Please donate some of yer readies to a good cause to help disadvantaged kids

G'day:

Hey I just spotted that my mate Alex Skinner - head honcho of Pixl8, pillar of the CFML/Lucee community in London, and bloody good bloke - is doing a charity drive at the moment ("Crowdfunding to refurbish donor or purchased 2nd hand laptops") to get refurbished laptops into the hands of kids / families who perhaps haven't had all the life opportunities that you and I might have had. This is an especially critical consideration at the moment in the UK where kids can't in general attend school, and need to do all their learning online.

So what Alex is doing is this:

We're raising £5,000 to refurbish donor or purchased 2nd hand laptops. Aim to get 200+ devices to families who have limited or no digital access.

Brilliant. If yer in the UK and reading this: go give them some money if you can spare it. If yer outside the UK, either give them some money anyhow (kids are kids after all: doesn't matter where they live), or perhaps seek out a similar good cause in yer own patch.

To make the link very clear, it's this:

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/digitalvillage

Please also circulate this to yer other colleagues / friends / etc around the place if you can. Nice one.

Righto.

-- 
Adam

CFML community working well together

G'day:
I've not much to say here, but I'm just really pleased how the CFML community - especially Dom Watson and Sean Corfield - have been chipping away and planning out and discussing a ColdFusion enhancement request Alex Skinner raised last night (Allow additional attributes to be added to CFPARAM tags).

I put my usual cynical / jaded oar in (that said, I stand by what I say!), but Dom and Alex have been having a lot of discussion today (not just on the bug tracker, but on the CFML Slack channel too), and it's great work.

Well done, community.

--
Adam

Clarification / retraction re Lucee community participation

G'day:
I mean to post this y/day, but forgot.

Brad pointed out I've been talking porkies about Lucee's popularity / community size:

Also, you and Sean are spreading what I believe are misleading "facts" about the "fragmentation" of the community. Firstly, the total number of members is no indication of the number of active members. Any list will accumulate old accounts after a few years, but that doesn't make it more active. Adam you said there is "so little traffic on the [google group]". Let's take a look at the stats.


https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!aboutgroup/railo
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!aboutgroup/lucee

Before the Lucee announcement, the Railo list averaged 496 posts a month on 87 topics. Since its inception, the Lucee list has averaged 1,137 posts a month on 83 topics! That's pretty much the exact same number of topics and over TWICE the posting traffic.

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.

--
Adam

Ortus does what Adobe / Railo ought to have done...

G'day:
Luis & Brad (and Alex from Pixl8) have been offering teasers for CommandBox for a while now: Luis first showed me at CF.Objective(), and had been talking about it before then. Today they released a "trailer" for it: "Teaser Video for CommandBox". Go watch it.

London Railo Group: but wait... there's MoreBox

G'day:
Blimey... not one but two London Railo Group meetings next week. On Friday Pixl8 are hosting Luis, who's gonna be showing off CommandBox, which is a CLI for CFML. As well as that Alex (and/or Dom?) are going to be demoing the revitalised PresideCMS. Details here: "Luis Majano (New Coldbox and CommandBox) , Pixl8 PresideCMS Sneak Peak".

I have to concede I don't have content to manage, so CMSes aren't something that're on my radar, but Alex has shown me bits 'n' pieces of PresideCMS, and I am really really impressed with what he and Dom have done with it. It's a cliche, but it really seems like they've taken CMSes to the next level.

Luis showed me a bit of CommandBox at CF.Objective(), and it looks really bloody excellent. Definitely covering territory that the CFML platforms themselves should already be covering as far as package management and CLI goes.

I really wish I could be at this presentation too, but I'll be over in Ireland seeing my boy, and that's a lot more fun than CFML stuff. Sorry guys ;-)

But I urge you to sign up for this meeting as well (as the Railo one on Tues: "London Railo Group: Gert's over").

Righto.

--
Adam

CFML: Built-in functions, UDFs, methods, and function expressions... with the same name

G'day:
I have no idea what I'm playing at. It's 9pm on Saturday night and I am in a downtown Galway ("Galway, Ireland", for you Americans... there's probably a Galway in TX, MN, CA as well ;-) pub, which was nice and quiet this afternoon and good for a quiet drink and some blog research. Now it's a full on Saturday night and everyone else is just partying and I'm still typing. The alternative is sitting here by myself and drinking, looking like... I'm sitting here by myself and drinking (and it'd not be the first time. Even today!). I guess at least I would not be the only person in the place writing a blog article about CFML.

Right, so today's efforts started with the intention of looking at some new methods in Railo: .some(), .every() (there's no docs for these yet - that I can find - but there is a Jira ticket: Add closure functions ArrayMap, ArrayReduce, ArrayEvery, ArraySome functions), and rounding out at look at any other CFML iteration functions I'd not looked at yet. I've looked at some previously from a ColdFusion perspective: "ColdFusion 11: .map() and .reduce()".

But then an interesting discussion came up on the Railo Google Group and the function map() which has been added to the latest Railo BER, which breaks WireBox: "Wirebox breaking on latest Railo patch 4.2.0.006", and this absorbed me for the rest of the afternoon and evening, thinking about it, wittering on on the forum, and testing some code. There's a few concepts discussed on the thread, and it's worth reading in its entirety.

CFCamp: PresideCMS goes open source

Guten Tag
(and that's the end of the German... I'm over-extending myself even with that much!)

Alex Dom and I flew from Gatwick to Munich late yesterday afternoon, touching down mid-evening. An hour or so later we were wandering around Germering in the middle of the night with Alex going "I think it's down here... just a bit more... further... still... I think..." (where "it" was their hotel... I was staying at a different one). But after a km or so stroll, we found their hotel, dropped their bags off, and went back to downtown Germering for a meal. Most things were closed (10pm, sure... but it was Saturday night?!), but we found a very traditional-seeming restaurant - Zum Griabig'n - which was still open and serving various renditions of flesh and potatoes, so we settled in. The food was hearty and the beer was perhaps one more than I needed (two at Gatwick, two on the plane, one over dinner), but all was good. I slunk back to my hotel a coupla km down the road, and collapsed in a heap.

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.

London Railo Group

G'day:
Me mate Alex Skinner of Pixl8 is hosting the new London Railo Group. The first get together is on Weds Aug 28 - so two weeks' time - at their offices in Clapham.

I'm gonna pop along and take advantage of the beer and the wifi, and I think I saw mention of pizza somewhere (can't find the reference now). Oh, and having a yap about Railo and CFML and that sort of stuff.

If yer around, head over. Alex and the crew are cool bods (I've been working for / with them on and off for years, so know them well), and it'd be good to get the Railo community in London in touch with each other.

Hopefully see ya there.

--
Adam

Enhancement to replace() in Railo 4.1

G'day:
Gert Franz has just given a very impressive presentation on some new features Railo has added in 4.0 and 4.1. There's too many to go through, but here's one that interested me.

In Railo, the replace() function can now take a struct containing key/value pairs which represent the substitution tokens / values to replace. EG:

cf.Objective()

G'day:
In a surprise move... I am going to cf.Objective(). So that's quite cool. My mate Alex Skinner is heading over from Blighty too, and he convinced me to tag along. The lads (and guests) from CFHour also had a hand in convincing me I really ought to make it, as the presentations people described they're giving sound excellent.