CFScript 2.0 follow-up

G'day:
A few days ago I put up this article: "CFScript 2.0?". At that juncture I was just soliciting input from the community. It's worth reading the comments if you're not up to speed with them. Especially from a Railo perspective as Micha, the chief engineer, offers his thoughts. It's a pity we don't get similar input from Rupesh on this, from a ColdFusion perspective.

I think it's been favourable enough to warrant enhancement requests to the vendors, which I have now raised: RAILO-3199; ColdFusion: 3822362.

Go have a vote (one way or the other! Even if you disagree, your input is valuable), and put your oar in and let your vendors know what you want them to do.

Cheers.

--
Adam

CFScript 2.0?

G'day:
You will be used to me bleating about how Adobe have messed up a chunk of their CFScript implementation in ColdFusion 11 (and ColdFusion 9 for that matter too), eg: last week's "Example of the thoughtlessness of a generic tag to CFScript solution", plus "ColdFusion 11: cfloop in CFScript very broken"; plus some suggested fixes: "How about this for savecontent?" and "Another suggested tweak to CFScript: thread". But one of my readers has mentioned in passing a good approach to solving it, and revisiting all the things that are wrong with CFScript.

ColdFusion 2016

G'day:
Whilst some of the Adobe ColdFusion Team are pantsing about trying to take as long as possible to fix ColdFusion 10 and 11 bugs, other elements of the team must surely be planning ColdFusion 2016. Adobe have completely failed with their increased-frequency release cycle, but they are undoubtedly still moving forward.

Each CF release people blog "ColdFusion n wishlist". I've just googled-up articles such as:

• My Scorpio (ColdFusion 8) Wishlist
• ColdFusion 9 Wish List
• ColdFusion 10 - Wish List
• ColdFusion 11 Wish List

One thing though - and I didn't check the dates on those articles specifically - we only tend to start thinking about what should go in this next version of ColdFusion Adobe are developing once the cat is out of the bag that they are developing it. By the time whispers of the next version of ColdFusion reach the gen. pop., I suspect most of the features and general gist of the release is already at least written-, if not locked-, down.

ColdFusion 11.5?

G'day:
Rakshith did a good job in the latter half of the main Adobe ColdFusion 11 presentation @ CF.Objective() yesterday. The first half was still a bit of a sell job on <cfclient>, but in the latter half Rakshith rolled up his sleeves and showed us some code. Which is what developers at developer conferences want to see. Towards the end of the presentation he (or was it back to Elishia at this point?) spoke about some of the stuff they're looking at for ColdFusion 2016. I sent out Twitter messages about it all at the time, but here it is again.

CF.Objective(): what to put into ColdFusion 2016

G'day:
First things first... I'm suffering from "writer's block" (such as it can be described with what I do here), which is really unfortunate whilst sitting at CF.Objective() and having no idea what or how to write. This frickin' hangover doesn't help, either.

Anyway, I'm only slightly engaged with the keynote presentation (sorry Jen), so will dwell on something Jason Dean said in the intro whilst I direct one ear to the front of the room. Adobe are running a competition today wherein they are soliciting the community for what people consider the top five (I think it was five?) potential features for ColdFusion 2016. So this article has a twofold purpose... for me to formalise my thoughts whilst I write, and for you lot to put your oar in. The competition only runs until after lunchtime today (so like 4h time), but in general let's think about this.

I've previously written down my thoughts on this back before ColdFusion 11 was released: "What do I want to see in ColdFusion 11?". It's pleasing to see a lot of that list have actually made it into the product:

• Member functions
• First class functions
• 100% CFScript coverage
• queryExecute()
• Express install

ColdFusion: Credit where it's due: cheers Rupesh

G'day:
I'm pretty hard on Rupesh at times (where those times are "most of them"), but I've just being doing some back-and-forth with him on the bug tracker regarding some bugs / enhancements I'd raised in the past. And it's all been pretty positive.

I'd raised one about first-class functions a week or so ago (so way too late for anything to be done about it in ColdFusion 11): "Built-in functions as "first class" glitch in function expressions", and he's been investigating what's up, and gave me some more repro information; and I've updated with a better repro case as I was wrong about what I thought the issue was before.

Quite a while back I asked for <cfloop> to be deprecated (yes, really; but only in a certain regard): "Deprecate CFLOOP/array and try again", and I never expected any movement on that, but he's suggested a good resolution which doesn't require any deprecation nor would it cause any backwards compat issues.

When I was looking at other languages, a while ago (Ruby, PHP), I had a look at what other interesting operators these and other languages had, and suggested <=> for CFML: "<=>: compare operator"; they might take this up in the next release.

And I had previously suggested combining all the array-finding functions into a single function, and deprecating the existing ones: "arraySearch()". he's been giving that some thought too; basically agreeing, but being uncertain about my suggestion of deprecating the existing ones.

A few other ones I've raising in the past have simply been marked "to fix" without any further commentary:

• replaceWithCallback()
• ==~: regex compare operator
• Arbitrary restriction on IMPORT
• Another suggested tweak to CFScript: thread

Not only am I pleased here because the feedback has gone the way I wanted it to; I'm just pleased there's feedback and a sense of consideration going on here at all. I'm completely OK with any bug / enhancement request I raise being rejected provided there's sounds, transparent reasoning behind it (I don't even need to agree with it; I get that opinions differ)... it's the sense of collaboration and inclusiveness that's important. Of course it's even better still when the ticket gets marked "to fix".

Thanks for the good work Rupesh. Rakshith: buy that man a beer.

--
Adam

Rakshith is mistaken about the release schedule for ColdFusion 11

G'day:

First things first:

To demonstrate a point, I am going to release this blog article with one title, post my usual Twitter status update, and ask someone to "retweet" it. Then I shall be changing the title subtly... and the title change will reflect the title I actually want the article to be seen as. This is to demonstrate that once someone says something on the internet, it stays said. The original title was unfairly harsh, and a slight overstatement (although not actually inaccurate). By design.

Today I wondered out loud on Twitter whether the ColdFusion 11 pre-release lifecycle seemed longer than usual. Brian Klass set me straight on that:

@dacCfml Previous cycles have been in the 10-12 month range. CF11 is following the same path.
— Brian Klaas (@brian_klaas) January 17, 2014

And, indeed, having done some homework, I am well off base with my instinct. I'll get to that. That's only tangential to what this article is about.

Micha offers Railo-centric feedback on Adobe's CFSummit ColdFusion 2016 promises

G'day:
I meant to post this ages ago when it was more relevant, but it got buried in my in box.

Back when I posted the article "CFSummit: interesting ColdFusion 2016 stuff " (whilst CFSummit was actually on!), Micha from Railo responded with his own thoughts on what Adobe had said.

I really appreciate how much time Micha puts over to helping me on this blog by following up various things I raise or wonder about. His community approach is definitely something the guys from Adobe could take note of.

In this case I think it's pretty interesting stuff, so I'm going to reproduce his comment here, in case people missed it the first time.

Again, sorry to not do this straight away when it was more fresh.

I've adjusted this slightly for formatting, but otherwise it's the same copy as per Micha's original comment:

CFSummit: interesting ColdFusion 2016 stuff

G'day:
Not that I was at CFSummit, but thanks to Tony Junkes, I saw some interesting slides about ColdFusion "2016" (yeah, the next version, not 11) which can only lead one to speculate...

But first a gripe (hey, this is me, remember). Dazzle? Are you trying to make a mockery of ColdFusion, Adobe? This is like some programming newbie who gives themselves the handle "ProgrammingNinja!" or something. It's not up to you to decide how cool you are; it's up to the audience around you. Rethink that bloody name to something less self-aggrandising. And less like something out of TAoPQotD.

Anyway, the interesting stuff...

Road Map

(yeah, sorry, the links are gonna be links to the photos of the slides that Tony took sorry).

Here we have (time to get my table-based layout skill ready):

Future of the web - vertical			Areas
Mobile			Enterprise Mobility
			Responsive Multi Screen Content
Modernized Platform			High Performance Runtime
			Modular Nimble Engine
			Enterprise Class Package Manager
			Language Revamp
		Horizontals
Peformance		Security		HTML5

OK, so I'm going to ignore the mobile stuff as it'll still be as wrong to be doing it in ColdFusion 2016 as it is in ColdFusion 11, so I simply don't care.

Modular nimble engine

But "modular nimble engine" sounds interesting. Well forget "nimble": that's marketing-speak. But very pleased they're modularising things. But I wonder to what extent? This conversation has done the rounds a lot of times, and I've posted my own take on it as well: "Survey Results: ColdFusion Modularisation". It can only be a good thing though. ColdFusion has become such a cruft-filled monster that it's time it shook some stuff out of the core. I'm all for leaving stuff like <cfform> and <cfclient> as deprecated options, but they should not be part of the core install. People can install them if they want them using the...

Enterprise class package manager

Here's Tony's photo of the slide (I'll spare you my design skills this time). Cool! Hopefully this is like Ruby Gems or Node.js's NPM system (not that I've used the later... I've not touched node.js, but I've heard great stuff about NPM). It's high time for this, and something people have been clamouring for. It seems to have all the key points:

• A portal/registry to list all packages available
• an organization (excuse my ghastly American spelling... I'm quoting this) - a custom package registry
• CF Developers - easily contribute to this registry
• info about package exposed as a REST webservice
• Configure multiple registry URLs

That sounds... perfect. I guess the "Organization" bit is like a sub-registry. So Adobe will maintain an official one, but people can also maintain their own ones? Say for example Ortus want to have BoxManagerBox or something for all their... boxes. Seems reasonable.

Language revamp

(Tony's first photo; second photo; third photo).This is a monster. Check out all the bullet points:

• Focus on optimized performance on JVM
• Breaking backwards compatibility
• Anything with quotes is a string, scope search
• Increased support for OOP - retain simplicity
• Tighten interface implementation
• Collection datatypes
• New logging framework
• Create WAR and deploy anywhere
• Image manipulation revamp
• Extending the language
• Concurrency
  • Existing support - CFTHREAD and CFLOCK
  • Synchronized functions and blocks
  • Concurrent data structures
  • Atomic variables and non blocking IO
  • Inherently concurrent - Actor model

What a mountain of stuff!