Lucee 5 beta: final keyword (redux)

G'day:
Community stalwart and "OK bloke even if he is Australian" Andy Myers made an observation on Twitter this morning:

@DAC_dev making method arguments in Java final I understand and actively practice mind you. Does new lucee allow this?
— Andy (@am2605) April 13, 2015

This is a good question, and one I did not think to check.

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.

Proposed TDD logic flow

G'day:
I've been really busy this week, and haven't been able to discover much interesting about either PHP or CFML or anything, hence being quite quiet. I'll admit this is very much a filler article, and a bit of a cheeky nod to something Andy said the other day:

@am2605 hahahahaha. Best I do some more charts soon then.Can't have my sole reader put off by all that weird writing shit.
— Adam Cameron (@DAC_dev) October 8, 2014

Earlier I asked for people's opinions regarding TDD vs private methods: "The received wisdom of TDD and private methods".

I didn't get much feedback [scowl], but thanks to Dom and Gerry (there's a cat 'n' mouse joke in there somewhere) for offering up some thoughts.

I needed to provide a workflow for the team, and I thought I'd stick it up here as well, as a bit of closure on the previous article. And to give Andy a picture to look at.

What do you think of this approach (other than "unreadable at that size". Click here):

Forget the first two steps "Assign Ticket", etc, as that's just our Jira workflow and a bit of context for our peeps, but the rest of it after that. Also the associated process of how to maintain private methods whilst still adhering to TDD.

I think there's a reasonable mix of pragmatism and dogmatism in that?

Thoughts?

--
Adam

7Li7W: Ruby Day 1

G'day:
That's short of "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks", btw: some ppl get arsey when I write about non-CFML stuff on a blog claiming to be about CFML, so it's an enabler for them to know to piss off and do something else instead of read this.

Seven Languages [etc], and how guilt tripping me tends to work

G'day:
A few weeks ago Sean piped-up about the sequel to "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks":

I'm enjoying Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks - you should try it too! http://t.co/eR6zoRW5tF via @Prismatic
— Sean Corfield (@seancorfield) June 27, 2014

Seven more languages? I hadn't even looked at the first seven yet :-|

I do actually have the first book at home (Marcos, I must give it back to you), but haven't really opened it.

However then this happened:

@seancorfield get on it @dacCfml
— Andy Myers (@am2605) July 12, 2014

I claim I don't "do" peer-pressure, but it seems to have worked this time. I'm over in Ireland @ the mo', so don't have the book with me, but bought my own soft-copy of "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" y/day, and have commenced working through it. And once I've done that, I will consider moving on to the sequel.

The first language is Ruby which I've done a bit of already, and at the end of Day 1 I have not covered anything I didn't already know or haven't already actually covered on this blog:

• Ruby: stream-of-consciousness
• Ruby: doing a second tutorial @ codeschool.com
• Ruby: doing a second tutorial @ codeschool.com (cont'ed)
• Ruby: third tutorial (part 1 of tbc)
• Ruby: blocks (recap), proc(edures), lambdas and methods

However the writing style is accessible, and I've now paid to learn this stuff, so I had better work through it.

I'll keep you up to date as I go (and guilt trip me if I do not!). In the mean time, Ben Nadel did all this stuff years ago, so maybe go read what he had to say on the topic: "Seven Languages In Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide To Learning Programming Languages By Bruce Tate". There are links to each day's progress at the bottom. I think perhaps I'll go read them myself.

This seems a bit of a pointless article, outwardly. The general gist is that once I have said I am going to do this stuff, I want you to give me a hard time if I go not. I'm crowd-sourcing motivation, it seems.

But short-term... I'm done with programming for the weekend. I shall now resume drinking Guinness and waiting for my flight. And probably pass the time with a DVD rather than with code.

Righto.

--
Adam

We don't need bigots in this industry

G'day:
Bravo to the individuals at Mozilla who are requesting their new CEO steps down:

Have waited too long to say this. I'm an employee of @mozilla and I'm asking @brendaneich to step down as CEO.
— Chloe Varelidi (@varelidi) March 27, 2014

Cheers to Andy Myers for putting me on to this: 'Mozilla employees tell Brendan Eich he needs to “step down”'.

There is no place in our industry for bigots.

F*** off.

--
Adam

re: "Oi! You Bloody Wankers! [etc]"

G'day:
Thanks to Andrew Myers for spotting this one. It seems even Adobe (inadvertantly) agree with this sentiment:

Right there. On the home page of their own documentation site.

Brilliant.

Cheers for giving me a smile today, Andrew.

--
Adam

Preventing Adobe from messing with ColdFusion community projects

G'day:
I was chatting to me mate Andrew Myers on Twitter this morning, and he brought this Twitter exchange about - basically - the death of CFQuickDocs at Adobe's hands to my attention:

1

G'day:
I'm a bit late with this as it happened a week or so ago, but I just noticed I've been prattling away on this blog for a year now.

Apropos of nothing, here's some mostly useless information about this blog.

• I've "published" 322 articles; I've got 14 in progress (some of the "in progress" is just a title and an idea).
• That's an accumulation of approximately 350000 words (!!).
• I've had almost 2000 comments! Crikey, that comes as a surprise.
• According to Google Analytics (which I installed about a week after I started), I've had 25000 people visit the blog.
• My busiest day was Mon 8 April this year. That day I knocked out four articles, which helps:
  • A reader asks me: "CF10 for a new start up?". Answer: no
  • Moving House... Mango Blog? (note that I have not moved it yet... I'm still on Blogspot)
  • Now with comments on the mobile version
  • onApplicationStart() will run whilst onApplicationEnd() is still underway
• The most viewed article - by far - is the article my mate Chris wrote on his adventures getting Railo working on his Raspberry Pi! I'm not proud, so I've had a bit of a laugh with him about that. I should get him to write more stuff. The next four most popular were:
  • Your IDE of choice: survey results
  • I've picked a framework. Well: you've picked it for me (UPDATED)
  • Arrays in ColdFusion (part 2)
  • Sean said that Nick said that Fusion Authority said...
•  However the most +1`ed article was one of my own: What do I want to see in ColdFusion 11?
• The most commented-on article (with 41 comments) is - surprisingly - the very non-controversial "Unexpectedly performance differences between listFind() and arrayFind() in ColdFusion"; second to that have 40 comments, and was "Which CFML-oriented blogs do you read?"
• In January this year (so after the first six months), I was averaging 94 unique visitors per day; Over the most recent six months, it's about 150 per day. So not a huge amount of traffic still, but at least it's something. And it's generally building week by week, so that's a positive sign.

I said in one of my earlier articles that I've learned more about ColdFusion since I started this blog than I had in the preceding few years. This continues to be the case, and I've learned a bunch of good stuff about Application.cfc, ColdFusion regexes, JSON (grumble), REST, interfaces (in general, as well as ColdFusion's inplementation of them), and various other odds 'n' sods. Even some web sockets stuff, whilst troubleshooting that security issue from a coupla weeks back. I've also used Railo a lot more, and had a look at Coldbox. Beyond ColdFusion I've also started dabbling with PHP and Ruby. It's been cool! I hope some of it was useful to you, or at least slightly interesting. Or killed some time whilst you tried to decipher what I was wittering on about.

To close, I'd like to say special thanks to a few people whose participation in this blog has been helpful, interesting or thought-provoking. In no particular order, and it's certainly not an exhaustive list:

• Chris Kobrzak
• Sean Corfield
• Andrew Myers
• Bruce Kirkpatrick
• Brad Wood
• Andrew Scott
• Adam Tuttle
• Ray Camden
• Gavin Pickin
• Jay Cunnington
• Simon Baynes
• Duncan Cumming
• Brian Sadler

There's been a bunch of great input / correction / sanity-checking / bullshit-detection done by a heap of other people too.  Cheers to everyone who's participated here.

And now on to year 2...

--
Adam

PHP: IDE

G'day:
That "Hello World" code from yesterday (dammit... I missed a trick there... it shoulda been "G'day World", for this blog, shouldn't it!) was written using Notepad++, as I didn't have an IDE installed at that point in time.

My initial instincts for an IDE was to just use Zend Studio, as my understanding was that it was considered where it's at as far as PHP dev environments go. Then Andrew Myers recommended Netbeans, and I also googled around to see what else was on offer.

Plutarch (via Andrew Myers) teaches me something about struct keys

G'day
I chat to Andrew Myers a bit on Twitter (OK, well it goes out to the entire Twitter universe, but you know what I mean). And a few weeks ago he flicked through some interesting code to me. I've been meaning to write this up for three weeks now, but other stuff seems to keep cropping up that I "need" to write up first. Anyway, I've just looked at his repro case and it's an interesting one. And the code speaks for itself (thus making this a very easy article to write):