Clean Code

G'day:
Not something by me, but just a heads-up to go read one of Gav's blog articles: "CommandBox - Commands can be Clean Code Too". Don't worry about the fact it's about *Box stuff, that's irrelevant. It's a good practical demonstration of applying Clean Code concepts to CFML code.

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Adam

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 ;-)

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Adam

ColdFusion 10: be prepared, Adobe is removing the downloads

G'day:
Amongst the (fairly muted) hubbub around ColdFusion 11 shipping today ("Announcing the launch of ColdFusion 11 and ColdFusion Builder 3"), Adobe slipped some bad news into the mix as well. In a few weeks they will be removing the ColdFusion 10 downloads from their site:

Availability of installers for CF10 and CFB 2.0.1
ColdFusion 10 installers and ColdFusion Builder 2.0.1 installers will only be available for download on adobe.com for a limited time – till the 14th of May, 2014. If you need these installers for later use, then please download them before the 14th of May, 2014.

Bugs in iterator functions in both Railo and ColdFusion

G'day:
I decided to "do my bit" for the cfbackport project, and am looking at implementing the new collection iteration functions for older versions of ColdFusion. I'm aiming for CMFX6.0 onwards, but am having to guess at some of the language restrictions as I'm on my back-up laptop and only have CF10 & 11 to test with.

Do not sponsor me to go to CF.Objective()

G'day:
A coupla days ago I posted a guilty blog post "Shamelessful plug", which mentioned that Gavin was running a charity drive ("Charity Corner - Diabetes and Fly a Foul Mouthed Fusioner Fund") to try to fund me to get to CF.Objective() this year.

I am calling quits on this.

I hope I don't make any of the existing donors (thank-you!) cross, but I'm going to give the money away. Or back to you. But hopefully you let me give it away.

I just spotted this Twitter message from my long-standing mate Jared:

Thank you to everyone who has donated. It isn't easy to step up and ask for help like this, so you... http://t.co/jAMm3iJkDJ
— Jared Rypka-Hauer (@ArmchairDeity) March 13, 2014

He needs help (details here), and more than I need a ticket to a conference, so I've instructed Gavin to give him the money gathered so far.

If any of my donors are unhappy with this decision (and I understand it'd not what you put the money in for, so that's fine), contact me privately and I'll get your money back to you.

And if you were thinking of sponsoring me: thank-you, but please sponsor Jared instead. Cheers.

Thanks for the kind thoughts & gestures everyone, but... ballocks to that: let's help our industry mate out when he needs it.

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Adam

Shamelessful plug

G'day:
I'm not quite sure what I think about this one, and not sure how to word things. But one thing I do know how to articulate: Gavin's a nice bloke.

I might not be, but Gavin is...

G'day:
A few days back I got a bit shouty about not being a dead CF installer storage facility: "Things I am not...".

Gavin, who is a much nicer person than I am, has - instead of just complaining about stuff like I do - done something about it, as detailed here: "CFML Server - A Different type of ColdFusion Repo - ColdFusion Installs". Gavin has created an online repository (via copy.com), of old ColdFusion installer files. He's got a range of installs for various versions back to ColdFusion 5, as well as a mix of operating systems and bitness (what's the technical term to describe the concept like "32-bit" or "64-bit"?) of the OS architecture.

Waitangi Day again

G'day:
It's Waitangi Day again,(in NZ, anyhow... it's still the day before here in the UK) so here's some fluff about New Zealand.


This is a Kiwi:

Kiwi

So is this:

Self

And this:

Gavin

And so - apparently - is this:

Kai

Although I'm not so sure about that last one.

Gavin is a star!

G'day:
Within minutes of me reaching out for help regarding my wee icon for the @CfmlNotifier Twitter account, me mate Gavin Pickin had sent me a number of options, more than one of which was eminently fit for purpose.

So I've picked this one:

That's pretty cool, and is fairly simple. Which suits me :-)

Currently my Twitter page is broken (Twitter are claiming responsibility) so I can't update it just yet.

Gavin: next time we're in the same place at the same time: there will be beer.

Cheers mate!

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Adam

3/4: The dumb things ColdFusion does

G'day:

Admission:

This is the article I alluded to a coupla weeks ago when I said this:

OOOPS. Got about 30sec away from pressing "publish" on a blog article... only to realise I was wrong in what I was saying. Dammit.
— Adam Cameron (@dacCfml) December 13, 2013

I promised Gavin I'd still release the article anyhow, so here it is. I have made it clear where I go wrong, so people don't get the idea I'm actually right in what I say here.

- Adam 31/12/2013

Documentation for older versions of ColdFusion

G'day:
Gavin was asking about docs for older versions of ColdFusion today. In my searchings, I've located the docs for a number of older versions of ColdFusion. I'm gonna list 'em here so they're easier to find.

• Cold Fusion 2.0 online documentation, courtesy of GES technologies (update 2015-05-07: link is now dead)
• Cold Fusion 3 online documentation, courtesy of House of Fusion (update 2016-06-30: link is now dead)
• ColdFusion 4.5 online documentation, also courtesy of House of Fusion (update 2016-06-30: link is now dead)
• ColdFusion 4.5.2 offline downloadable documentation, courtesy of Adobe (these are zip files)
• ColdFusion 5.0 offline downloadable documentation (Adobe, zip files)
• CFMX 6.1 offline downloadable documentation (Adobe, zip files)
• CFMX 7 offline downloadable documentation (Adobe, zips)
• ColdFusion 8 online documentation (Adobe livedocs)
• ColdFusion 9 online documentation (help.adobe.com)
• ColdFusion 10 online documentation (the current rendition of Adobe online docs: learn.adobe.com. I wish they'd just stick with the same bloody domain name / online docs structure!!). That site is now dead. But the docs are here: ColdFusion Documentation Archive.
• ColdFusion 11: same page as above, but that's a direct link.

Hopefully that's helpful to someone.

Righto...

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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...

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Adam