CF Live

G'day:
Hey, in case you've not heard, Russ Michaels (who also runs CFMLDeveloper, who host my code) has launched a site "CF Live".

isValid(). Groan

G'day:
Some things (OKOK, most things...) just piss me off.

A list of things I am not researching

G'day:

All of these things I am not investigating:

• PHP, despite it being a positive career move for me (strange, but true);
• Groovy & Grails despite Scott's brilliant presentation on the two;
• Angular.js despite Kurt's also brilliant presentation (Scott: you still win ;-), and John's equally good one at SotR;
• Ruby, and then Ruby on Rails despite starting some courses on them @ Code School, and actually paying fees to continue;
• oh, and Sinatra too, thanks to Matt piquing my interest;
• ColdFusion's REST implementation, as well as Adam Tuttle's Taffy and Chris Phillip's Relaxation, despite being quite interested in all three (the CF side of things as a baseline, and to see why people don't like it);
• ColdBox, even though I went to all the hassle of holding a survey which you lot helped me with to decide which framework to look at;
• FW/1 because in the process of doing so, I decided it sounded pretty good too;
• not really research, but I'm not finishing my ColdFusion bug-update notification project;
• Ember.js even though Paul's presentation at SotR made it look pretty bloody good, and something perhaps to focus on instead of Angular (if I have time for only one);
• ColdFusion 10's web sockets, despite promising someone I would, and starting some investigation into them;
• ColdFusion 10's new scheduler, even though it looks kinda cool (as far as schedulers can ;-);
• ColdFusion 10's EHCache integration even though it looks execellent too (thanks to Rob's presentation on it);
• submitting a fix for a bug in MXUnit I promised Marc Esher about six months ago, because I haven't got around to writing unit tests for it (and, come on, I can't submit a fix for MXUnit without unit testing it!);
• anything to do with mobile development. No, I'm not doing that either;
• node.js even though Sean recommended it to me as a good career-building option;
• oh, there's a bunch of other stuff too.

Why not? Because - f*** me - I don't know where to start! There's so much bloody interesting technology around and only about 18 hours in the day (eating, sleeping). Plus my blimin' life keeps getting in the road (case in point: I type this from the Wetherspoons @ LHR... the one at which I am beginning to recognise the staff, and they me...).

This article exists almost entirely to guilt-trip myself into doing something about all this. I've even got about a dozen blog articles underway on all this stuff. That weighs heavy too.

Argh!

Right. That feels better.

Have a good weekend.

--
Adam

212 untriaged ColdFusion 10 bugs

G'day:
I saw this on Twitter last night, and - predictably - it f***ed me right off.

cf.baseball()

G'day:
Apropos of not much, here's a badly exposed photo of the cf.objective() bods who have come along to the Twins v Red Sox game:

What a very very shady bunch they are. Update: I've changed to a much better photo... one in which one can actually tell who the people are!

We're currently sitting at the bar at the game. Great fun, great new friends, great conference.

Time for another pint...

--
Adam

Interface inheritance what one can and what one cannot do

G'day:
Today's article is brought to you via my baby netbook, as I sit on my bed in my hotel room in Portumna, Co. Galway in the the Republic of Ireland. My ex-wife and my son (25-months-old) live in Portumna, and this is why I pop across to Ireland every two or three weeks (you might have heard me mention it on Twitter or elsewhere). I get to see my boy for four hours on Sat and Sun, every - as I said - 2-3wks. This sux, but that's the way it is.

I only have internet here if I go sit halfway down the stairs, and despite that being doable as I'm the only guest here this weekend, it's a bit cold for that today. So I'm writing this article without the benefit of docs or fact checking! Wish me luck. Or enjoy picking apart whatever it is I end up getting wrong. Heh: in reality I will check everything before I publish... the internet works in the bar downstairs, so I'll proof-read and publish over an early evening Guinness.

And... we're back

G'day:
Yesterday due to issues at CFMLDeveloper, my account was disabled which killed my public-facing "services":

• the @cfbugnotifier listener;
• the 50 most-recent ColdFusion bugs RSS feed
• the 50 most-recent ColdFusion Builder RSS feed
• the Simplified ColdFusion Bug Search UI

We interrupt this service...

G'day:
Well actually: no, it's not "we" who have interrupted any service.

However I'm afraid to say a few small community-oriented services I run are currently down.

A quick note on spamming/abuse on my blog

I am nonplussed.

Code Review

G'day:
I became aware of Stack Exchange's Code Review website a few months back, but never really looked at it until today. I decided one way to get someone other than Bruce (no offence! ;-) to look at my PHP code would be to chuck it up there and see what happened. Well so far nothing has, but it's the weekend etc, so perhaps people have better things to do than review my code on the weekend. How this can be true I don't know, but the world is a funny place.

Anyway, they have a ColdFusion / CFML channel too, so it might be a place to chuck yer code up there to get reviewed.

Follow-up to "Quick Code Puzzle" article

G'day:
I'm a bit disappointed that I only got three responses to my code puzzle the other day, but so be it. At least Matt, Dale and Winston will get a beer next time I see them. Thanks guys: I really do appreciate you taking the time to join in.

Bruce: cheers for your response, but you didn't actually post a solution, so you weren't in the running for a beer!

To recap, the problem was to write this function:

boolean function isWithinWebroot(required string fileSystemPath){
    // provide code here
}

Do you have your code reviewed?

G'day:
I've just been chatting to Chris Weller this afternoon about various odds 'n' sods, and the topic of code review came up. I recalled that Stack Exchange has a code review sub-site, but the CFML presence on it is pretty limp: 12 questions in two years. I think it's a pretty good idea though. I've added it to my RSS feed, and see what people post. And I'll put my oar in as needs must ;-)

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.

"Request functionality" doesn't not work with CFThread

G'day:
That was an intentional double negative.

This is a follow-up to my article yesterday, questioning why Adobe / Shilpi / Rupesh have said not to use "request-related functionality" within CFThread, and specifically choose to mention this when releasing a security update for ColdFusion 9-10. This makes me concerned as to why they are telling us this. I am moderately confident it was not simply a CFML tip for the community (because that'd be a first, surely, if nothing else ;-), there's a problem they're not telling us about.

The guidance was a bit vague, so I've looked into it more.

One of my colleagues is a published author

G'day:
Another community announcement. One that I mean to make a week or two ago, but it kept falling out of my brain.

Anyway, one of my mates from work - Marcos Placona - has had some of his work actually publishing in a real book: "Instant jQuery Drag-and-Drop Grids How-to". I reckon that's pretty impressive.

I haven't read it yet: it all happened whilst I was over here in NZ, and I was waiting for the hard-copy to be released (which it has been now, and I've just bought one... It'll be on my desk when I get back to London). My plan is to get him to sign it, and when he shuffles off this mortal coil, I'll be able to sell it for millions! As I said to him "this time next year, I'll be rich!" ;-)

Anyway, support your fellow community members and give it a read. Congrats, Marcos.

--
Adam

A new (to me) ColdFusion blog appears on my radar

G'day:
This might be old news to everyone, but thanks to a tip from one of the CF people I "follow" (how stalky that sounds. Probably more so now that I point it out) on Twitter - Carol Hamilton -  I "discovered" a ColdFusion blog I was previously unaware of. It's by Summer S. Wilson, and called ColdFusion Beyond. I've read a coupla articles, and have found it pretty interesting and with an engaging writing style. Plus she mentioned a curious bug that has piqued my interest, except I've not investigated yet.

Check it out!

And... err... that's it.

--
Adam

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):

A reader asks me: "CF10 for a new start up?". Answer: no

G'day:
Goodness: someone asking me for advice. How risky is that? Anyway, it's interesting I guess, and the person said I could use this as a blog article topic, so that's precisely what I'm doing. What I reproduce below is the completely unexpurgated, other than removing a couple of references which identify the correspondent/client/project. At the person's request, I have fixed a couple of typos from the original too. NB: the links below are from the original email, not something I added. I can't / won't vouch for their merits (one way or the other).

Overlapping requests will not cause a race condition in a CFM's variables scope

G'day:
This is mostly a follow-up from a Stackoverflow question. The question is based around some confusion arising from a blog article which offers some misinformation about how functions can cause race conditions across two requests simply by not VARing variables, or accessing the variables scope explicitly instead of using a function-local variable. To be very clear from the outset: the blog article is mostly wrong.

Cool Regex Tool!

G'day:
A real quick one. One of my cronies - Simon Baynes - just pointed me to this cool regex visualising tool. Here's a screen shot of how it analyses a regex: