Yesterday Daniel asked me for an update on this "Learn CFML..." book I'm supposedly writing:
@DAC_dev do you still have plans to finish your book on #CFML?
— Daniel Jansen (@DanServices) April 21, 2015
The news isn't very impressive, I'm afraid.I haven't done a commit to it since [checks Github]... March 16, and the current status is that I've got five chapters at "first draft" level, and two chapter in progress. That's out of notionally 24 chapters in total.
I had a completely writing motivational slump when I was over in NZ, through until a week or so ago, but this seems to have passed now. But this means I have a backlog of stuff to write down for this thing, and then once I catch up I'll go back to the book-writing.
It had become a bit of a pain in the arse and a bit demoralising because trying to write about using CFML in a platform-neutral but still coherent fashion is actually a bit tricky. There's really quite a lot of difference between ColdFusion and Railo / Lucee's CFML, and I really don't want to get too bogged down explaining that sort of shite. Also I was finding an awful lot of bugs in both platforms as I progressed. Often a bug will take a coupla hours to clearly and portably reproduce, which just kills my flow. I could simply not raise the bugs, but that's not very helpful.
I'm also waiting hopefully that Lucee might solve some incompat issues that I'd really rather not have to expose them for, as Lucee is my preferred dialect of CFML. It's just a shame they do some stuff quite differently from ColdFusion in place.
Oh, that reminds me. I hit Lucee up about a shortfall I saw in one of their features (I must actually write this up too), and it took about a week to go round the houses with them on the forums and the end result was f***-all other than me questioning... well: a number of things. So that didn't help. That was the point at which I stopped writing completely.
Prior to that I was actually considered going "you know what? Screw ColdFusion, I'm gonna write this about using Lucee's dialect of CFML only". I'm still mulling this over. That said, I first started thinking that a few weeks ago and... well... if you've been keeping apace of things, you might know that I'm hesitant about that being a worthwhile horse to back any more. I'm def on "watch this space" mode @ the moment.
So not a great deal of progress, but I do intend to get back to it. Plus Daniel's made me feel guilty now (nice one, Daniel :-| ;-), so I might try to pull finger and start chipping away again.
Anyway, that's me lunchbreak finished, so I better crack on with some PHP.
--
Adam
