Showing posts with label Matt Bourke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Matt Bourke. Show all posts

Tuesday 31 December 2013

(4/4) CFRETRY for ColdFusion

G'day:
I had had this article in draft for over a year, but never got around to writing it. Then Matt Bourke offered an idle challenge to me to write four blog articles before year-end (it's not 8pm in the UK yet, so plenty of time), and I found myself trawling through my draft-backlog for inspiration. I came across this article (well: an earlier version of it), but decided "nah, screw that... I missed the boat on that one, Railo's already done it".

But now I read on Twitter that Steven Neiland is suggesting an enhancement to it... and it's something I had a discussion about the last time I floated this idea for CFML (back in 2010: "<cfretry> / retry")...

3/4: The dumb things ColdFusion does

G'day:

Admission:

This is the article I alluded to a coupla weeks ago when I said this:

I promised Gavin I'd still release the article anyhow, so here it is. I have made it clear where I go wrong, so people don't get the idea I'm actually right in what I say here.

- Adam 31/12/2013

(2/4) ColdFusion: var hoisting can make a difference

G'day:
Remember a while back I observed that - like JavaScript - ColdFusion hoists its VAR declarations: "ColdFusion hoists VAR declarations". At the time I could not see how this could cause problems in CFML. Well I've noted a case where it does cause problems, in that it reveals a bug in ColdFusion 9 & 10.

I came across this ticket on the bug tracker: "cfloop array and wrong iterator", which details how ColdFusion 9 (and, as it turns out: 10) gets confused whilst array-looping in an edge-case situation. Check this out:

(1/4): it's not all about ColdFusion 10 bugs. CF 9.x has outstanding bugs too...

G'day:
First the "1/4" thing. Matt Bourke has just challenged me to release another four blog articles today. Let's see if I can do it. I make no apologies for the quality (or length) of the writing today. I'm not in the pub for one thing ;-)

This one is really short, but was underway before Matt challenged me.

Sunday 8 December 2013

CFML: For the sake of completeness: createLocalisedDayOfWeekAsInteger(): a closure approach

G'day:
A coupla days ago I continued my TDD / unit testing series with an article "Unit Testing / TDD - refactoring existing code". This engendered a few comments, none of which paid any attention to the intent article, instead focused on something pretty much irrelevant to what I was discussing. This engendered this reaction from me:


Oh how I love my readership sometimes. But, actually, the comments got me thinking...

That article covered the approval process for CFLib of a function dayOfWeekAsInteger(), which is the reverse of dayOfWeekAsString(): it takes a string (in English only), and returns which day of the week that corresponds to, starting with Sunday as the first day. Why does it start on Sunday instead of Monday (as per ISO 8601)? Because it's the inverse of dayOfWeekAsString(), and that's how that does it. Is that right? Well: no. Is that relevant to either this UDF or the blog article? Also: no.


However James's suggestion for how Simon could rewrite his function to suit James's requirements (James: write your own functions if you want them different from how others have implemented them!) did get me thinking about how to do it. A thought popped into my head that one could leverage closure to create a function which was specific to a given locale. This might not be exactly what James wants, but it was what I decided to look into, because it's slightly interesting, and covers a feature of closure I've not covered anywhere on this blog yet. So it interests me.

Saturday 7 December 2013

CFML: Response for Russ

G'day:
I feel like writing more in response to Russ than Twitter messaging will sensibly allow, so am doing a quick blog article instead.

The context is as follows:



Note that the RT's of Matt's messages aren't quite in the correct order, but as his Twitter account is "private" (that was easily circumvented ;-), I cannot include them inline in a custom timeline. But the gist of the exchange is preserved.

Right, so I feel the decline of CFML as a language is mostly down to Adobe's stewardship of it. There are a few factors here: