Tuesday 18 June 2013

CfmlNotifier down and back up again

G'day:
I don't actually keep a close eye on the @CfmlNotifier Twitter feed, so sometimes don't notice when it goes down. This happens occasionally if the ColdFusion instance it runs on gets cycled, or [some other reason]. It's a hosted box to which I have no admin rights, so if it stops working, I just go [shrug] and reload its services: I don't attempt to get to the bottom of it. On the whole it just chugs along fine by itself.


This morning it occurred to me I'd not read about any new ColdFusion / ColdFusion Builder bugs recently, and figuerd this was less likely to be down to no bugs being raised, but more due to the notifier dying. I restarted it and re-ran the "process bugs" script, and got a warning back from Twitter that I was too old skool for them: they'd moved the API of on from [whatever I was on] to [whatever they are on now] (I didn't pay attention to the API versions... it was 1.0 to 1.1, or 1.1 to 1.2 or something). Anyway, no updates were being sent, nor have they been sent for about a week.  Oops.

Initially I dreaded having to horse around getting the new API to work, but then remembered "oh, hang on... the person behind Twitter4J will have most likely dealt with this already, and all I probably have to do is to upgrade my Twitter4J JAR file".

So I downloaded the latest JAR file, uploaded it to my account @ cfmldeveloper, updated my call to JavaLoader (thanks again Mark!), reloaded my services and... off it went: back up and running, and resumed where it left off with the notifications.

This ought to come as no surprise as it's how software ought to be written (I mean twitter4j, not my CfmlNotifier!), but I'm just pleased it was that straight forward.



Speaking of ColdFusion bug notifications... currently the CfmlNotifier only sends out updates when new bugs are found. I'm 75% through knocking together some code to send updates whenever a bug is updated too. I was going to make this a service one could subscribe to to receive updates of specific bugs, but I decided to just send out updates for any bug being updated. I'll still do the subscription thing at some point, but that's way down the todo list, so will be ages before it's todone.

I started this code whilst surrounded by little old Catholic ladies waiting at Shannon Airport, on Sunday afternoon. I was en route home from seeing my boy for the weekend, they were en route to Lourdes on a pilgrimage. Strange but true. If they could harness the energy generated by the chins wagging, Ireland could supply its power grid until Judgement Day, I think. Surreal.

Anyway, it only took a coupla hours and one pint of Guinness to get the code 75% done, so am only one more pint away from getting it going. All I need to do is to find a room full of little old Catholic ladies to work in.

;-)

--
Adam