ColdFusion: more on this encodeForHtml() crap

G'day:
This is a follow-up to last week's ColdFusion: please help me discourage Adobe from releasing bad code article; my inspiration drawing from Brad and Sean's comment on same. I found myself writing too much in reply, so have extracted it into an article instead.

First Brad:

[...] the word "encode" is noise in the method if the class is already called "Encode". I kind of like "Encode.forHTML()" to cut down on verboseness. I'm not too much of a fan of Ruby's uber-succinct shortcuts [methods like to_s() instead of toString() ] but I think there's something to be said for trimming down on unnecessary fluff typing.

I initially started with the same thought (see my comment on the ticket):

So they should be in something like:

String Encode.forHtml(String stringToEncode)

Sorry, was being hasty before. That class / method name example I gave was rubbish: Encode is a verb, so makes no sense as a class name; and the method suggestion had similar grammatical shortcomings. Something more like Encoder or StringEncoder or something for the class, and the methods themselves should be the same as their procedural counterparts, so:

static String StringEncoder.encodeForHtml(String stringToEncode)

The name of the method needs to stand on its own two feet (methods have two feet, just like you and I, apparently ;-). "forHtml()" does not adequately describe what the method does. This is a bit semantic given it'll generally be referenced in context with its class, but I still think a method name should describe what it does. "forHtml()" sounds like one is coming in half-way through the description.

Of course at that point, the only difference (to the average programmer) between

Encode.forHTML()

and

EncodeForHTML()

is one character and I think the latter is easier to remember and easier to type since it reads the same but isn't peppered with punctuation.

Well I'd be advocating StringEncode.encodeForHtml(), so that makes even more typing still. I think an appropriate level of brevity is a factor in language design, but not the chief one. And I programming is not an exercise in typing: it's an exercise in thinking. I am perpetually bemused by these people who think programming is some sort of typing race. In the bigger scheme of things, typing a few extra characters each time one wants to encode something? So what?

Also in equivocating over Encode.forHTML() and EncodeForHTML() you're arguing a case for something I'm not contesting. Or even talking about. This conversation is not about whether we should have a headless function or an OO method: that horse has already bolted.

I'm kind of torn here, because I like the highly-academic idea that a language does things "properly" and according to best practices (or at least the precedent set by other languages at the time) but I also like the idea that CF (and many other dynamic, loosely typed languages) bend rules here and there with an end result of making things as simple and easy for the developer as possible in order to get code out quickly and efficiently. (Push complexity on the compiler, not the programmer) At the end of the day, I'm not quite sure what real-world difference there is between a collection of related functions that differentiate themselves by starting with "Encode." and a collection of related functions that differentiate themselves by starting with "Encode".

This is - again - misdirected equivocation. This is not part of the discussion. The ticket is specifically about the member-function implementation of the encoding functions.

Are we getting closer to having a CLI & REPL on ColdFusion?

G'day:
I have to admit this is pretty much a click-baiting exercise, whilst also trying to drum up some community interest and support in a bugbase ticket.

A while back I raised 4013832, which says:

CLI/REPL - probably via CommandBox

I'm sure this has been raised before, but I cannot find the ticket.

ColdFusion needs a CLI/REPL for it to be taken seriously in these times. It's just a fundamental.

CommandBox is really good in this regard, so perhaps bundling it with ColdFusion under licence might be a solution.

This is by no means an original idea, and plenty of people have lamented the absence of this fundamental platform feature in ColdFusion for years. Indeed I've mentioned it a number of times previously on this very blog:

• More ColdFusion 5... CFML.EXE
• CLI
• CFML is dying. Let's drop it off at Dignitas
• Ortus does what Adobe / Railo ought to have done...
• ColdFusion 2016
• What I'd like to see in ColdFusion 2016 (redux, as is happens)

And I'd even raised a previous bE/R for it back in 2013: 3646258. The indication then was that it was going to be picked up for ColdFusion 11, btw.

I'm nothing if not predictably repetitive.

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.

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

Brad tries <cfclient>

G'day:
This is just a heads-up. Brad's having a go at <cfclient>: "My First Foray Into CFClient". He's blogged about his initial challenges, and it makes for interesting reading.

In an epicaricatic sort of way.

PHP: getting AspectMock to work

G'day:
First things first: Luis, Brad, everyone at Ortus Solutions: I bloody love you guys. Working with TestBox and MockBox is an absolute pleasure compared to getting their PHP equivalents installed and working properly.

Over the last coupla weeks, meself and Duncan have been investigating unit testing on PHP, and specifically how to mock dependencies. On our old CFML code base, we have 1000s of test, and we use MockBox heavily, as we have rather a lot of dependencies which interfere with testing if they're not mocked. We only ever really moved to TestBox as a proof-of-concept before our CFML codebase was put into maintenance mode, and we shifted to PHP. Prior to that we had been using MXUnit for a number of years.

PHPUnit is a bit rough-and-ready in comparison to TestBox, but it's solid and will do the trick. However we both had an arsehole of a time getting AspectMock to work. And we both failed and moved on to other things. Earlier I'd looked at Mockery as a solution for mocking - its docs are better than AspectMock's (both a recommendation for Mockery, and an indictment of AspectMock), but it did not do something things we expect to need to be doing, whereas AspectMock claims it can (mocking static methods).

Anyway, this afternoon I found myself furrowing my brow and thought "I'm going to get that bloody thing to work... or else". Fortunately after a lot of swearing and wondering if I can hunt down and punish AspectMock's author... I finally noticed what I had been doing wrong. I presume Duncan was doing the same thing wrong, but don't know. Anyway, I got it working.

So here's my AspectMock mission from this afternoon.

TickintheBox

G'day:
I watched a good amount of bickering between two fellas who should know better last night:

@AdamTuttle @bdw429s fellas.
— Adam Cameron (@DAC_dev) October 17, 2014

(click through and read the "conversation" if you want to. I'll not reproduce it here as it's a bit embarrassing for the participants, I think).

Also, I "published" some misinformation of my own about CommandBox a day or so ago (as a comment on Cutter's blog:  "What's Wrong With ColdFusion - 2014 Edition"). So I figured I owed to Brad and Luis to actually have a look at CommandBox (which I do like the sound of, see "Ortus does what Adobe / Railo ought to have done...").

ColdFusion 2016 in 2016? ColdFusion 2016+1 in 2018?

G'day:
Brad posted an interesting (if very blurry) image from CFSummit earlier:

Tridib's plan for the future of ColdFusion http://t.co/gJhvKFaOw9 http://t.co/UCrKxfRlrn #CFSummit2014
— Brad Wood (@bdw429s) October 16, 2014

Come on Adobe: bring Anit to CFSummit

G'day:
OK ColdFusion community: time to voice your will again.

Brad started this conversation off:

Hey @anitkumar85, will you be at CF Summit this year? You're one of the most visible on the CF team, so I'd love to meet you cc/ @ColdFusion
— Brad Wood (@bdw429s) September 12, 2014

And the notion needs support: currently Anit is not attending CFSummit, and that's not really on.

I'm sick of vendors screwing up CFML

G'day:
AAARRRGGGGHHHH!!!

How hard does any of this need to be? I'm posting this here and against the Railo bug report I started typing it into "CFHTTP accept callback UDF to report progress" (RAILO-3131). As it's stroppy, Micha should feel welcome to delete it from Jira. However it's staying here.

Couldn't have said it better: Brad explains objects in CFML

G'day:
I'm being a bit lazy here... I'm just pointing you towards some reading. Brad does a great job of answering a question on StackOverflow: "Behavior of creating objects in ColdFusion".

Go have a read.

--
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.

Ways to call functions in CFML

G'day:
We've got Brad Wood and David Epler to thank for this article (sorry that Twitter presents information back to front, so start at the bottom and read up. Like one never generally would):

CFML function syntax

Locking investigation for Brad

G'day:
I will admit I'm not in a blog mood at the moment, hence the silence over the last few days. However Brad Wood has asked for a second set of eyes on some code of his, so here are my findings.

Brad Wood makes an interesting feature suggestion for CFML

G'day:
OK, having got today's Stack Overflow rant out of the way, here's the article I meant to write this morning. Or actually last night. Well actually "here's the text that someone else wrote that I meant to copy and paste in lieu of actually writing something". Here it is. CTRL-C, CTRL-V...

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

Weird issue with MockBox and interfaces: issue identified

G'day:
A coupla days back I wrote a vague article "Weird issue with Mockbox and interfaces", which detailed some weirdness I was seeing with using Mockbox to mock methods in CFCs which implement an interface.  The short version is that on the first use of a method mocked this way, I was getting this error:

coldfusion.runtime.InterfaceRuntimeExceptions$ArgumentsMistmatchException: Function argument mismatch.[etc]

However if one just re-ran the test, the problem went away. In fact it was only the first usage of the mocked method after ColdFusion was started that caused the problem. Subsequent runs: all good. Restart CF: problem. This is on ColdFusion 9 & 10, but not Railo.

Repro case for "contains" pseudo-reserved-word interfering with Mockbox

G'day:
This is mostly for Brad Wood, but it might be of passable interest to others, so I'll plonk it here.

Yesterday's article discussed how contains is kind of a reserved word, but kind of not in ColdFusion (it's just not in Railo). I observed to Brad that this actually bites us on the bum with Mockbox, and he asked for more info, so here it is.

Basically we use a caching system which has a method "contains" which checks to see if there's an item with a given key already in the cache, before trying to fetch it. We've actually since revised this approach, but we have some legacy code still using methods called "contains". So we need to unit test them, and indeed their responses play a part in other methods we test. When testing these other methods which use the caching system, we mock-out the cache, and the methods within it, and we use Mockbox to do this. Mockbox is cool, btw. You should be using it if yer not already.

We're still using Mockbox 1.3 (more about why further down), and it is impossible to directly mock a method called contains using Mockbox. We've worked around this, but it took a bloody long time to work out what the hell was going on, and that there was working-around to do.

Another serious struct-literal syntax balls-up in ColdFusion

G'day
Ray hit me up about this the other day, and I've only just been able to look at it now.  He's written a blog article about a bug someone mentioned to him, which they had raised on the bug tracker (3505517).

As far as the investigation had gone at the time, it seemed like a pretty edge-case sort of bug: if one has a CFC method call within a transaction block, and the method call used struct-literal notation for named argument values, then there was some execution duplication.

I've had a bit more of a look at it, and it's actually more far-reaching than we initially thought.

Shorthand struct notation is still buggy (follow-up & repro case)

G'day;
Brad Wood has demonstrated that he is a bit of a star, in that he has concocted a repro case for that bug I mentioned a coupla weeks back.  The repro case is buried down in the comments of that article, but here it is: