Showing posts with label Ray Camden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ray Camden. Show all posts

Saturday 25 May 2013

Ruby via codeschool.com

G'day:
Cheers to Ray Camden for putting me on to this, but Code School are offering free online training all weekend, thanks to some outfit called New Relic sponsoring it. Yay for Code School & new Relic!

I was planning on doing some summery stuff like going into the forest and getting a decent dose of greenitude and vitamin D, but it's bloody freezing (10degC @ midday, about a week from the start of "summer"!) so I'm staying indoors and am gonna work my way through the Ruby courses they offer. If I find anything interesting - which I presume I will - I'll write it up.

However I had better also dose up on various forms of caffeine first, as I've already sat at this blimin' computer for 4h today, and my attention span is waning.

Wish me luck (not with the Ruby, but with not freezing to death en route to the station for a coffee ;-).

--
Adam

Wednesday 20 March 2013

OK, I'm gonna give this Brackets thing a go

G'day:

I've been terribly judgemental about this Adobe Brackets thing. Not vocally (until I raised my scepticism about it on Twitter a day or so ago), but just in my mind. My mind was saying "WTF? Why is Adobe wasting time on this sort of project?" My chief concerns arose having listened to Adam Lehman talk about Brackets on the CFHour podcast a while back.

The whole notion of it being "focused on JavaScript, HTML and CSS development, [...] but also built with JavaScript, HTML and CSS" doesn't ring true to me (when we're talking about JS/HTML/CSS anyhow). The rationale for doing this was explained along the lines of "eating one's own dogfood" when it comes to how an IDE is built is somehow relevant / good / "a thing". I'm unconvinced.

I was also horrified to get the impression that it was built in a web browser. However I'm in the process of re-listening to the podcast, and it seems that was an idea in an early iteration of Brackets, and is not the case now. Phew. I really could not imagine the thinking behind writing a text editor in a web browser (well: beyond a souped-up <textarea> like TinyMCE and its ilk implement).

Still, all of this was based on gut feel rather than experience, which is an approach I don't like to take, so I've decided to use the thing to see what I think. I've decided all the code I'm going to write for this blog will be done on Brackets. This is an easy way to slide into it, as the code is usually between one and a coupla dozen lines long, and I don't have to integrate with anyone else. All my daytime work will still be on CFB, as that's my employer's IDE of choice (well: CFEclipse or CFB, anyhow).

Stop Press
I read too much into the Twitter comment Ray made that lead me to believe Brackets has a ColdFusion plug-in. It does not. So this exercise was a bit of a waste of time. A waste of time for me trying to do it, writing this article, and - sorry - you starting to read it. Oh well...

Installing the thing was easy... I just googled "Adobe Brackets" and followed my nose. I'd heard a lot of talk mentioning sprints and github and that sort of thing, and I really couldn't be arsed with the idea of downloading the source code of a desktop app and trying to get it to work, so I was pleased to see that there was an MSI install for it. I'm very much in the camp of "double-click on setup.exe" approach to making software work. "Making software work" is tedious, and the less time and effort I spend doing it the better. So... first win: the install was easy.

I've got Brackets open, and open a CFML file to see how it handles it. Out of the box it just seems to treat it as HTML with illegal tags in it. This is fair enough, as it's not a CFML editor, it's a generic HTML / JS / CSS editor. What I had heard, though, is that there was an extension for CFML. So far, finding this extension is proving very difficult. Initially I had a superficial look around the brackets.io website, but nothing leapt out at me. Then I googled "Brackets extension coldfusion", and flicking through the first coupla pages (about as far as I'm prepared to look in a Google result set), I found nothing. I tried "Brackets extension cfml": even the initial result weren't relevant. I then changed it to ""Adobe Brackets" extension +ColdFusion", and got nothing; as I did with "CFML" instead of "ColdFusion". I found a Github wiki page for Brackets Extensions, but no mention of CFML :-(

I also, incidentally, followed the "project's blog" link from that main Brackets URL I linked to above... this just yields a blank page, which is very clean-looking, but not much help.

And now my patience for googling something like this has expired, so I shall hit Ray up on Twitter and get him to point me in the right direction. But that will need to be covered in a follow-up article, as I need to crack on with some other stuff, using a text editor that does already understand CFML for now.

Stay tuned...

--
Adam

Thursday 28 February 2013

Another serious struct-literal syntax balls-up in ColdFusion

G'day
Ray hit me up about this the other day, and I've only just been able to look at it now.  He's written a blog article about a bug someone mentioned to him, which they had raised on the bug tracker (3505517).

As far as the investigation had gone at the time, it seemed like a pretty edge-case sort of bug: if one has a CFC method call within a transaction block, and the method call used struct-literal notation for named argument values, then there was some execution duplication.

I've had a bit more of a look at it, and it's actually more far-reaching than we initially thought.

Wednesday 21 November 2012

CFLib.org needs your UDFs

G'day:
 I assume you all now what CFlib.org is, but in case not, it summarises itself thus:
The purpose of the Common Function Library Project (CFLib.org) is to create a set of user-defined function (UDF) libraries for ColdFusion 5.0 and higher. These libraries are open source and may be used and modified to your liking. Functions range from email format checking to encryption routines. These UDFs can greatly speed up development time as well as add new and powerful features to your web site.

Anyone can add their code to the project by simply using our submission form. You must be running ColdFusion 5.0 (or higher) to run these libraries. For more information about ColdFusion, please visit Adobe's ColdFusion product page. If you have any suggestions or comments, please contact me. CFLib.org was created by Raymond Camden [...].

Sunday 7 October 2012

Probable significant bug in ColdFusion 10's (and Railo's) RESTful web services

G'day:
Whilst waiting in the virtual queue to book my Glastonbury ticket this morning, I decided to review the new bugs raised for ColdFusion 10, over night. There's nothing better than sitting in front of my PC at 9am on a Sunday pressing refresh-refresh-refresh on six different browsers trying to buy a ticket for a festival that hasn't even announced its line-up yet, and doesn't even happen for another eight months. Still: after 90min of hammering my "reload" buttons, I had parted with my £50 deposit, and I'm all sorted for Glasto next year.

Anyway, this is not a post about mud and drugs and a looming sense of "am I too old for this?", it's about the safer territory of bugs in ColdFusion. And Railo.

Tuesday 4 September 2012

SEO Gone Mad (oh, and link bait for the Paralympics)

G'day:
OK, this is the weirdest one yet.  I was wondering why the hell my blog was so popular today - it's been my biggest day ever so far with a mammoth 600 hits - and I started looking at where the traffic was coming from, because basically unless Ray Camden mentions me on his blog, I don't get much attention.  I promote myself via Twitter and ColdFusionBloggers, but I basically don't exist on the 'net except for that.

Here's the weird thing.  At the moment, if one searches on Bing for "paralympic medal update", this blog ranks first. "paralympics medals": still above the fold @ 6th. Search on Google for "paralympics medal table", and I'm 8th (ie: on the first page).  What?

Friday 17 August 2012

Quality of CFML documentation

[This is a "toned-down" edit of the first draft I made of this doc.  The initial doc had a bit more vitriol in it than would be considered helpful.  Plus I was going to have to give it an NC-17 rating for its language.  It's a good thing to draft something then cool-off before pressing "send" sometimes]

G'day:

I've had a long day, some things that could gave gone smoothly didn't, and I'm in an intolerant mood. Some would say "sounds pretty much like your default setting, Cameron". Fair cop.

Anyway, I'm trying to write this second article about ColdFusion arrays (now complete... I started on this rant a few days ago), and I'm reading the official Adobe docs for inspiration (OK, not "inspiration", I guess. Anyway: I'm reading their docs).