Unit Testing / TDD - why you should bother

G'day:
OK, I actually showed some code in the last entry in this series, but now we're back to me spouting rhetoric (read: waffling on). This stems from Andrew Scott making a very good observation about a benefit of unit testing (not so much TDD) in a comment in my last article:

Adam, can I add another under estimated use for TDD. Apart from the bit you touched on about refactoring. But there comes a point when one will need to migrate to a newer version of ColdFusion or Railo, and this would help identify migration problems as well.

And Andrew is dead right.

"Not worth the effort" again, from the Adobe ColdFusion team

G'day:
Andrew Scott brought this one to my attention. It's what seems to be another example of Adobe finding the "too hard basket" being more convenient that rolling up one's sleeves and actually doing one's job properly.

CFML: cfcontent in CFScript

G'day:
As per my earlier article about a <cfqueryparam> enhancement I raised, which Adobe have put in the pipeline to be fixed, here's another one which could use some votes to get re-opened and fixed:

No equivalent in cfscript for cfcontent

There is currently no support for cfcontent in cfscript can we have it please.

This is ticket 3133316. It's an easy obvious thing that should be implemented in CFScript. I haven't needed this thing every single day, obviously, but I have needed to recode files on occasion when I find I do need to use <cfcontent> in an otherwise CFScript-only file.

It's currently marked as Closed / NotEnoughTime, but I'm sure if enough people got behind it, it can be reopened and dealt with.

I don't mean to attempt any ballot stuffing, so don't just go vote for it because I asked you to. But if it's the sort of thing you have had a need for, or think should be in CFScript as a matter of course, please add your vote.

Cheers.

--
Adam

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

Thread longevity weirdness

G'day:
Man, I've been slack recently. Sorry: sickness, my "actual real life" getting in the way of sitting in front of the computer all the time, and general malaise have been pre-occupying me. I'm sure y'all been coping without a blog article to read. I have actually been beavering away with a coupla articles, but it's all just investigation at the moment, and I've nothing written down yet.

Here's an interesting thing I encountered on Friday, and just got a chance to write some test code now.  Consider this code:

Positive Communication from Adobe regarding ColdFusion: more thoughts

G'day (again):
I'm following the comment thread on the "ColdFusion: News, Initiatives and Updates from Adobe" blog post on the Adobe blog that got posted a few days ago. I offered my first tranche of feedback a coupla days ago, and here's my second lot.

These are replies to people's comments, and some general thoughts. I'm posting them here rather than there because this is too long for a comment cluttering-up someone else's blog. I'll cross reference this article over there too though. Also I want to get this discussion on the radar of my readers too, in case they're not aware of it, or have not thought/bothered to follow it.

I've worked my way down the comments, and commented / responded as I go. It's a bit stream-of-consciousness.

Positive Communication from Adobe regarding ColdFusion

G'day:
In a break from the perceived doom & gloom I have been seeing recently regarding CFML - this blog, Sean's blog, Andy's blog (Andy's gripe is specifically about the ColdFusion installers not working on the current versions of Windows), the Fusion Authority blog etc, some  stuff from the Railo community (which seems a bit counterproductive to their cause, but it's only an element of the lunatic fringe that engage in this), and various series' of sound-bites on Twitter - Adobe published a very positive-sounding article on their official ColdFusion blog yesterday. It should come as no surprise that Adobe are sounding positive about their product, but it's really not something we hear too much of too often (Rakshith, take note ;-).

One might think that the article was all just self-promotion & marketing spiel, but this one actually had a bit of meat to it, which was refreshing.