2

G'day:
I'm frickin' lousy with dates (as in "calendar", not as in "romance". Although the same applies, from memory ;-). Well: remembering dates is never a problem, but remembering what the current date is is something I'm not so good at. I forgot to touch base with my big sister on her birthday over the weekend... and there's another anniversary on the same day.

I've been doing this bloody blog for two years now. Which is approximately 23 months longer than I expected it to last.


Last year I gave you some stats ("1"). I'll try to do the same now.

• I've now published 750 (this'll be the 751st) articles. I still have about a dozen in progress. The same ones as last year, funnily enough. The topics just don't have legs, I think.
• And the word tally is now up around 600000 words. So in the second year I didn't write quite as much as the first year (350000), but spread over more articles (428 in the last 12 months vs 322 in the first year).
• I've had another 3000 comments since the previous year's 2000. That's pretty cool. Thanks for the contributions everyone. Often the comments are more interesting than the articles, I find.
• Google Analytics claims I've had 86000 visitors over the last year (up from 25k in the first year). So this thing is getting more popular. The average per day is 230-odd. It was around 120/day in year one. It's still not a huge amount of traffic, but I guess my potential audience is pretty small too.
• The busiest day in the last 12 months was 5 March 2014, with 593 visitors. That was towards the end of the isValid() saga, with this article: "ColdFusion 11: Thank-you Carl, Mary-Jo, many other community members and indeed Rupesh", and a click-chasing one entitled "CFML is dying. Let's drop it off at Dignitas". Looking at the analytics, that was the bulk of it, plus I was writing a lot about new features in ColdFusion 11 around about then, which boosted things. That was also my biggest week ever, by quite a margin.
• The most popular article last year was the one about me migrating from "ColdFusion Builder to Sublime Text 2". That's had 2200 visitors. The next most popular were as follows:
  • Arrays in ColdFusion (part 1)
  • 212 untriaged ColdFusion 10 bugs
  • Arrays in ColdFusion (part 2)
  • ColdFusion vs JSON. How to make a developer cry
• The most +1'ed article was "I am one step closer to being unshackled from ColdFusion". It's interesting that that was the one that people liked the most. It had 13 +1s. Most articles get none or maybe one, so that's quite a lot.
• Last year I worked out which article had the most comments. I have no idea how I did that, and I can't be bothered working it out again. So erm... that'll remain a mystery.

I've blogged a lot about ColdFusion 11 during the year... what with it being in public beta and then being released. I've also compared its functionality to Railo's equivalents. I've shifted my primary dev platform at home to Railo now. I've done a lot of JavaScript over the last 12 months (I've spared you most of the detail), but haven't progressed in other languages as much as I'd like to. That's my mission for the next year.

I battered Adobe a lot about how they (don't) handle their bugs. I will continue to do this. They're long overdue for an updater to ColdFusion 10, for one thing; plus we should have had at least a coupla small updates to ColdFusion 11 by now.

The biggest shift in my coding practices in the last year has been down to reading Clean Code, and adopting a lot of its suggestions. My code is better for it. I've got my colleagues Chris and Brian to thank for this... both the encouragement to read the book, but also keeping at me about it. Sometimes to great irritation on my part. If you have not read that book: do so. Especially if you're either of the two members of our team who still haven't read it. Ahem.

Another thing I've been fascinated with this year gone is TestBox. I love it. I am looking forward to shifting off ColdFusion 9 at work so we can start converting our MXUnit styled tests to BDD ones. Brad and Luis are dudes.

I've bitched a lot about Stack Overflow, but contrary to what I threatened ("Not that it will really matter in the bigger scheme of things..."), I still answer questions there every day (if I can find questions I can answer, that is).

Railo continues to rock. As do Gert, Micha, Igal from Railo. They really have done brilliant work keeping CFML alive and interesting.

A bunch of people have motivated me to write this year... it's too difficult to pull out a list of the main miscreants, but Sean would be the top. And the list of my various muses (or adversaries!) is - as always - on the right hand side of the screen, over there.

Gavin deserves special mention, as he very kindly tried to raise money to get me across to CF.Objective() ("Shamelessful plug"), but we had to kill that plan just as it was getting started ("Do not sponsor me to go to CF.Objective()"). But happily Gert stumped up with a ticket at the last minute ("Well that was unexpected"), so I made it anyhow. I really am taken aback by you guys. Seriously.

And of course Mike from CFCamp paid for my entire conference last year too ("CFCamp 2013"). That was amazing. And I mean both Mike's generousity, and the conference itself. Go to it this year if you can: CFCamp.

Ray's done most of the work for ColdFusion UI the Right Way, but I've helped out a bit. I'm glad we got going with that project.

Thanks for your participation in this blog, everyone. If you weren't reading it or commenting on it, I'd've chucked it in. But you keep coming back. Cheers.

Oh and let's not forget: <cfclient> sucks arse. And I can tell that without using it, Dave Ferguson ;-)

--
Adam

CF(Hour) is dead :-(

G'day:
Well that's a shame.

Encourage Adobe to relocate /CFIDE/scripts

G'day:
I was listening to CFHour just now - another good podcast, fellas - and Scott mentioned that ColdFusion doesn't help its case keeping itself secure/locked down because assets for CFUI tags are homed in /CFIDE/scripts, and /CFIDE really mustn't be exposed to the outside world.

Whilst there are various options to move / rehome these, I've raised a ticket to get /CFIDE/scripts to somewhere else "Isolate the /CFIDE/scripts directory from the rest of /CFIDE" (3732913), which says this:

Now, children...

... stop it.

ColdFusion: Tirade averted... (update: no, actually: tirade)

G'day:
Last night someone from the community directed me at this issue on the bugbase: "Updating a task via cfschedule resets task to defaults". Neither of us could believe what Adobe had said to justify themselves. Fortunately in the interim cooler heads have prevailed, and they're on the case, but - dammit - I want to mention this anyhow.

The story with this bug - and it's a bug, Uday - is this:

If you are updating a scheduled task via the cfschedule tag it is possible for some of the task info to be reset back to default. For example, if task had an eventhander configured and cfschedule was used to update task but eventhandler attribute was not used then eventhandler would be set to blank. The eventhandler attribute is just one example as this affects other attributes equally.

So that's a bit rubbish.

Last night, the response from Adobe - via Uday Ogra - was this:

This is by design. As this action re-creates the schedule task. For updating particular attributes of an existing task it is recommended to use admin UI

This is yet another example of Adobe people being bloody jobsworths, IMO. I am gobsmacked by the stunning ignorance of Uday's justification here on two levels:

• Who cares if it's by design: it's poor, lazy design. I'd be cool with this is Adobe went "oh yeah... oops", but to try to justify this away with "oh, it's meant to be like that" is pathetic. Indeed if you actually went out of your way to design something like that it doubles the question marks over your capabilities here: introducing a bug during development is one thing; specifically deciding to design something this poorly is unbelievable. Do you mean to say you sat down and went "right, when one uses this functionality to do an update, we'll blow away all the settings to didn't specifically set for update. Yeah: that's what people will want". Shudder.
• What sort of bloody moronic advice is "as an alternative, use the UI". How is that gonna help us in our code? What sort of completely detached from reality suggestion is that? How is it a solution to a coding problem to suggest "use the UI instead".

</cfform>

G'day:
This is gonna be quick as I'm a) hungover (yeah... 10pm and I'm still hungover from y/day!); b) had a few medicinal beers to try to deal with (a); c) absolutely nackered, and want to just vegetate and watch a DVD.

I want to actively participate in the demise of <cfform>, <cflayout>, <cfajax> and the like as "a thing" that CFML developers might accidentally use.

Damn you and your opinions, Dave Ferguson

G'day:
(Just kidding Dave... that's just a reference to Scott saying I'd be doing a blog article about you after hearing the latest CFHour: "Show #189 - Manage Your Indention").

This is clarification of something Dave did dwell on during that podcast, in reference to my article 'Really, Adobe: "NotWorthEffort"'. And to fulfill Scott's observation that I'd feed-back on what Dave said.

That article draws attention to what I perceive is slack-arse-ness on Adobe's part in how they dealt with a user-raised issue on the bugbase relating to the toScript() function (3041310).

The lads on CFHour made a few points / observations which are relevant, but at least partially tangential to the point I was trying to make.

Firstly: yeah, the code that toScript() generates works. It's slightly verbose, but it works. That's a very low bar to set though, isn't it? The approach taken here demonstrates a certain lack of finesse that one might expect from a function Adobe (OK: it was Macromedia) have provided to effect a better solution that just rolling one's own. And surely that's the intent here? It also kinda shows their hand in regards to their JavaScript capabilities, which seem to be "less than ideal" (I'd actually say: "not up to the job").

ColdFusion: Problem with session replication with CF10 clustering

G'day:
This is a quick one, just an appendix to yesterday's article about ColdFusion 10 instance clustering. You might recall I was having problems getting sessions working, and that lead on to a discussion about how to get session replication working on a CF10 cluster.

Well I think I have spotted a problem.

Here's the cluster-edit screen on ColdFusion 9 (9.0.2):

And here's the equivalent screen on ColdFusion 10 (10.0... oh, I dunno... I've got updater 2 installed):

Things I'd never looked at before: ColdFusion 10 instance clustering

G'day:

This might well be one of those "stating the obvious" kinda posts, but this one's all about me deciding to have a look at what the "Cluster Manager" option in CFAdmin in ColdFusion 10 is all about.  I've never looked at it before, so I'm pig-ignorant about it.  Perfect for the topic of a blog article then, eh?  Heh.