CFML: Gert points out a schoolboy error in my prime numbers generator logic

G'day:
I was messing around with using closure to mimic a generator the other day: "CFML: prime number generator UDF, and overhead of using inline function expressions". Gert had a look at it, and spotted a shortfall in my implementation. He's provided some code as well but I've not really looked at that yet, instead wanting to nut it out myself (part as a penance, part as an exercise).

I would actually love to see your Railo 5.x wishlist...

G'day:
That was a comment from Gert against the article "ColdFusion 12" article.

Fair enough.

I started writing my response as a comment, but whilst typing it my interest was piqued regarding one of my own thought processes. It would just never occur to me to write an article about a wishlist for Railo. And I don't know why. I prefer the product to ColdFusion (which is easy: it's just better, as are the company & personnel behind it), but this sort of article doesn't seem necessary to me, in a Railo context. I suppose it's because getting Adobe to do anything sensible with CFML is a hard-fought battle, and left to their own devices they either mess shit up, or come up with stuff like <cfclient>. So they need strong direction / coercion from the community. Conversely with Railo, they already have a better idea of what a CFML developer needs, and often come up with the goods before it occurs to anyone to ask for it. Or if one does make a good case on either the Google Group or Jira, they just crack on with it and do it.

So it's not neglect of Railo that doesn't have me writing "My Wishlist for Railo 5.x" etc. It's just never been necessary.

Equally in the back of my mind I know the Railo guys will take on board anything anyone suggests for ColdFusion, and either implement it first, or go "nah, not a good fit for Railo". So I suppose my article would better be titled "CFML-next Wishlist".

Still, Gert asked, so Gert gets. Here's what I said in the comment, before promoting it to being an article:

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

London Railo Group: Gert's over

G'day:
A very quick news announcement. There's a London Railo Group meeting next Tues (May 27), at Pixl8. Gert from Railo is going to be there, and he will be doing his "Railo 5.0 and Beyond" presentation from CF.Objective().

Well that was unexpected

G'day:
Well... once again I am gobsmacked by the community, and in a good way.

CFCamp: new (to me) function in Railo/CFML: serialize()

G'day:
Gert gave typically bloody interesting keynote presentation this morning on what's been happening in Railo over the last year or so, where it's at now, and where it's headed for its next version. I might write up that part of it at some stage, but that sort of thing takes a while to write up and requires more concentration than I feel like dedicating at the moment, so I'm just gonna focus on some of the code stuff he showed us.

First thing... take note, Rakshith: Gert showed us code. Not smoke and mirrors and marketing spiel, but code.

There was a bunch of stuff that was new to me, and I'll write that up separately, but here's a quick examination of Railo's serialize() function. The docs are here: serialize(), but there's not really any useful information there. What serialize() does is to... serialise data, which can later be evaluated (using, yes, evaluate()) back to CFML data again. Here's an example using an array:

rainbow                    = ["Whero","Karaka","Kowhai","Kakariki","Kikorangi","Tawatawa","Mawhero"];
serialisedViaFunction    = serialize(rainbow);
deserialised            = evaluate(serialisedViaFunction);

writeDump([rainbow,serialisedViaFunction,deserialised]);  

Here we get the output:

Minor common-sense tweak to CFML from Railo

G'day:
This is just a quick confirmation I was wrong about something.

OK, another handy new Railo feature

G'day:
I have some downtime @ cf.Objective() at the mo', so looking at some of the stuff Gert showed us in his presentation. It's that or have a beer... but it's perhaps slightly too early for that. Maybe... hmmm. Anyway, whilst I mull over having a beer, I have this article in my head, so I'll type it in.

Enhancement to replace() in Railo 4.1

G'day:
Gert Franz has just given a very impressive presentation on some new features Railo has added in 4.0 and 4.1. There's too many to go through, but here's one that interested me.

In Railo, the replace() function can now take a struct containing key/value pairs which represent the substitution tokens / values to replace. EG: