Adobe opening up ColdFusion 2016 prerelease to more punters

G'day:
I can't really say too much about this (NDA, etc), but the Adobe ColdFusion Team have posted this on their blog "Pre-release for API Management capabilities in ColdFusion Raijin".

So if you're interested in testing their new API Manager (which I am not, I hasten to add), then you can go give them a hand. Adobe really could use more tester-eyes on this thing, so if you're so inclined to pitch in, you'd be helping both Adobe and the subsequent user community of the API Manager.

Righto.

--
Adam

ColdFusion: request for transparency and inclusion from Adobe

G'day:
A few days back I indicated some ire that a (IMO) wayward ER had been implemented for ColdFusion 2016: "ColdFusion: a piece of functionality should do one thing, and do it well". Poor old David Epler who raised it seems to feel a bit put upon cos it was something he raised three years ago, and with no further consultation Adobe have now implemented a solution. Without indication it was going to happen, or any communication with David about it, who now think it's perhaps not as good an idea as he originally might have thought.

This also got me thinking about another new feature in ColdFusion 2016: this whole ordered / sorted structs carry on (see "ColdFusion 2016: ordered/sorted structs"). Where's the ER for this one? I can't find one. So where did the impetus to do this work come from? Did Adobe just decide to do it off their own bat? If so why? Why the heck did they decide to do that work? Instead of any of a number of other features the community have actually asked for. Obviously there are probably some back channels via which people can ask for ERs - although there shouldn't be - but even if this came from some PHB or one of his minions at one of Adobe's special enterprise clients... why does this mean this is what gets implemented? All Adobe ought to say to the PHB et al in this case is "raise the ticket, engender some interest from the community, and let's see what people think".

Conversely the ColdFusion Team might have come up with this themselves. They really shouldn't do that, as - as far as I can tell - they are completely ignorant of CFML usage (I judge this based on everything they do and say about CFML, basically), so their decisions are not informed ones. But by accident they might have a decent idea... in which case they should... raise the ticket, engender some interest from the community, and let's see what people think. They definitely are not qualified by themselves to make decisions as to the direct on CFML.

I'm on the ColdFusion Pre-release Programme, and am under NDA to not divulge or discuss anything that gets mentioned on said programme (some people claim the PR has some sort of Fight-Club-esque rules about even mentioning it, or participation therein, but this is not true. They just want to make themselves come across as being "special". They do... but not in the way they think). So I won't. However I can speak freely on topics that have not had any discussion at all. And two of these are:

1. Dave's issue about adding encoding functionality to <cfoutput>. This has been apparently implemented without any mention whatsoever on the pre-release.
2. This sorted / ordered struct stuff. All I can say about that is that it exists in ColdFusion 2016. And there has been no discussion about its suitability or necessity for ColdFusion 2016 at all. Make of that what you will.

This is absolutely the wrong way of going about things. The ColdFusion Team might be fine Java developers (hey, they might be), but they seem woefully uninformed about CFML, and - as I have said already - don't use it, and don't really seem to have much of a handle on how we use it. They should not be making opaque decisions as to what goes into it. They have a CAB and a Pre-Realease Programme for this, and these decisions should be made there. And any work that is planned to be undertaken should be discussed out in the open, on the public bug tracker. An ER should be raised, public consultation should be allowed, and then the plan of how (or "if") the functionality will be undertaken should be proposed in public for further discussion. Not all opinions should necessarily be given equal weight (there's some bloody stupid opinions out there; some of them are my own), but they should be at least heard.

Here's an example of how it should be done, Here's the proposed schedule and feature-set for Java 9. There's no reason Adobe could not do that, at least at this high level. They could caveat the timeline with "all things being equal, and subject to change due to unforeseen circumstances", and they could caveat the feature list with "this is not a promise, but it's a guideline, and is also subject to change". We're all grown-ups and we understand things might prove tricky or not worth it, or something else might come along that's more important and needs to bump one of the "nice to have" features. And timeframes can change, etc. There's not even any commercial sensitivity to this, as ColdFusion isn't competing with anything. Well, other than "itself and its community" at times, I think.

PHP has similar timelines and have pretty organised RFC documentation these days for new features. I presume other language projects - well successful language projects - are similar.

Even LAS (those behind the Lucee CFML project, and the .lucee language) are heading in that direction, albeit in a more casual sort of way... but they're still finding their feet so it will probably round out as time passes.

I think the chief reason the ColdFusion Team don't take an inclusive communicative approach is that "inclusion" and "communication" are just devoid from their collective psyche, for whatever reason. They seem to treat their community with a degree of contempt that they seem to be "handing down manna from heaven" when they give us a ColdFusion release.

I think it's fine that Adobe marshal suggestions from their own team and from the "dark" part of their user base. But then they should open that up to the rest of the community so we can put our oar in. We have a great wealth of expertise in CFML usage to gauge how a feature might fit, and we've also got a great resource in the form of Sean Corfield who actually has designed languages in the past, so kinda knows how these things work (others in the CFML community might have experience here too, but I don't know about it). There's a few really old hands from the CAB and PR programme still around too, and they/we are kinda used to discussing how CFML should come together too.

Adobe have done a chunk of fine work in CFML, this is for sure. But they've also done some woeful shite, which I can't help but think never would have happened if they actually engaged their user base. As far as I can see there's no published plan for ColdFusion 2016, so I suspect there isn't really one. So it's not too late for them to kinda organise themselves a bit more, and include the rest of us in the language planning process. This would be bloody easy. For any public ER out there, simply tell us on Twitter or on Slack or on their own blog that they're looking at implementing it. And then encouraging people to have input. If there's not a public ER... create one, then do the same. Adobe have a vast pool of free planning resource. They should be using it.

Start using it.

--
Adam

... and... Adobe hot fixes it

G'day:
Just a quick follow-up to this morning's article: "CAUTION: Latest ColdFusion 11 patch breaks (at least some) code using "/>" in CFML tags"

Well knock me over with a feather... they're released a hot-fix for it! How good is that?

It's attached to the ticket: "CFPOP doesn't create the query given by name="" with updater 7 installed".

I still think they need to withdraw update 7, bake that hot fix into it, and release it again (as update 8), but at least this should get Tom going.

I haven't tested it as I'm behind a firewall here and cannot get to a POP server, but I'll report back when I have confirmation it actually fixes the problem.

Good snappy work there Adobe. And good to see it's possible for you to release individual hot fixes.

Righto.

--
Adam

The quality of the new ColdFusion docs in one quick screencap

G'day:

This is from Creating and Using Custom CFML Tags.

Chuckle.

--
Adam

Survey results: bug tracking software expectations

G'day:
This survey was so devoid of interest even I forgot about it! It took a bloody age for me to gather enough responses to bother writing up, but it seems to have maxed-out at 94 replies, so I'll run with that. Cheers to everyone who replied. And if you read this blog and did not fill it out: you suck. ;-)

As ever, I will preface this "analysis" with observing it's statistically meaningless because the sample size is too small, and is only really measuring the position of people a) reading this blog; b) likely to reply to a survey I create. That's pretty niche. However I got the answer I was after (yes, as I often do, I asked specific questions to demonstrate a specific point).

The questions were as follows:

• What bug tracking software do you use?
• When reading comments that have been added to an issue, in which order would you expect them to be listed?
• When voting for an issue would you prefer (out of the listed options)
• How important to you is it to be able to (perform a list of common bug-tracking tasks)
• If you are a user of the Adobe ColdFusion bug tracker, what are your thoughts on it?

As I said in the original article (Survey: bug tracking software UX expectations), "The last question kinda gives away my motivation for asking these questions: I'm hoping to lean on Adobe to get some stuff in their bug tracker to be changed."

I had lobbied Adobe to switch the way they list comments in their bug tracker (from last first so one needs to read them upside down), to first first ("Comments displayed in reverse order"). Like reading and writing usually work. Adobe have come back with:

Currently the logic behind showing the notes in reverse (latest at top) is that:

- If user wants to go through the comment history they can go all the way to bottom, keep reading notes one by one (could be hard if any note is really huge) upwards. Once gone through all, they reach the point where they can add their comments in the note box.

- If user wants to read latest comment and respond to it, it's right in the top next to the box where new note can be added.

If we change the order then it would only make sense to move "add new note" box also to the bottom which may be confusing as the landing view will not show this box and user may think there's no way to add new comment.

I still believe the way it is shown (if we don't change design of page) is right.

Let me know if you still feel it should be other way around.

This is actually very good feedback from Kapil, and he is definitely one of the good 'uns at Adobe (like Anit). I don't agree with what he's saying, but it's a well-reasoned and well-articulated case. If it was one of the ColdFusion Team members, I'd expect this ticket to be closed "NotABug/ByDesign" without further comment. So cheers for the feedback Kapil.

This got me thinking... is my expectation actually as ubiquitous as I think it is? I am used to using Jira, and it lists the comments in reading order, not upside down order, and this is where I level my expectations. Not exactly scientific research there. Hence the survey (also not scientific research, but at least it's not just basing my position on my own person proclivities).

So what did other people think?

Q1: What bug tracking software do you use?

The sole "hard-coded" option I offered was "Jira". I was aware of a few others, but didn't know if people took them seriously: Bugzilla, FogzBugz (or whateverTF it is), Trac (chortle: I feel sorry for you if you are stuck with that). It did not occur to me to list GitHub, which would have been another sensible option. Still: I had an "other" option for you to DIY.

The responses were interesting. Not least of all because I had not even heard of a lot of the options. Some people put more than one option, and I've included them all (with how many votes each got, in parentheses).

• Jira (48)
• GitHub (7)
• None (5)
• assembla (3)
• Bugzilla (3)
• Redmine (3)
• FogBugz (3)
• In-house solution (3)
• YouTrack (3)
• Bitbucket (2)
• Mantis (2)
• Rally (2)
• Trello (2)
• Asana
• BugBase (what, the Adobe one? I cannot find anything else called this)
• BugLogHQ
• CA Service Desk Manager
• gforge.com
• GitLab
• HP ALM
• Issue ticket (I dunno what this is)
• LANDESK (why so shouty?)
• Lighthouse
• Microsoft OneNote
• OnTime
• Remedy
• Spiceworks
• TestTrack
• unfuddle

Jira was head and shoulders the winner. My way of asking the question might have skewed this, but I will note that some people who used different systems as well as Jira answered "other", and listed the lot.

One observation. Five of you said "None"? What sort of way of conducting your work is that? Blimey. Perhaps you don't actually code in a professional environment.

Q2: When reading comments that have been added to an issue, in which order would you expect them to be listed?

Oldest first: 57
Newest first: 32 (you're all weirdos ;-)
Other: 5

The "other" options were:

I'm fine either way. If Bugbase becomes oldest-first, it's cool by me. I also now query my local copy of the Bugbase.

Oh I do so love people who sit on the fence. You have no preference for which order you like to read things? None? I'm surprised by that.

---

I actually prefer interfaces that thread comments, from oldest to newest.

Good call! I didn't think about threading as an option. Do some issue trackers out there permit this? But - bottom line - this is a vote for reading top-to-bottom.

---

I like the idea of being able to see the most recent comment first, but if reading through a substantial list of comments, oldest first (chronological order) makes more sense to me.

So - if I'm getting you right - you don't care if there's not much to read, but once it because an exercise in reading, then it becomes an issue to deal with, and you prefer top to bottom. That's a good pragmatic way of looking at it.

---

Newest first. Best if done in a threaded fashion. Also sortable by date

Good idea regarding being able to toggle the ordering.

---

Configurable at RunTime

This does not really answer the question. The answer would be based on when you see a list of comments in (some order), then which order would you use the toggling to order them in.

---

So the bulk of people - UX tweaks aside - prefer reading in chronological order. Not reverse chronological order. And I like the idea about being able to thread and re-sort the list too, so as to accommodate better discussion, and each person's ordering preference is preserved. Tell me though, people who suggested threadability... how would you expect the re-sort toggle to work within a thread which has more than one comment at the same level? Would that re-sort too? That seem weird to me.

A real prospect of getting engagement from the ColdFusion Team regarding your "favourite" bugs

G'day:
Dan Fredericks, backed by Elishia Dvorak and later Denard Springle have asked me to spread the word and garner some interest in an idea they've had to improve engagement between the ColdFusion community and the Adobe ColdFusion Team. We had a round of emails yesterday, and Dan and Denard have come up with this write-up:

This past weekend while attending NCDevCon 2015, Adobe... at the bequest and in conjunction with CFML community members... came up with an idea that we hope will help foster and facilitate better communication between the Adobe CF development team and community members.

The idea, in a nutshell, is to take advantage of the momentum we are building as a community with our Slack channel and work together to generate a list of the communities most pressing and important CF bugs that need addressed. They want us to use the Slack channel [#adobe] to accomplish this.

To participate, simply join the channel and work as a community to come up with a list of the most important bugs.

There are some caveats to this request... We ask for you to put in the bug number from the Adobe bug base and give a concise use case for why it should be in this list. Other community members can then comment on the bug and/or the use case. This way we can have open community dialog on the bugs to make sure we get the best and more pressing list of bugs for Adobe.

[The] channel will be used to do this for 3 weeks[...]. All community comments [in this period] will be used to aggregate the bug numbers and business cases, and turned over to the CF team to have a larger internal discussion of those bugs.

After a timely review of the aggregated data by the Adobe CF team they will update us on the status of the bugs on the list via the [#adobe] channel [you need to have subscribed to the #cfml channel first before that will work], a blog post and/or other Slack channels.

This status will include which bugs were accepted to be addressed, and which ones were not accepted. In each case the community expects a fuller explanation of what is chosen to be addressed and what is not, and why those decisions were made. It is our hope that this may lead to a more inclusive discussion of the bugs that are elected not to be addressed if the reasons given turn out to be poor. It is also the community’s expectation that the bug base will likewise be updated with fuller explanations for the actions taken on these bugs.

We hope by using Slack, which is getting a lot of daily use, the community can come together more readily with the Adobe CF development team and put together the best list possible. If this is a successful venture, then we will try using Slack more aggressively with the Adobe CF dev team to foster a more open relationship that benefits all concerned parties.

ColdFusion docs site: update and question

G'day:
I've received official word from Adobe as to the fate of the ColdFusion wiki (see yesterday's article "Is the ColdFusion community about to lose the ability to update the docs?"). What do you make of this?

Dear Adam,

Two years ago, we together made a decision to move ColdFusion documentation to a wiki model so that we can open the documentation up to chosen ColdFusion experts to improve and add value to the content. Today, we are at a juncture, where in, we have to move away from the wiki model temporarily due to multiple issues. From starting next Monday, 28 Sep 2015, ColdFusion documentation will go live at helpx.adobe.com. We will share with you the link to ColdFusion documentation when it goes live.

Meanwhile, we would like to not miss out on the value add you have been doing to ColdFusion documentation. Hence, we are setting up a DL (DL-CHL-CF) to which we will be happy to receive any information you deem right to be included in the ColdFusion documentation.

Thank you for supporting us,
ColdFusion documentation team.

So there we go. That sux. I am interested to know why they're moving away from the wiki model temporarily. And what sort of units of time this temporary state of affairs ought be be measured in.

More importantly, can anyone explain to me what the hell this means: "we are setting up a DL (DL-CHL-CF)". What the hell does that sequence of words mean? And is it reasonable to think I might already know what a DL is (especially a DL-CHL-CF one, as opposed to some other sort of one)?

I think the ColdFusion community is about to lose a great resource.

And I'll let you know when I find out what at DL is. A -CHL-CF one, at that.

Update:

Here goes, I got a reply from Adobe on this:

DL is a mail distribution list. It’s a mailing alias (we will communicate to you as soon as it is set up) in which the CF documentation team members will be available,

I'm not sure how anyone expected anyone to infer "DL" meant "a mailing list", but then again Adobe aren't exactly known for clarity or thoughtfulness of communications.

I have, btw, opted out of participation in their mailing list.

Righto.

--
AC

Is the ColdFusion community about to lose the ability to update the docs?

G'day:
(Hopefully this is a nod to Ian Betteridge in my subject line there).

I read this last night, on ticket 4010693:

Update: Adobe has copied the wiki docs over to AEM (Adobe Experience Manager). The AEM docs cannot be edited by anyone outside of Adobe. The wiki will be taken offline in about a week or so (guessing October 1st).

To verify, see Adobe's comments here: https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3921578

Thanks!,
-Aaron

And the comment in question is (from the pleasingly named "Jacob Jayakar Royal"):

Yes, Nitin, already migrated. All our CF content is there in helpx already. Wiki pages can't be viewed after a week or so.

So... um... what?

The only useful thing Adobe have ever done with the ColdFusion docs is to put them on the wiki so we (ie: the community) could actually fix them up. And now it seems they're taking it back in house?

I can't see anything that confirms Aaron's comment that "The AEM docs cannot be edited by anyone outside of Adobe", but that would really suck if it was so.

It would be really good if someone from Adobe (I'm looking at you, Anit) could clarify what's going on here?

Cheers.

--
Adam

New bug status for ColdFusion bugs: DELETED/NEVERHAPPENED

G'day:
This is just a repro of something Aaron said on the bugbase, which reveals a rather interesting act of weirdness on the part of the Adobe ColdFusion Team. And you know how I love those.


I spotted this today on the Adobe bug tracker (look quick, before it gets redacted!):

[ANeff] Bug for: Adobe is deleting thousands of tickets from their public bug tracker

Adobe is deleting thousands of tickets from their public bug tracker. 2,824 ColdFusion tickets have been deleted between June 9, 2015 and September 22, 2015.

Steps to Reproduce:
1) Try to view any of these ColdFusion tickets which were fixed in CF11 Update 3: 3041747, 3043855
2) Try to view any of these ColdFusion tickets which were fixed in CF11 Update 5: 3037144, 3039708, 3041684, 3041790, 3043111, 3043375, 3043657, 3044064, 3114274, 3226380, 3369472, 3520983, 3673298, 3842326
3) View attached 20150609_CFTicketsTotal.jpg and see total ColdFusion ticket count was 5,140 on June 9, 2015
4) View attached 20150922_CFTicketsTotal.jpg and see total ColdFusion ticket count was 2,316 on September 22, 2015
5) View attached 20150609_CFTicketsFiled.jpg and see -my- total ColdFusion ticket count was 455 on June 9, 2015
6) View attached 20150922_CFTicketsFiled.jpg and see -my- total ColdFusion ticket count was 328 on September 22, 2015

Action Items:
1) Restore the tickets deleted between June 9, 2015 and now.
2) Delete no more tickets.

My emphasis.

I can confirm a lot of the bugs I have raised have been deleted. I don't track the numbers, but I can see they're way down. Also looking at one of my older blog articles ("Most popular unhandled ColdFusion bugs"), all the ones I checked from that list - and a reminder: those are the most popular unhandled bugs: so ones we clearly care about - have been deleted.

So what's going on here then? What on earth would possess Adobe to delete this stuff? Even if a ticket has been fixed, it's all valuable historical information... not everyone will be patched-up or running the current version, and the ColdFusion Team has a nasty habit of closing tickets when they can't be arsed doing anything about it, so a lot of historical bugs will still actually be potentially impacting their clients. All this sort of action is achieving is increasing potential work for their clients as they troubleshoot issues which might actually already have been identified and discussed (if not fixed).

What's more, the content of those tickets is - on the whole - the community's work, not Adobe's. I put effort into tickets I raise so they're googleable and reproduceable and are intended to stay there so as to save people time if they run across the same issue. So please don't delete my bloody work, Adobe. Or Aaron's work. Or Ray's or anyone else's.

And, um... please explain.

Update:

And, indeed, they have explained. Apparently it was not their team that did it, it was another team. The team who looks after the Adobe bug tracker were a bit too zealous in making older versions of ColdFusion unselectable when raising new tickets, and in the process made all the tickets for those versions "invisible". Okey dokey then. I do have to wonder why no-one on the ColdFusion Team noticed this change, or checked the results of it, or... seemed to care, prior to Aaron bringing it up..?

--
Adam

The Adobe ColdFusion Team loses a good 'un

G'day:
I was a bit let down to read this yesterday:

Adieu Adobe! Long due post but here it goes - http://t.co/ZMVeMQtY2T #adobe #coldfusion

— Hemant Khandelwal (@khandelwalh) September 12, 2015

It seems like long-standing ColdFusion Team member Hemant is moving on to new things. Firstly: congratulations to Hemant on the new gig. You've been at Adobe for ages, so it must be a big thing to move on!

For my part: I've been interacting with Hemant regarding ColdFusion for a bloody long time. He was always a key participant in the ColdFusion pre-releases, and always had an indefatigable approach to dealing with his clients in a professional and collaborative manner.

Recently his participation has been less obvious, and I had wondered if he was still around; perhaps his role had changed, or perhaps victim of some policy team management have adopted to stop team members from engaging with the public (except, obviously, for Anit)

I always had the impression Hemant knew what he was on about, understood ColdFusion, and also understood to a better degree than most of his colleagues the motivations and needs of the ColdFusion community.

Hoepfully Adobe will find someone suitable to fill Hemant's shoes, and they step up to keep ColdFusion fresh, and perhaps also put additional efforts in to add a new communications channel (over and above Anit) back to the ColdFusion Team.

I look foward to Adobe's introduction of his replacement.

Best of luck, Hemant. It's been good working with you on the occasions we've interacted.

Righto.

--
Adam

ColdFusion: getting the audit trail exposed on the bug tracker

G'day:
Just quickly. Obviously I've fallen foul of the Adobe bug tracker in the last coupla days... mostly due to my dim wits, but not helped by the fact it doesn't present information as thoroughly as it could.

Aaron Neff has had the presence of mind to raise a ticket to get the audit trail exposed on the UI, which I think would help a lot with the clarify of what's going on, and also better expose the activity taking place on issues we're interested in.

The issue is "[ANeff] ER for: Display audit trail on tickets" (4054727). It's already been marked as "To Fix", but I'm sure we could get action on it more quickly if we got some more votes & observations added to it from as many people in the ColdFusion community as possible.

Can I urge you to go have a vote.

Righto.

--
Adam

ColdFusion Team: further erosion of trustI'm an arsehole

G'day:

Update 4:

I was completely wrong in what I said in this article, and I am not proud of myself as a result. I am leaving the article here as evidence of what a prick I can be. You should instead read this article: "Wrong".

ColdFusion: exactly what you are installing when you install this recent security "hot fix"

G'day:
Adobe recently released a security fix for a security issue in ColdFusion's Flash Remoting services. It impacts all versions of ColdFusion which ship with Flash Remoting (that's at least ColdFusion 9 through ColdFusion 11, but possibly older versions too). Only CF10 and CF11 have been patched, although Piyush claims to have instructions for patching CF9 although is not being helpful about sharing this info with the ColdFusion community for some reason.

This morning I read an article from ZDNet ("Adobe issues hotfix patch for ColdFusion vulnerability") wherein Adobe appear to have claimed that this fix is a "A hotfix, otherwise known as a Quick Fix Engineering update (QFE update), is a lightweight software patch". This is somewhat of a misrepresentation of reality on the part of either Adobe or ZDNet. I suspect ZDNet are just reporting what Adobe told them.

The "patch" that was released was rolled into all other previous fixes released for ColdFusion, and one does not have the option to simply apply the one-off security fix; one also needs to apply every single other fix Adobe have ever released for the product.

This represents quite a heavy regression-testing burden for anyone thinking of applying the patch. It is not just a matter of installing one small patch and then regression testing a small subset of potential touchpoints in one's CFML application; it means a complete regression testing of everything Adobe have "fixed" in previous patches. And given the ColdFusion Team have a habit of introducing new bugs with these monolithic updates they give us, this is not something that ought to be taken lightly.

To put things in perspective, here is a list of all the fixes shipped with this "quick fix engineering update", for ColdFusion 11:

Adobe ColdFusion Documentation Team: thanks!

G'day:
As hopefully you all know, the latest implementation of the online ColdFusion docs is a wiki, meaning the user-base can edit it. It's not quite as free to edit as - say - Wikipedia, as one does need to contact Adobe for permissions to have editing rights, but that's fairly straight forward: it's just an email (I'm hitting Anit up as I type to get the best official way to contact them, and will update this article when I have it. Or as Mary-Jo points out in the comments below, there is this guidance page: "Moderator Guidelines", which suggests emailing cfdocs@adobe.com).

Anyway, I signed-up a while ago, and whenever I hear of something wrong with the docs, I'll fix 'em if I can. I probably average one change a month or something like that: I don't spend much time on it.

So you could knock me over with a feather when this email arrived yesterday:

Dear Adam,

Two years ago, we made a decision to move ColdFusion documentation to a wiki model so that we can open the documentation up to chosen ColdFusion experts to improve and add value to the content.

Today, we took stock and realized we received over 500 contributions from ColdFusion experts.

We received contributions of various kinds – better code samples, various usage scenarios, even a complete developer security guide and much more. We believe this is a good reason to celebrate and pass on our appreciation to you for all your contributions.

We value your contributions and here is a small token of appreciation in the form of an Amazon gift voucher to reciprocate our heartfelt thanks. Enjoy!

Your Amazon Claim Code is [redacted] for 50 dollars.

[...]

Thank you again,
ColdFusion Documentation Team

On the contrary, ColdFusion Documentation Team: thank you.

Wasn't that nice?

Anyhow, maybe go along and sign-up to be a documentation editor, and you can help the ColdFusion community too. Every small change we make improves things for everyone else.

Righto.

--
Adam

Adobe: if you can't be helpful, just get out of the f***ing way

G'day:
The Adobe bugbase has to be one of the sh!ttest things about ColdFusion that Adobe have foisted upon us. From the UI and the UX; to how buggy the bloody thing is; to the length of time it takes to get any action without badgering poor Anit across Twitter and Slack; to the abjectly sh!t-house way the Adobe ColdFusion Team handles client interaction on same.

It's just f***ed.

Just when I thought there was no way they could possibly make it even more f***ed, they actually managed it. I think they have disengaged their brains so far this time that there is probably a (small) grey sloppy mess on the floor of Adobe BugBase Central, because their brains have actually fallen out.

Now I preface this by saying it's been virtually impossible to get Adobe to fix any of the bugs in the bugbase. I don't mean ColdFusion bugs... I mean bugs in the actual bugbase application:

Those are just the ones I've raised. There are 105 altogether.

ColdFusion: complete the implementation of associative array notation

G'day:
This'll be a quick one (not least of all because I only have about 20min to write it).

CFML has the ability to reference struct (and by extension object) keys either statically via dot notation, or dynamically via associative array notation, eg:

someObj = {
    someKey = someValue
}; 

value = someObj.someKey;

whichKey = "someKey";
value = someObj[whichKey];

This is cool, but it doesn't work when referencing functions, eg this does not work:

someObj = {
    someFunction = function(){
        // do some stuff
    }
}; 

result = someObj.someFunction(); // all good

whichFunction = "someFunction";
result = someObj[whichFunction](); // nuh-uh

This errors with:

Invalid CFML construct found on line 2 at column 13.

ColdFusion was looking at the following text:{

If associative array notation had been thoroughly implemented, this ought to work. However I suspect this latter situation did not occur to Adobe when doing the implementation.

Adobe / ColdFusion: sh!thouse work ethic from CF Team members again

G'day:
Adobe have been really pretty good with patches for CF10 and 11 this year, they're released a number of patches, and I have no idea how many issues have been dealt with, but it seems like quite a few. Perhaps someone can dig the numbers up. And people like Anit and Elishia (admittedly: more Anit) do a good job at being responsive to client comms via Twitter, blogs, forums and now Slack.

However this hides a general attitude of lazy-arse-ness that infects the ColdFusion Team as an entity, and it's just not on.

The most recent episode of this is around this issue:

CFHTTP does not work with SNI enabled SSL (3598342)

Problem Description:
We are trying to connect via CFHTTP over SSL to a Windows 2012 IIS 8 server that has SSL installed and Server Name Indication (SNI) is enabled. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

Java 1.7 is supposed to work with SNI. ColdFusion's CFHTTP tag needs to be updated to handle SNI. SNI is an extension of the TLS protocol. Microsoft made this feature available in IIS 8 and as as more of these servers are setup ColdFusion will need to connect to them and will run into this issue.

ColdFusion 10 and ColdFusion 9 should be updated for the Server Name Indication (SNI) feature.

Steps to Reproduce:
Setup a Windows 2012 IIS 8 server and enable SNI for SSL. CFHTTP will not connect to it with SNI enabled.

This was raised in 2013. Note: this was back when ColdFusion 9 was still a supported ColdFusion version.

Last month (June 2015, one month shy of two years after the ticket was raised), Rupesh had this to say:

The SNI support has been added in ColdFusion 11. The change required for supporting this is quite big and therefore it can't be backported to ColdFusion 10.

Not f**in' good enough, sunshine. This issue was raised on ColdFusion 10, and it's impacting people using ColdFusion 10. You've had two years to get your sh!t together and conduct yourself like a professional team and get this issue sorted out on what's supposed to be a currently-supported version of ColdFusion. This means you need to fix broken sh!t.

You guys always seem to conveniently forget that your clients have paid for this software, and part of that - not-inconsequential - price tag is for the product to be supported for a number of years after purchase. In the case of ColdFusion 10, this is until June 2017. Another two years yet. We're already paid for you to fix this.

This attitude that the ColdFusion Team continues to let itself down with of variations of "we can't be arsed doing this" needs to stop. Treat yourselves and your paying clients with respect.

I invite my CFML-community readers to indicate any disapproval they might have with the ColdFusion Team in this regard by commenting on the ticket concerned, and on social media too. Once I put the Twitter message about this article out, I'll embed a link to it back here too.

"Adobe / #ColdFusion: sh!thouse work ethic from CF Team members again" (http://t.co/eRTG1QzKbs)

— Adam Cameron (@DAC_dev) July 28, 2015

Right. Back to watching telly.

--
Adam

ColdFusion Team & especially Anit: bloody well done

G'day:
This is a quick adjunct to the article I put up a few min ago: "ColdFusion 10 & 11: new updaters released".

During install, Ray found that the update didn't show up in his CFAdmin. Anit reported back straight away:

@raymondcamden @DAC_dev @oneofwe3geeks Because, I see the updates not showing up under CF11 U4 setup only. Rest everywhere, it works.
— Anit Kumar Panda (@anitkumar85) April 14, 2015

And before you knew it, he was reporting back:

@raymondcamden @DAC_dev @oneofwe3geeks Its fixed. Please check now #coldfusion
— Anit Kumar Panda (@anitkumar85) April 14, 2015

Elapsed time: 17 minutes.

Good work, Adobe ColdFusion Team. And good being so responsive, and keeping us in the loop, Anit.

Righto.

--
Adam

ColdFusion 10 & 11: new updaters released

G'day:
This just came to my attention courtesy of Ron Stewart on Twitter:

#ColdFusion folks: Adobe has apparently released hotfixes for both ColdFusion 10 and 11: https://t.co/fR2fxVkKPU
— Ron Stewart (@oneofwe3geeks) April 14, 2015

So exactly what does Adobe's ColdFusion 'Extended Support' get you?

G'day:
This comment from Anit was fairly astonishing:

@BugTracker_News @aandrewdixon @ColdFusion Extended Support doesn't include bug fixes/patches/hotfixes.
— Anit Kumar Panda (@anitkumar85) March 30, 2015