting message feed, Twitter, IRC and my blog, and relaying them to Micha so he could answer them all.

I was out of the loop for a while during the presentation - unavoidable family stuff - and Brad stepped up and also fielded all the questions coming into my blog, interpreting, relaying, and intuiting answers on the fly.

Sean also fielded questions on IRC.

And other people helping out with the launch of Lucee this evening, including the meatspace attendees who also gave the thing a vibe and kept Micha honest.

Good work everyone.

--
Adam

"Learn CFML in 24 Hours" status

G'day:
You might remember this: "Learn CFML in 24 hours: chapter 0" back in Dec. I've not had much more to say about it, but I am working on it. I have that sketchy draft of chapter 0, and also pretty much done chapter 1 ("Variables, commands/statements/expressions, operators").

I'd like to get some other people's eyes on it, and I've had some volunteers to help sanity check / bullshit detect on it. But I don't want it to be a public thing, and I've been mulling over how to implement that. Yesterday I created a BitBucket account... BitBucket allows private repos for free. I am not prepared to pay GitHub £5/month to enable me to have a single private repo for a coupla dozen files. I've also invited a coupla bods to have access to it, to see how that works.

I'm pretty busy at the moment so progress has been a bit slower than I would have liked. But I am enjoying the writing I've thusfar done, so my interest is not waning at all. I have a month off work in Feb, so I anticipate breaking the back of the thing then. As long as the Kiwi sunshine and World Cup Cricket don't occupy all my time during that period. The good thing about cricket is that it takes all day, and doesn't require 100% of one's attention, so I should be able to multi-task a bit.

Anyway, that's that. A bunch of people have indicated interest in the project so I thought I'd write a quick update.

And now to convert the work I've done so far into markdown. Grumble.

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Adam

Book review: Adam Tuttle's newest book

G'day:
Adam's been busy recently. You'll've heard about his new book "REST Web APIs: The BookREST Assured: A Pragmatic Approach to API Design" which is being released soon - I'll have a review up and a competition to win a copy next week - but he's also released the first book dedicated to ColdFusion 11's newest marquee feature: CFClient.

I know I have derided CFClient a lot, but it does have its good bits, and Adam has worked through them all and put a fairly accessible book together. Granted it's not very long, but for something that focuses on a single tag, I think that's fair enough. It's free and open source, so you should go get it, and give it a read. It might make you think again about whether or not to use CFClient. I have to admit it did give me pause for thought.

Go grab it from it's official website now (it's just a PDF): "CFClient The Good Parts".

I think Abram Adams (of trycf.com fame) said it best in his review when he said:

I felt like I was looking into the minds of Adobe engineers

It's exactly this attention to detail Adam Tuttle captures in this latest book.

CFML doyen Mark Drew had this to say:

I have been looking everywhere for an in-depth look at the useful features of the cfclient tag and I have to thank Mr Tuttle for providing it!

I am not good at reviews but I should say that this is not only The Good Parts, it is also the definitive guide.

5/5

I'll get back to you about the REST book next week (here it is: "Book review: REST Web APIs: The Book (win a copy here)"). The CFClient book'll keep you going until then.

Cheers.

--
Adam

Cool Railo thing I learned at the London Railo Group meeting last night

G'day:
Last night was the first meeting of the London Railo Group. A bunch of people in the local London Railo community got together at the Pixl8 offices and had an informal catch-up and drank beer and ate pizza. There was only about a dozen people there, but I think it was a successful first meeting. Well done Alex Skinner for organising it, and Mark Drew for giving an impromptu presentation on some random Railo stuff he finds interesting.

Railo docs licence weirdness?

G'day:
I just noticed this in the licence (yes, I read licences) for the new Railo docs site:

The Railo Docs Site by Mark Drew (@markdrew) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Saving class files in ColdFusion (and Railo): anecdote should not take precedence over analysis

G'day:
There was a thread the other day on the Railo Google Group regarding the "Save Class Files" setting on Railo. I piped up with my usual spiel that I don't think it's a worthwhile setting to use on ColdFusion:

Yeah, I can't vouch for Railo, but on ColdFusion saving class files rapidly becomes a performance hit on the system (Windows) if your app is such that you generate more than a thousand or so classes. The reason being - it seems - that Windows really struggles to file-scan a directory to find the pre-compiled class if it's needed... say the one in memory has been garbage collected... once there are more than a few hundred files in that directory. On big apps it's more expedient to let the class recompile from source code than rely on Windows finding and loading a saved one.

I doubt this is a problem on *nix-based file systems.

The issue with CF is that all the classes are stored in one flat directory. If they were stored hierarchically (which shouldn't be too much of an issue?), then there'd be no problem. I did mention this to the Adobe bods, but they looked at me like I was speaking [some language they didn't understand... CF perhaps], and that was that.

Anyway... I dunno if the same consideration exists on Railo, but this would be one reason why one might not want those class files saving. Something to test, perhaps.

Mark Drew subsequently suggested it might be a topic for a blog article, so here one is.

New Railo docs site

G'day:
Bam Bam Bam. Three articles in rapid succession this evening!

I shoulda said something about this earlier, but it slipped my mind. Mark Drew has been beavering away getting the new Railo online docs sorted out, and they're now live.

The site is here: Railo Documentation Viewer.

Wanna know the best thing? This is the URL for the docs on <cfassociate>: http://railodocs.org/cfassociate. I did not look that up, I just knew all I needed to do is to type the tag (or function) after the domain name, and it works. Contrast this with Adobe's equivalent docs. Take a deep breath... http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/10.0/CFMLRef/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec22c24-7f5b.html. Got that? Railo seem to have a better grasp of web concepts like SEO and URL hackability than Adobe have (well if Adobe does, they don't care).

On SEO... if I search for "railo docs cfassociate" the first link is the page above. If I try "coldfusion docs cfassociate" I get the CF8 version of the docs as the first link, and the docs for ColdFusion 7 are third. ColdFusion 9 and 10 don't actually show up on that search, but Google displays them as results for "similar" searches: "coldfusion docs cfassociate", then the CF9 docs are listed. Oddly, if I actually do a search for "coldfusion cfassociate", I get the CF8 match first, the CFMX7 match on the second page (who the hell every looks at the second page of Google's search results? ;-), and by the time I gave up... page 5... I'd still not seen a link to the docs for any currently-supported version of ColdFusion. Blimey on page 3 there was a link to this blog of me talking about the tag, but nothing from Adobe on CF10 or even CF9. Slack. How can a web company be so poor at making sure their own docs are googlable?

How did you come to be using Railo? (survey results)

G'day:
I've got 80-odd results for the survey I started the other day. This was one of the best and fastest responses I've had on the various surveys I've run on this blog. I wonder if this is because it was just a very short survey (one question), it was something people felt like responding to, or just that more people read this blog these days? Dunno. Anyway: no-one cares about that.

So: the results. Firstly I'll repeat something I touch on with each of these surveys I do, and that Mark Drew alluded to in a comment against the original article relating to the survey. With the mechanisms available to me, these surveys are not reflective of a very broad population base and this can have a hand in pre-determining the results.